Free To the Hermitage by Malcolm Bradbury Page B

– dies, our Philosopher tips off the Tzarina the man has collected a magnificent library without knowing how to read, created a great art collection without being able to see anything in it more than a blind beggar. Buy, she says. He buys. When the great art collection of Louis-Antoine Crozat is offered in the market, our Philosopher-Fixer is first one at the door. He drives the hardest of bargains, devising another of his stratagems, another great ‘mystification’, running round Paris to divide the various heirs from one another with cunning mischievous rumour and gossip.
    Soon Leonardos and Van Dycks, Raphaels, Rembrandts (
The Danae
), Veroneses, Durers, Poussins, Titians, five Rubens sketches – seventeen crates in all – are making their way north to Petersburg’s Imperial Palace. Now
le tout Paris
is furiously complaining: patrons, politicians, tax-farmers. Thanks to this unfair northern competition, the art market has gone mad. They will say the same of greedy Americans a hundred years later, greedy Japanese a hundred years after that. They’ll be saying the same in England not much later, when the glorious contents of Sir Robert Walpole’s debt-ridden Houghton Hall, destined to deck the new pavilion in the British Museum, are handed over to good Mr Christie, auctioned to the usual Russian buyer (absent), crated, shipped off up the Baltic. It takes a sage like Denis to explain these things properly. As he explains, art follows power, there are laws of history. ‘How things have changed,’ he declares. ‘We sell our paintings and sculptures in peacetime, Catherine buys them in the midst of war. Now the sciences, arts, taste and philosophy have left for the north, and barbarism and its consequences retreat to the south.’
    Which is why for the last ten years he’s done everything a true courtier and a devoted librarian can possibly do for his patron. Except, that is, for one thing: the last, the greatest, hardest service. Again and again the summons has come, ever more imperiously, inviting the philosopher to crate himself up and make this journey north.
    ‘It is not that Didro would be coming to settle in Russia,’ the lady carefully explains. ‘He would be doing something very much finer: coming to court to express his gratitude.’
    Year by year the invitations have grown more pressing and precise. He’s been urgently asked to bring all his friends, ship his relatives, take the whole project of the
Encyclopedia
northward with him.
    Similar summonses, he knows, have gone to his fellow philosophes – Voltaire, d’Alembert. All have sent homage, but displayed strange reluctance actually to go. No doubt bruised by his Potsdam experience, now happy in Ferney where he has set up his own private court, crusty foxy Voltaire has announced himself perfectly willing but found a charming and cunning excuse. He too writes a florid poem in the great lady’s honour (‘You astound the wise man with your wit, /And he’d cease to be wise the moment he saw you’) and explains that, while too busy to visit the court while he’s still alive, he’d be over the moon to do so the minute he’s dead – ‘Why should I not have the pleasure of being buried in some corner of Petersburg, where I could see you passing back and forth, crowned with laurels and olive branches?’ Offered a palace and fortune to go to court as tutor to the young archduke Paul, d’Alembert is more graceless, publicly telling a friend: ‘I am far too prone to haemorrhoids; they take too severe a form in that country, and I prefer to have a painful bum in safety.’
    Our man takes a different view. He’s never believed in travel, would stay home if he could. But he’s given far too many hostages to fortune. ‘I love to see the wise man on display, like the athlete in the arena,’ he has announced. ‘A man only recognizes his strength when he has the chance to show it.’ That’s why, for years, he has not been so much refusing as