Read To the Hermitage for Free Online

completely gridlocked with polite Volvos, feeling different, poorer, wiser on the instant, as, for some reason, foreign travellers often say they do . . .

TWO (THEN)
    O N F RIDAY , 11 J UNE 1773 , a big-browed grey-haired well-built man of nearly sixty, with a very mobile face, a wry amused expression, a bit of a cough and what he likes to call an amiable stoop, rides out of the rue Taranne, in the quarter of Saint-Germain-des-pres in Paris, in a hired four-horse coach with a yellow-coated postilion. Who is he? He’s been called, by everyone including himself, ‘The Philosopher’. Where’s he been? Everywhere in the world, in his own busy mind at least, and all of that without ever once leaving France. Where’s he going? By a less than direct route, to St Petersburg: the great new city on the Neva, often known (but what northern city with lots of water isn’t?) as the Venice of the North. After all, he’s the Philosopher. And he’s heading, as a great thinker should, for the greatest imperial court of the day: the court of Catherine the Second, Tzarina of the Russias, soon to be called the Great. For the moment at least, she’s resting – between lovers, they say. What better time to catch up on the newest, most advanced ideas of this thoughtful, reason-inspired, light-filled, positively electrical new age?
    Over the last few days he’s made the most meticulous preparations for his journey. It’s the greatest he’s ever taken: the greatest, given his annoyingly considerable age, he’s ever likely to take. He’s packed shirts and suppositories. He’s filled up his writing case, packed a shoulderbag tight with nice new notebooks. He’s written his will, left instructions for dealing with all his property. He’s made exact, detailed, cunning arrangements with his secretary, Posterity (also called M. Naigeon), about what it must do with his papers: those innumerable papers, philosophical reflections, medical meditations, poems and plays, stories that are not stories, essays that are not essays, reports on drains and sanitation, accounts of the great artistic salons, fantastic travel sketches, dreams of unknown lands and noble savages, those playful works of pure pornography set in brothels and convents that spin out of him in endless creative euphoria. Truth is, Posterity is quite as fickle as princes and as careless as secretaries, and it certainly won’t do what he’s asked it to promise. Such is the way things are written in the great Book of Destiny above. But at least Posterity doesn’t put you in jail. Under princes, he’s already served a term or two.
    The previous night he’s organized an emotional and deeply moving scene of farewell. He spent most of the evening weeping buckets with his ill-tempered, ever-sewing wife – the Great Particularist, he likes to call her – and his fond, dancing, piano-playing daughter, whose recent expensive marriage and huge dowry is the unspoken reason for his journey. With them he has contemplated to the point of extreme despair all the terrifying risks that lie ahead of him: shipwreck, coachwreck, brigands, cholera, fleas, starvation, war, famine, getting arrested, getting lost, getting drunk. A couple of friends call by, and distress suddenly leaves him. Our Philosopher is a man who gets euphoric on sociability. Drink appears, the piano tinkles. The whole evening brightens. As the drink flows so does his famous talk: of life and death, mathematics and astronomy, destiny and drains. It flows like a torrent, for half the night. Meaning he’s almost omitted to pack, virtually neglected to sleep. Now the yellow-jacketed postilion has come: early, far too early, it’s still hardly dawn. He’s left the apartment with a frantic rush and hardly a connubial kiss – not knowing what he’s remembered to bring with him, what he’s forgotten to pick up, where exactly he’s headed, what’s happening next . . .
    Luckily the postilion is one of those sensible and