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Updated: June 29, 2025


By the cheese Anitchkoff seemed confident of my sympathy, and I, having found nothing amiss in him except an imperfect enjoyment of the pleasures of the table, was planning how least imprudently might be raised the topic of the Del Puente Giorgione. But it was he who spoke first.

After some reflection in the corner of the Pretorian where Anitchkoff once told me his story, I have come measurably into the clear about the whole matter. Mantovani's position is plain up to a certain point. Either the 'Zorzi' was given to him or else he bought it in his hopeful youth. In either case he surely kept it merely as a solemn hoax on his learned contemporaries.

With the next block we enter upon the liveliest, the most characteristic portion of the Nevsky Prospekt, in that scant fraction over a mile which is left to us above the Anitchkoff Bridge.

When every fool learned that the Giorgione at "The Curlews" was false, many inferred that Anitchkoff, having praised it, must have a hand in Brooks's bad bargain a conclusion sedulously put about and finally hinted in cold type by certain rival critics.

That this last precaution is not superfluous is shown by the iron flood-mark set into the wall of the Anitchkoff Palace, on the southern shore of the Fontanka, as on so many other public buildings in the city, with "1824" appended, the date of one celebrated and disastrous inundation which attained in some places the height of thirteen feet and seven inches.

The conspirators seemed willing freely to sacrifice their own lives to that object. As regards the mine, it was so heavily charged with dynamite that its explosion would have wrecked a great part of the Anitchkoff Palace while killing the czar. How the explosive material was conveyed from Paris to Russia is a mystery which was never successfully traced by the police.

The ceremony over, the throngs melt away rapidly and silently; pedestrians, Finnish ice-sledges, traffic in general, resume their rights on the palace sidewalks and the square, and after a state breakfast the Emperor drives quietly home, unguarded, to his Anitchkoff Palace.

For years I hoped my time would come, but the opportunity was provokingly delayed. How should you feel if Mrs. Warrener should show you all her things but the great Botticelli?" I nodded understandingly. Mrs. Warrener, for a two minutes' delay in an appointment, had debarred me her Whistlers for a year. "That's the way Mantovani treated me," Anitchkoff continued.

I seized his hand impulsively, and clumsily offered him, in a breath, whisky, shuffleboard, or cowboy pool sound Pretorian remedies for all human woes. These consolations he refused and took his leave. Midnight found me in the same chair, thinking less of Anitchkoff, whose case now lay clear, than of Mantovani and the Marquesa del Puente, about whom it seemed there still might be something to say.

If we look to the south, we find the long ochre mass of the Anitchkoff Palace, facing on the Nevsky, upon the right shore; on the left, beyond the palace of Sergiei Alexandrovitch, the branch of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, in old Russian style, with highly colored saints and heads of seraphim on the outer walls; and a perspective of light, stuccoed building, dwellings, markets, churches, until the eye halts with pleasure on the distant blue dome of the Troitzky cathedral, studded with golden stars.

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