A Gentleman in Moscow

“‘A king fortifies himself with a castle,’ observed the Count, ‘a gentleman with a desk.’” 

Among the items the Count chooses to bring from his suite to his room in the belfry is a desk that had belonged to his godfather, Grand Duke Demidov. The desk had been built in Paris in the time of Louis XVI and had “the gilded accents and leather top of the era” (18). When he asks the bellhops to bring it to his room, they complain about the desk’s weight; this quotation is the Count’s response. Later that evening, when the Count sits at the desk, he thinks about the Grand Duke, who “represented his country at Portsmouth, managed three estates, and generally prized industry over nonsense” (18); as he runs his hand “across the desk’s dimpled surface” (18), the Count thinks about how many “concise instructions,” “persuasive arguments,” and “exquisite counsel[s]” (18) the Grand Duke wrote at that desk. In this quotation, he asserts his insistence on retaining a certain formality as a vestige of his former life.

“For eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends.” 

The Count muses on the sentimental value of possessions as he looks around his suite to decide which items to bring with him to his new room. He thinks about how we allow “memories to invest them with greater and greater importance” (14); they come to represent to us the experiences that surrounded them.