His refusal was unalterable, and he returned to Paris. He was sure enough of his firmness to visit his royal friend again, two years later, in 1776. He had been acting tutor once more, to the two Counts Romanzoff this time. He had taken them to Naples to embrace Galiani, to Ferney to see Voltaire, and to Berlin to see Frederick. They arrived in Petersburg in time for the second marriage of the Czarevitch, of whose first marriage, with Wilhelmina of Hesse, Grimm had been the principal promoter. Catherine received him with the same flattering interest and offers, but he was as deaf to them as before. Then she gave him the title of Colonel--to the intense amusement of King Frederick--and appointed him her general agent in Paris at a salary of ten thousand livres. After his return to the capital this appointment formed a very large occupation in his life. His frequent absences had naturally not been the best thing in the world for the ‘Literary Correspondence,’ but it would have been a much worse thing if Diderot--Grimm’s ‘patient milch-cow whom he can milk an essay from or a volume from when he lists’--had not been there to do his work. The ‘Correspondence’ rightly appears with Diderot’s name as well as Grimm’s on its title-page. In these latter years, indeed, its readers often had to be content, not with Diderot, but with a mere Meister; and when Grimm did write himself it was sometimes carelessly and in a hurry. Not quite the first, or the last, perhaps, to commit that literary enormity, he occasionally reviewed books he had not taken the trouble to read. His letters to and from Catherine, after the first few years, were not conveyed through the post, but by special messenger, and are therefore delightfully outspoken. Grimm’s contain indeed a good deal of flattery and exaggeration; but Catherine’s are spontaneous enough. She used to say she was as ‘frankly an original as the most determined Englishman.’ The pair wrote sometimes in French and sometimes in German. They had nicknames for most of the crowned heads in Europe. Of ‘Brother George of England’ Catherine had always spoken with contempt, and considered his loss of the American colonies as ‘a State treason.’ But much of the correspondence was devoted to mere homely details. As her agent, Grimm bought the imperial rouge for the imperial cheeks, pictures, books, and bon-bons. He took long journeys in her interest: he supplied her with architects when she caught a fever for building; and presently, having been discreet matchmaker for the Hesses and the Czarevitch, he was commissioned to play the same delicate part for the Czarevitch’s daughters.