But she loved studying and books, the way other people love wine for its power to make you forget. What else did she have? She lived in a deserted, silent house. The sound of her own footsteps in the empty rooms, the silence of the cold streets beyond the closed windows, the rain and the snow, the early darkness, the green lamp beside her that burned throughout the long evenings and which she watched for hours on end until its light began to waver before her weary eyes: this was the setting for her life. Her father was almost never there; her mother came home in the evening and locked herself away in the sitting room with Max; Bella had no women friends: in wartime, people had other things to worry about than the happiness of children …

A servant came in to close the curtains; in the next room she could hear Max’s muffled laughter.

‘What are the two of them doing in there?’ she thought. ‘But what does it matter, as long as they leave me the hell alone …’

She could smell cigarette smoke from under the door; her father wasn’t home yet; he’d get back between nine and ten o’clock and they’d eat meals that were either cold or burned; he would bring home men whom Hélène knew under the generic term of ‘business associates’, nervous, anxious men with impatient eyes and hands as taut and grasping as claws; she closed her eyes, imagining she could already hear the word they endlessly spoke, the only word Hélène understood, the word she heard again and again, buzzing around her, the word that invaded her waking moments and her dreams: ‘Millions … millions … millions …’

The servant stopped at the entrance to the room, looked at the clock and shook her head. ‘Does Mademoiselle know what time her father will be getting home?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Hélène.

She pulled back the curtain and looked out into the street, trying to catch a glimpse of the carriage lights in the snow. Little by little, everything around her faded away. She sank into a delicious trance, as she had done in the past when she’d played at being Napoleon. But now, other dreams filled her mind, dreams that returned again and again, imperious dreams of domination: to be a queen, to be a feared statesman, to be the most beautiful woman in the world … This last dream was new; she approached it with caution, as if it contained some mysterious fire.

‘Will I be beautiful? No, certainly not,’ she mused sadly. ‘I’m at that unattractive age now, when it’s impossible to be pretty. But I’ll never be beautiful; my mouth’s too big and I have an ugly complexion. Dear Lord, please make every man fall in love with me when I grow up …’

She shuddered: her father had just come in, followed by two men, Slivker, a Jew with jet-black eyes whose arm shook when he talked, as if he were still carrying the bundle of rugs he undoubtedly used to hawk on café terraces; the other man was Alexander Pavlovitch Chestov, the son of one of the short-lived Ministers of War of the period.

Hélène sat down at her place, next to Mademoiselle Rose. The dining table was weighed down by heavy silver place settings, bought at auction, for the old aristocracy had managed to lose all its money and was selling just about everything it owned to the newly wealthy businessmen.

‘Everything in this house is second-hand, like in a thieves’ den,’ mused Hélène; the heavy silver pieces came from various sales; they hadn’t bothered to remove the initials, coronets or family crests that decorated them; only their weight interested the Karols. Capo di Monte porcelain groups sat in a corner, still in their wrapping paper; the sideboard was piled with Sèvres statuettes and delicate pink plates decorated with figures and flowers; Bella had bought them the week before at auction, but they just sat there sadly, unused, wrapped in straw and tissue paper. All the books in the library had been bought by the yard and no one except Hélène opened the leather-bound volumes emblazoned with gilt tooling.

‘Where could we buy some portraits of ancestors?’ joked Bella.

Only the furs brought back from Siberia were new. Each ermine pelt that now adorned her mother’s coat had once been a scrap of fur, the remains of a dead animal, which Hélène had seen emptied on to the table and rummaged through by greedy hands.

‘Alexander Pavlovitch …’

‘Salomon Arkadievitch …’

Chestov’s eyes were full of disdain when he spoke; he seemed afraid to raise his long head with its fine blond hair covered in pomade, as if the company of these Jews poisoned the air; Slivker returned his scornful look, though tempered by fear.

Adding to the clutter of the dining room were the bouquets and arrangements of flowers sent to Karol’s wife; because he had become so rich since the beginning of the war, everyone pandered to him.

On her way to her place at the table, Bella picked up a red rose and placed it in Max’s buttonhole. Her lace dress gaped open slightly, revealing her bosom; she slowly pulled it closed: her breasts were beautiful.

The butler came in, followed by an underling who carried the soup in a silver tureen that bore the Besborodko family coat of arms; the glasses were Baccarat, but all of them were chipped; no one took any notice; everyone seemed to sense that such wealth was fleeting: since it had come out of nowhere, it could just as easily disappear in a cloud of smoke.

Mademoiselle Rose leaned in towards Hélène. ‘Have you read the papers?’ she whispered anxiously.

‘Yes. It’s always the same thing,’ Hélène said sadly. ‘They’re “treading water” …’

‘You don’t understand,’ Slivker was saying. ‘For us, the war is a bit of good luck. Those bits of paper you play around with will be worth less than that tomorrow,’ he said, pointing to the vase of fragrant, dark-red roses that decorated the table. ‘What the war needs, what’s important to war, are arms, munitions, weapons, cannons. And besides, it’s our patriotic duty!’

‘And what if the war ends in a month?’ Chestov bellowed shrilly. ‘We’d be left with all that stock on our hands …’

‘If we always worried about tomorrow …’ said Slivker, laughing, pushing away his empty plate.

The Minister’s son took his monocle out of his pocket; he turned it over in his hands, slowly, affectionately, as if it were a flower, before placing it over his eye and fixing it there with a sudden contraction of his facial muscles. Throwing Slivker a look of aristocratic scorn, he leaned towards Bella. ‘Our conversation isn’t very interesting for Madame,’ he said amiably, in French.

‘She’s used to it,’ said Slivker.

‘It isn’t wise to have dealings in the things you were talking about,’ Karol interjected. ‘That’s up to the department of National Defence. No, what’s important are uniforms for the soldiers, boots, food …’

The butler brought in the sturgeon in aspic, arranged on a bed of herbs and garnished with golden egg yolks, accompanied by a silver sauceboat decorated in bas-relief with little shepherds and bagpipes.

They ate for a while in silence. Hélène looked up and heard Slivker say, ‘… Some business about cannons … In Spain, they have some cannons that date back to 1860, but they’re still in excellent condition, it must be said.