‘I’m no different from anyone else. Of course, everyone’s house has an adulterous wife, unhappy children and busy men who think only of money. With money, everyone flatters you, smiles at you, everything works out, that’s what they all say. I have money, I’m healthy, but I’m bored.’

One evening Chestov found her in this state of mind and walked over to her; he was drunk; he looked at her slim face raised towards him and smiled. ‘Such beautiful eyes,’ he said.

Hélène knew he was drunk and worse, that he was despicable, selling his country to the highest bidder. But he was the first man who had noticed her. She couldn’t explain how she felt. It was the first time she could feel the impact of a man’s eyes on her, the way he looked at her face, then down at her chest where his gaze lingered on her budding breasts, straining beneath her dress. For a long time Chestov’s gaze sought the tender spot between her chest and her shoulder, still small and angular like a young girl’s; he took her hand and kissed it, then left. That night, for the first time in her life, Hélène wasn’t able to sleep, feeling ashamed, unhappy, troubled to the point of suffering, and yet so proud, still feeling, there in the darkness, the heavy, insolent gaze of a man upon her. Yet from that moment on, Chestov made her feel more and more afraid and she did everything she could to avoid him.

On another evening she saw groups of women marching through the city asking for bread. They walked behind a scrap of material that billowed in the wind and the sound that rose from the crowd was not a clamour but rather a muffled, timid pleading: ‘Bread, bread, we want bread …’

As they passed, all the doors closed one by one.

Hélène could hear them in the room next door saying, ‘… Buy … sell …’ ‘I’ve heard …’ ‘They say that …’ ‘Unrest, riots, a revolution …’

But deep inside they didn’t believe it; they were as irrational as men being swept along by a flood.

‘We’ll always have money …’

‘There’s only one thing to do … buy, buy …’

‘Buy anything … electric light bulbs, toothbrushes, jars of jam … I was recently told about a Rembrandt. They’d sell it for a piece of bread …’

Riots? They brushed the idea aside with a wave of the hand; they didn’t ignore it; they didn’t underestimate it, but that impatient wave of the hand meant ‘Yes, yes. But we know very well that it can’t last. Yes, yes. We can tell, just as you can, that it will all end, fade away. In any case we’re used to it. Stability is rather boring, frightens us. We understand, we understand perfectly well, but what prods us along, what we enjoy, is to gamble on the future, on the symbols of wealth, on the diamonds that will be confiscated, with stocks and shares that soon might only be worth the paper they’re printed on, on paintings that might be burned …’

‘I’ve heard that Rasputin has been murdered,’ someone said quietly. ‘They say he was assassinated by …’

Then there was a vague whispering: to them, a halo of respect and terror still surrounded the Emperor and the Imperial family.

‘Is it possible?’

A moment of shock, then they brushed it aside. ‘Yes, yes, we’ll have to see. For the moment, let us get on with gambling, getting intoxicated, piling up our gold, our jewellery, or at least let us talk about money, dream about money, amorously stroke our gold bars, our gemstones, our roubles … What will they be worth tomorrow? What will they be worth? Ah, tomorrow is tomorrow … What’s the point of thinking of tomorrow? We have to sell, sell, sell … We have to buy, buy, buy …’

‘Dear Lord, please protect Papa …’

Her mother was never included.

‘Dear Lord, please protect Mademoiselle Rose … Forgive me for my sins. Please let the French win the war …’

4

The February Revolution came and went, then the October Revolution. The city was distraught, buried in snow. It was a Sunday in autumn. Lunch was over. Max was there. Thick cigar smoke filled the room. You could hear the gentle crackling of the wads of American dollars and British pounds sewn into the armchairs. It was three o’clock; they were drinking very expensive cognac in brandy glasses.