"To win the love of a people that is free": this line, which had initially passed almost unnoticed in the melodious flow of the verses, struck home. The French, a free people… Now we understood why the poet had dared to offer advice to the master of the most powerful empire on earth. And why to be loved by these free citizens was such an honor. On that evening, in the overheated air of the nocturnal steppes, this freedom seemed to us like a harsh and chilly gust from the wind that had made waves on the Seine, and it filled our lungs with a breeze that was heady and a little mad…

Later we would learn to put the ponderous bombast of this declamation into perspective. But at the time, despite its focus on the particular occasion, what we could already detect in his verses was a French je ne sais quoi, which for the moment went without a name. French wit? French politeness? We could not yet say.

Meanwhile the poet turned toward the Seine and held out his hand, gesturing toward the dome of the Hôtel des Invalides on the opposite bank. His rhymed address was coming to a very painful point in the Franco-Russian past: Napoleon, Moscow in flames, the disastrous Berezina crossing… Anxiously, biting our lips, we awaited his voice at this passage so fraught with risk. The tsar's face went blank. Alexandra lowered her eyes. Would it not have been better to pass over it in silence, to pretend nothing had happened and go straight from Peter the Great to the current entente cordiale?

But Heredia seemed to set his sights even higher:

That distant shining dome against the sky Still shelters heroes from a time gone by, When French and Russians, jousting without rage, Mingling their blood, foresaw a future age.

Bewildered, we kept asking ourselves this question: Why do we detest the Germans as much as we do – still recall the Teutonic aggression of seven centuries ago at the time of Alexander Nevski, as well as that of the last war?