It was this sentence that sounded the death knell for my childhood. "He died in the arms of his mistress…"

I was overwhelmed by the tragic beauty of these words. A whole new world swept over me.

What struck me above all about this revelation was the setting: this scene of love and death had been played out at the Elysée! At the presidential palace! At the pinnacle of that pyramid of power, of glory, of world fame… I pictured a sumptuous room with tapestries, gilt, rows of mirrors. In the midst of this luxury – a man (the president of the Republic!) and a woman, united in an ardent embrace…

Dumbfounded, I began unconsciously to translate the scene into Russian. That is, to replace the French protagonists with their national equivalents. A series of phantoms, looking cramped in their black suits, appeared before my eyes. Secretaries of the Politburo, masters of the Kremlin: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev. Four very different characters, loved or detested by the population, each of whom had put his stamp on a whole epoch in the history of the empire. Yet they all had one quality in common: at their sides a feminine presence, let alone an amorous one, was inconceivable. It was far easier for us to imagine Stalin in the company of someone like Churchill at Yalta, or with Mao in Moscow, than to picture him with the mother of his children…

"The president died at the Elysée Palace, in the arms of his mistress, Marguerite Steinheil…" This sentence seemed like a coded message coming from another planetary system.

Charlotte went to the Siberian suitcase to look for some of the newspapers of the period, hoping to be able to show us a photo of Madame Steinheil. While I, embroiled in my erotic Franco-Russian translation, recalled a remark that I had heard one evening on the lips of a gangling dunce, a fellow pupil. We were walking along the dark corridors at school after a session of weight lifting, the only subject at which he excelled. Passing the portrait of Lenin, my companion had given a low whistle in a most disrespectful manner and had observed, "You know old Lenin. He didn't have any children, did he? 'Cause he just didn't know how to make love…"