He had used an extremely coarse verb to refer to the sexual activity in which, according to him, Lenin was deficient. A verb I should never have dared to use and which, applied to Vladimir Ilyich, became a monstrous obscenity. Taken aback, I heard the echo of this iconoclastic verb resounding in the long empty corridor…

"Félix Faure… the president of the Republic… in the arms of his mistress…" More than ever Atlantis-France seemed to me a terra incognita where our Russian notions no longer had any currency.

The death of Félix Faure made me aware of my age: I was thirteen; I guessed what "dying in the arms of a woman" meant, and from now on I could be spoken to on such subjects. Furthermore, the courage and total absence of hypocrisy in Charlotte 's story demonstrated what I already knew: she was not a grandmother like the others. No Russian babushka would have ventured on such a discussion with her grandson. In this freedom of expression I sensed an unaccustomed perception of the body, of love, of relationships between man and woman – a mysterious "French outlook."

Next morning I went out onto the steppe to brood alone on the fabulous transmutation effected in my life by the death of the president. To my great surprise, rerun in Russian, the scene no longer made a good story. In fact it was impossible to tell! Censored by an inexplicable modesty of words, revised, all of a sudden, by a strange offended morality, when finally told, it swung between pathological obscenity and euphemisms that transformed the pair of lovers into characters in a badly translated sentimental novel.

"No," I said to myself, stretched out in the rippling grass under the warm wind, "it is only in French that he could die in the arms of Marguerite Steinheil…"