For the French, what the odd couple's adventure marked, above all, was the real start of the postwar era. If you could once more drift down the river in an old boat with your arms around a woman and a bottle of wine under the seat then peacetime had returned for good. The fatal turn of events only confirmed this impression. In one Paris paper a brief account of the drowning had succeeded for the first time in displacing the headline purged that recurred in issue after issue, often with news of death sentences… Furthermore, in the same newspaper they were announcing the start of the Tour de France 47, the first since the war.

The Russians, too, saw Golets's death as what might be called a historic event. Those who that July afternoon had feasted their eyes on the man stretched out in the grass and his companion, whose body looked naked beneath the fine, wet fabric, all the Russian inhabitants of the lower part of the town felt, almost physically, that the passage of calm, predictable days had been shattered there on the riverbank. Indeed, they sensed the advent of a new before and after in their personal chronology.

The start of this chronology went back to the revolution, to the civil war, to the flight across a Russia set ablaze by the Bolsheviks. Next for them had come the period of putting down roots in Paris, in Nice, or, for some, in the sleepy monotony of Villiers-la-Forêt. Later, in 1924, came the terrible decision by the French to recognize the Soviet Union. In 1932, worse still: the Russian émigré Pavel Gorgulov assassinates the President, Paul Doumer! For several weeks the whole Russian part of the town had lived in fear of reprisals… Then the war had broken out and, paradoxically, had somewhat rehabilitated them in the eyes of the French-thanks to the victory of those same Bolsheviks over Hitler… And finally this latest event, this incredible coupling of the Princess Arbyelina with the ridiculous Golets.