So who had left this imprint? The Parisian lover, the shadowy L.M.? Or an unknown person whose existence the investigator had failed to reveal? As for the readers at the Russian library, they interpreted this strange remark as a sign of incipient madness. "Oh, you know," the elderly inmates of the retirement home would exclaim. "The princess hasn't been all there for some time now."

In these tangled webs of personal interpretation there was, however, one matter that intrigued all the people of Villiers-la-Forêt equally, whether they were French or Russian: the impossibility of picturing the bodies of the two protagonists of the tragedy in carnal union. Their bodies were so physically incompatible. Such an act of love-for many of them almost against nature-led in their conversations, particularly among the men, to this disconcerting question, which subsequently spread through the town: "How could she give herself to him?" Which was, of course, the expurgated version of what they actually said…

Apart from that, picturing the Princess Arbyelina in the arms of this squat, bold, ungainly Russian allowed the men of Villiers-la-Forêt to have a kind of revenge on the woman. Most of them experienced jealous regret: this creature with her statuesque body must have been an easy catch, after all, given that this moujik had wooed her with such success! The bitterest of them harped on the fact that the woman was forty-six… thrusting her utterly inaccessible body toward old age, toward the unattractiveness of old age. Men can be pitiless toward a woman whose body has eluded them, particularly if this is thanks to their own cowardice.

Once male pride had been appeased, however, the key question returned: "But at the end of the day, what weird twist of fate brought them together?"

Be that as it may, by dint of tireless preliminaries, the whole scenario of the tragedy ended up being pinpointed with the conciseness of an epigram.