At Cannes the compartment had filled up, and since everyone knew each other there was naturally a good deal of talk. As we passed through Tarascon1 somebody said: ‘Isn’t this where those murders were?’ The conversation then turned to the mysterious and elusive murderer who, for the past couple of years or so, had taken to bumping off the occasional passenger on this line.2 Everyone had, if not their own pet theory, at least something to say about it. The women looked out into the darkness beyond the windows, shuddering at the thought that a man might suddenly appear at their carriage door. People started telling scary stories of various unpleasant encounters they had had at one time or another – a conversation in an express train with someone clearly off his head; hours spent sitting opposite some suspicious character or other elsewhere, and so on and so forth.

Each of the men had some tale of valour that starred himself. Each had either sent off or sent sprawling, or in some cases strangled, some villain or other under extraordinary circumstances in which they themselves had shown remarkable bravery or presence of mind. After this, a doctor who spent every winter in the south of France added a story of his own.

‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I have never had the opportunity to test my own courage under those sorts of circumstances. However, I did know a woman, a patient of mine, now dead, to whom the most extraordinary thing in the world happened. It’s one of the most mysterious as well as one of the most touching tales I ever heard.

She was a Russian countess, Marie Baranow, a very grand lady and a great beauty too. You know how beautiful Russian women are, at least to us:3 those fine noses, the delicate mouths, the close-set eyes of … how can one describe that lovely grey-blue colour and that distant, almost cold look they have. There’s something wildly attractive about them, some combination of the severe and the gentle which we Frenchmen find absolutely irresistible. Maybe it’s just the charm of the exotic that makes us see so much in them, I don’t know …