He’s come to meet Rachkovsky. ‘It’s nice to see your friendly face,’ he says, enveloping Nicolas with his ursine upper body. It’s 8.15 a.m. Nicolas has just arrived and manoeuvres his arms so as not to spill his paper cup of coffee down the general’s back. ‘Look at you! How many winters, how many summers?’ Skobelev asks, rhetorically. It’s a conventional Russian expression for long time, no see. ‘I’m staying just around the corner. We should have dinner.’

‘Absolutely,’ Nicolas responds with a similarly hearty warmth.

Time hasn’t been especially kind to the general. Trembling hands and a lace pattern of broken capillaries on his face suggest that alcohol’s the cause. His thick hair is white, his beard iron-grey. But when he stands up, he’s still straight-backed, tall, commanding. And more than that, he represents an important time in Nicolas’s life. ‘No rush. I’m here for a while. Paris, eh?’

At dinner, the two men call each other comrade, polish off half a bottle of brandy and get increasingly sentimental about MacGahan.

‘What a woman! She rode better than my officers. You know I offered to put her in charge of a battery at Plevna? She smiled at me and said something about “journalistic objectivity”. And the hardships she underwent. For soldiers like you and I, this life is natural. It’s quite something for a woman to forgo the pleasures of a home and husband.’

Nicolas is flattered by Skobelev’s mistaken assumption that he’s a soldier and doesn’t bother offering his opinion that a husband was the last thing MacGahan would have wanted.

‘How old are you?’ the general asks, refilling Nicolas’s glass. ‘You’re young now. You must have been a child then.’

‘Looking back, I suppose I was, but I thought at the time that I knew everything.’

‘There’s no phase of life when that vanity leaves us,’ declares the general. ‘Right now, I’m sure we can’t imagine improving on our understanding of the world. And yet, we must! That is the only meaningful form of progress.’

‘I’m not sure about that,’ says Nicolas. ‘Twenty million former serfs might disagree.’

The general shakes his head. ‘Emancipation has been a disaster. Here and in America. Some people are just not ready for the responsibilities of freedom.’

It’s a measure of the two men’s friendship that they can disagree about practically everything and still get on.

The food is no more than passable, though Skobelev touchingly pronounces it delicious. The room is empty and the smell of stale fat has impregnated the curtains. Nicolas can’t help contrasting this place that the general’s chosen with the luxurious restaurants Rachkovsky patronises. It turns out Skobelev is having to fund his stay on a measly per diem and is spending his nights in a fleapit hotel. The difference in lifestyle is attributable to one thing: the general is principled and refuses to take bribes.

‘What brings you to Paris this time?’ Nicolas asks.