‘The strangest of lives’: the plight of White Russians in Paris

During the years between school and my first job on a newspaper I worked briefly in Paris in an antique shop in the septième, owned by an ancient White Russian who had fled Petrograd at the end of 1917. She was a charming old woman, impeccably turned out and with beautiful manners. She was prone to quote Pushkin, flirt with young men and burst into tears several times a day. She shed a few even when she fired me for the understandable reason that I failed to sell any stock and knew next to nothing about antiques.

She claimed to be Countess Sonya X (she has living relatives), though I discovered much later that she had in fact been a countess’s maid and had somehow managed to get out of revolutionary Russia with some jewels, which she sold to establish herself in a business. Nobody knows exactly how she acquired them, but I am sure it was with charm and a smile.