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are perfect. Kind. Brave. The cause lies with me.”
    “What is it?”
    “I don’t know. What . . . did you feel?”
    She gazed into the fire. “ Cold, ” she said.
    • • •
    She was a gift of the heavens, and I did not deserve her.
    That day Marie asked me henceforth to avoid her company, and I obliged. In a year she was seen with suitors; I could not blame her but suffered afresh nonetheless, not least because Andrei was getting married! Heartbroken was a medical diagnosis back then but it did not begin to describe the mix of envy and bile that flooded me when I stood at my brother’s wedding. Was my brother not cursed, after all? Was it just me? Or was Andrei’s bride, this Anna something or other, an unremarkable, demure girl I barely looked at before the ceremony, somehow more accommodating ? Or did she, poor thing, not know what she was getting into?
    The gossips of St. Petersburg found the famous “rejection of Prince Velitzyn by Countess Tolstoy” a fertile ground for speculation. Many held me at fault. In another year my petite comtesse married a rich civil servant twenty years her senior, while I remained chaste—and now the gossip turned to my deficiencies, one guess more piquant than another. Then Marie died in childbirth. Those narrow hips of hers.
    After her death my critics fell silent. Now I was a black swan who had lost the mate of his life. The irony.
    Of this I am as sure as I can be: she never shared my secret with anyone, she took it with her.
    • • •
    If not for Marie, I would have taken much longer to understand it, but now I knew: arousal made me cold. What was I to do?
    I became a misanthrope. I was intemperate with my grenadiers and curt with everyone else. I was disconsolate and reveled in it; after a while I became disliked. I daydreamed of various exotic and demonstrative ways of self-destruction. When Empress Ekaterine imported the distinguished Dr. Dimsdale and his son from England in 1768 to inoculate herself and the young Grand Duke Paul against smallpox, I volunteered to be the corpore vili on which to fiat experimentum. (The empress refused to order anyone to submit to such a fate, while the doctor was reluctant to use his procedure on her without a test run.) I looked forward to a dignified illness and heroic death, but the self-sacrificial move turned out to entail a week of purgatives and boiled vegetables, followed by nicking on both arms with a scalpel dipped in pustules of a disease-stricken child fromthe city’s outskirts. This was followed by another week of laxatives and special diet, during which I developed tenderness in my arms and then a mild fever. Then I got well. I erupted not one pustule, and Dr. Dimsdale doubted the inoculation had truly taken; he certainly could not use me as a source for more inoculations (which was my last hope: in those days we believed that the subject whose pustule matter is taken to inoculate others will consequently die). In two weeks, profoundly purified of “crudities in my stomach,” sick of turnips and cabbage but hardly altered otherwise, I returned to the regiment and to misanthropy.
    One winter eve, Svetogorov stomped into our room in the Leib Company House straight from la louveterie —wolf-hunting—with Count Gregory Orlov. Smelling of fresh snow and blood he came, rosy-cheeked and ready to pour out a full report of his adventure. Then he observed me curled on my cot, wrinkled his nostrils at the stifling air, and judged, “It ought to stop someday, friend Alexis. Count Gregory inquired after you just now. He is where power is. Three”—he raised his eyes to the ceiling and counted on his fingers—“no, four ladies I personally know, comfortably married and nicely positioned dames, have been inquiring after you and are ready to allay your . . . your douleur  . . .” He made a pause and since I did not protest, he hounded me a bit more. “I mean . . . Poor Marie had been a fine maiden, no