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make my own decisions.”
    All at once Maryse Robinson bobbed up between them, her fur hood dotted with snow. “What a great day!” she cried. “And what have you two serious people been talking about?”
    â€œWorld revolutions,” he said, letting Lily’s hand go. “Come on, let’s go to the Marquise de Sévigné for a triple order of hot chocolate.”

Chapter 2
    T he sumptuous offices of the Brasilov Enterprises stood on the second and third floors of a large granite mansion on the Rue de Berri, just off the Champs-Élysées, on the other side of which rose the elegant Hotel George V. Mikhail Ivanovitch Brasilov occupied the second largest office, which had once been the sitting room of a French duchess. Its walls, white and clean, met the high ceiling with a scalloped piping, and when Mikhail had to think out a complex problem, his eye inevitably fastened itself on the geometric design, so pure and so repetitive, which drew him like a magnet.
    But the room had long since become strictly masculine. It was decorated in gleaming Louis XIII ebony and rich mahogany, and the desk was adjusted to the large proportions of the prince. On the walls hung only two paintings, both oils, both framed in simple, understated gilt wood. One represented the Princess Maria Brasilova, Mikhail’s mother, done by Jean Édouard Vuillard according to a tiny photograph that had been smuggled from Russia; the other was a pastoral scene executed by Manet, all frivolous colors of the rainbow. Apart from these two testimonials to Mikhail’s love of beauty, the room was functional, and spare.
    He sat now, this January morning of 1924, with a series of legal documents in front of him, not looking at them, but thinking. The government of Raymond Poincaré, the Bloc National, was about to be changed; this he could predict. Poincaré had been the answer in ‘22; then, he had heralded a new prosperity, and his conservatism had matched the nation’s. He had been a middle-class premier in a country dominated by the newly rich bourgeoisie. But now, especially after last year’s ill-thought-out expedition into the Ruhr valley, the franc was devalued. France seemed to be turning to a more plebeian leadership. This would mean changes, in the economy as well.
    Work never bothered Mikhail Ivanovitch. As a child, in Kiev, he had so rapidly absorbed his tutor’s teachings that at the age of twelve he had already surpassed them. His father had moved the family to Moscow and sent Mikhail to a gymnasium. At fifteen he had graduated, passing his baccalaureate examinations with a series of unsurpassable 5’s. He had entered the university with a special dispensation from the czar, because he hadn’t reached the normal age; there he had entered two faculties at the same time: that of law, which all businessmen had to master, and that of history, which was his passion. Within three years he had obtained both degrees, where other young men took four years to complete a single course of study. And then his father had put the eighteen-year-old boy at the head of most of his enterprises.
    The Brasilov Enterprises had stretched over a vast continent, and had comprised diverse businesses. Prince Ivan, Mikhail’s father, had a nose for where the money lay. He bought all businesses that he thought could prosper; if they were failing, he saved them; if they were already successful, he tripled their gains. He owned a great number of sugar refineries in Kiev; windmills; mines of semiprecious stones in the Urals; lands in Siberia; a boat company on the Volga; and a tramway business in Odessa.
    Prince Ivan paid his son a million rubles in gold per annum. This represented an enormous sum of money, especially for one so young. Mikhail—Misha to his intimates—began then to spend all his nights out, to entertain himself with the mad passion of the “golden youth,” and to spend a small