They become lovers in the spring of 1780. Alexander Lanskoy is twenty-two, Catherine fifty. Unlike the previous favorites, Lanskoy turns out to be selfless. He does not angle for titles or seek jobs for his family. Intrigues bore him, he is indifferent to the influence he might have. At the apex of an empire that dominates half of Europe and half of Asia, he seems impervious to the reach of such power, setting little store by the history that is dictated by the caliber of cannons. He seems sincerely fond of this woman who is still beautiful and lively and maintains a very strict physical discipline. The other favorites, once at the palace, felt like prisoners and veered off into power games, plots, and debauchery at the first opportunity. Lanskoy is only happy in his long těte-à-tětes with Catherine, their walks along the pathways of the Peterhof, their evenings beside the Baltic …

It looks as if he loves this woman … which is both logical and totally impossible. Logical, since every favorite owes it to himself to declare his passion to the empress. Impossible, given that these men are not made to last—very soon they start to throw their weight around and try to turn their own whims into the policies of the State, deceive the tsarina, and then, overnight, disappear from her life. A letter of dismissal, a parting gift (land, serfs, gold), and a ban on appearing at court. Often a new favorite takes over the empty apartments the following day.

With Lanskoy it all happens differently. Catherine sees him for the first time in December 1779, but only the following spring does she invite him to the palace. The rhythm of the tsarina’s life is changing.

This new lover appears to be calming the fever of the great reign. At last Catherine can catch her breath. This doubtless relates to her age, to her physical ripeness. Furthermore, during these years she has reached the stage of a “cruising flight,” when her power, firmly established, weighs less heavily upon her. The peasant revolts are in the past, the conspirators have laid down their arms, disdainful Europe has finally accepted this vast country that can still be reproached for its Asiatic ponderousness, but must now be reckoned with. Catherine’s creation is like a bronze statue that has just been removed from its mold: it still needs to be cleaned and polished, but the sculptor knows that the essential work has been done.

For historians Lanskoy is a mere interlude of sweetness in the ongoing struggle of a woman destined to assert herself, to reign, and, in the absence of love, to purchase sex. A transient Prince Charming.

Yet he remains at the tsarina’s side for more than four years. The breakup is not caused by dismissal but by his death.

And it is he who prepares the way for the greatest change in the life of the one he loves—escape.

Oleg remembers Eva Sander. She was fervently attached to this version. A late love affair that Catherine finally comes upon, an unexpected tenderness on the part of a woman who has always contrived to organize her sexual life like a government department.

“What they were living through was so foreign to the way of the world that in order to love one another they had to erase that world. Escape. Be reborn …”

Eva had said this with a passionate conviction that was based on almost nothing. A dozen old maps of Europe and a brief note that historians occasionally quote: a note from Lanskoy to the tsarina in which he talks about “our journey” …

This probably referred to their visit to Finland in 1783, where Catherine met the king of Sweden, Gustav III. The only long journey the two lovers ever undertook.

If Oleg does not abandon the idea of an “escape,” it is because of a calm, steadfast certainty: without the hope of such a secret journey Catherine’s life no longer makes sense. Or at least it makes no more sense than the chronicle of wars, rebellions, and political intrigues, the tangle of bloody, brilliant vanities that goes by the name of History …

He thinks about Zoya, too. Without that February morning long ago, when they met in the entrance hall, all covered in snow, yes, without that dizzy, luminous moment Zoya’s life would be no more than a tale of which no trace remains: a woman fond of drink, a lonely soul heating the water for her tea in a huge kettle, a worker who, one night, had a fatal accident at her place of work. This epitaph and then oblivion.

Almost no trace of that journey exists, although Oleg tries to detect some of them in the intervals between major historical events. Catherine negotiates with Gustav III while the Russian armies are fighting close to the Caspian Sea. But amid all this how does she live? What is the flavor of the hours, what sun shines on the seasons that give a rhythm to her love for Lanskoy?

Often they read together. Catherine no longer hesitates to put on her glasses, which she never did in front of the previous favorites for fear of showing her age. It is also from these years that she begins to wear flowing clothes—not to hide the roundness of her figure, but in the certainty of no longer needing to wear corsets in order to please.

She gets Lanskoy to read over those of her letters she writes in Russian: he corrects the verbs of motion, which are the principal hazard in this language. On the tsarina’s advice, he is learning Italian … In their conversations he often tells her how politics disgust him.

A few scattered clues, from one published account to the next, make it possible to guess at the nature of their love affair: after the highly volatile passions Catherine has always experienced comes a serene harmony of hearts and bodies, the feeling that they have all eternity for their mutual love. “With him, the flow of my days is like a handful of sand I can take up again and again,” she writes. “Before, it was always an hourglass that I would turn over repeatedly, terrified by the way the grains ran through.”

Catherine seems not only rejuvenated but ageless. Lanskoy gives the lie to the insipidity of the portrait a court painter made of him. He matures, his presence gains substance, it is as if he were protecting this woman who is at once so powerful and so vulnerable. “When he gave his arm to the empress,” Catherine’s librarian notes, “Lanskoy walked with his shoulder thrust a little forward, like a shield.”

Oleg pictures the loving couple. They walk through the connecting rooms of the Peterhof Palace, then mount horses, and ride slowly along the Baltic shore in the pale light of a June evening.

The evidence that they may be preparing to go away is tenuous. Lanskoy learns Italian? But then Catherine encouraged all her favorites to speak foreign languages. Nor do the books they read (Algaritti, Voltaire, Swedenborg) offer any indication of their developing an escape plan.

The maps? Placed end to end, the routes underlined in ink that is barely visible could be tracing a journey that would link St. Petersburg with northern Italy. But there is nothing to show that the maps should be brought together in this way.

One evening Oleg realizes that his investigations have already taken up two months and it is only the memory of Eva Sander that drives him to continue. The idea of a tsarina abandoning everything, the wonderful madness of such an escape, is exhilarating. But he can now see where it comes from: Eva and her Italian friend, Aldo Ranieri, their love illuminated by the legend of Catherine and Lanskoy.

The jealousy he feels makes him smile: that was all so long ago! Walks through a city that was still called Leningrad, the filming, the Crimea … Since then the Berlin Wall has fallen, Germany has been reunified, and Eva must be quietly continuing her career as an actor. Has she any memory of an “artistic assistant” she convinced about Catherine’s secret journey? A madman who, for the thousandth time, is leafing through these dusty volumes, in search of a word whose resonance would evoke the sound of hoofbeats on a road at night?

The next morning he is woken by the whine of a saw. He glances out the kitchen window: the building opposite seems to be swaying. No, it is the tree at the center of the courtyard; it shudders, traces a great curve in the air, and falls, throwing up a cloud of snow.

Dressing in haste, he goes down, shouts, as if something could still be done to negate this fall. Four men look at him with relaxed contempt. “Was that tree in someone’s way?” he asks, aware that his voice does not carry. A scornful grin: “Well, it ain’t in no one’s way now. And if you don’t like it, buster, I can give you a bit of a trim yourself.” The man holding the saw spits out his cigarette butt. The others erupt into guffaws. And they begin cutting up the trunk … An hour later two big four-wheel-drives are parked where the tree stood. Oleg hates the build of these vehicles: they are like great beasts confident of their right to run you over. “The clatter of hoofbeats on a road at night …,” he says to himself as he crosses the courtyard.

At the central library in St. Petersburg his inquiries provoke contrasting reactions: admiration for his obstinacy and the wariness a fanatical scholar always attracts. The staff member who hands over the document he has requested informs him he will be consulting materials nobody has looked at since September 24, 1932!

The memoirs of a nephew of the favorite, Yermolov … Lanskoy dies on June 25, 1784. After an exceptionally long period of solitude—eight months—Catherine chooses as her lover Alexander Yermolov, who acquires the nickname at court of the “White Negro,” on account of his blond curly hair and thick lips. Catherine buys back the deceased man’s decorations from Lanskoy’s family in order to give them to the new favorite. The nephew relates this incident and also the excursion he took part in. It is a fine Midsummers’ Day at Peterhof. The empress walks on Yermolov’s arm, a little retinue accompanies them. A violin can be heard and the sound of a melodious voice. Two Italians: a blind old man playing, a youth singing. Yermolov throws them money. The courtiers grumble about these barefoot beggars who have one hand on their hearts and the other in your pocket. They are still at a distance when the youth’s voice suddenly rings out with passionate force: “Il prim’ amore non si scorda mai …” The empress laughs, everyone follows suit, mocking these Italians who, beneath their hot sun, cheerfully experience their “never forgotten” first love every day of the week … Suddenly they realize Catherine is weeping … The next day Yermolov is dismissed.

In front of the library building stands the statue of Catherine II. Oleg has studied it a hundred times, scanning the bronze contours for the key to the mystery of this woman … There she stands, a symbol of power, of Reason, of the inevitability of History. Around her are the men who supported her in her titanic endeavors. No trace of Lanskoy. A pigeon is asleep on Potemkin’s head.

In the courtyard at his apartment building Oleg is already getting used to the presence of huge vehicles where the tree stood. “History on the move,” he says to himself. “The boorishness we call the logic of progress …” There are lights on in the windows of the building opposite, workmen can be seen tearing down wallpaper. These former communal dwellings are being transformed into luxury apartments.

From the kitchen Oleg glances outside, as Zoya used to do: the two four-wheel-drives, sawdust, a cement mixer grinding away at the base of the wall. A life forging ahead—oblivious of the shade of a slightly drunk woman sitting at this window, her gaze lost in the slow fluttering of the snowflakes.

He understands it more clearly than ever: to write the history of a life or a reign you have to sacrifice those eyes fixed on the falling snow. And to sacrifice, too, the daydream two lovers hid from everybody, that secret journey across Europe.

The next day another “historic” event! New banknotes arrive to replace the old ones. The population was given twenty-four hours to change their money. Deep in his archives, Oleg became aware of this too late. He had little money left, in any case. Thousands of retired people, not very robust when it comes to elbowing their way up to the desk, lost all their savings.

This financial swindle is only one detail of the great postsocialist rummage sale. But it is from this day that Oleg abdicates. “My phone is off the hook,” he says to himself. This phrase applies to everything he wants to avoid contact with: the frenzied rush of people in the street, the noise of the cement mixer, the potbellied owners of four-wheel-drives, television programs (an expert demonstrates how monetary reform will save Russia). He would also like to break the link with himself, with the prudent “ego” urging him to get out there and resume his place in the rat race, to go back to making short films for the new rich …

And yet he still believes in a life in which a tsarina abandons her throne and escapes with the man she loves. One in which a woman stares out at a great tree at the winter’s end amid the swirling snow.