Abbas Tuman, Russian Caucasus, July 10, 1899

The setting was a wooden palace with colorful rooftops, balconies, and turrets rising up between the pine trees. All around were wooded hillsides. The fairy-tale palace looked deserted, but the low waters of the river Otskhe could be heard singing over the pebbles or pausing in the nooks and crannies behind the rocks. It was nine o’clock in the morning and the dew had already evaporated from the grass. It was going to be a scorching-hot day.

A man was contemplating this landscape from the roadside. He wore a pale jacket, which hung so loosely he appeared to be floating inside it, together with a pair of white trousers in the style of the Uhlan Cavaliers. Behind him was an extraordinary-looking machine: the first model of motorbike invented by the De Dion-Bouton workshops a few months earlier, consisting of a tricycle with a three-hundred-cubic-centimeter engine. The man had brought it from Paris by train.

He had spent eight years living in this valley in the Caucasus, arriving as an invalid in 1891. Tuberculosis had seized him during a grand tour around the world, which he had embarked on with his brother. They were in Bombay when he had spat up blood for the first time: he had been forced to leave Nicky behind and return home.

Out of the dozens of palaces that his family possessed, he had chosen to live alone in this one, guarded only by a few soldiers. The waters of the region were supposed to have healing properties, but they hadn’t healed him.

In the shadow of these forests, the man known to his sister and his mother as Weeping Willow had become even more of a wild romantic figure.

They had given him this nickname back in the days when his English teacher, Mr. Heath, had taught him fly-fishing. George had become solitary and lugubrious, spending whole days beneath the willows at the water’s edge. His sister, Xenia, used to say that he would take root, like the willow posts planted by the riverbank that instantly turned green.

Now, all these years later, he was weak; and yet he ran around the countryside until dusk. He was solitary but would sometimes hold celebrations for which the entire region arrived in costume. The guests would dance and bathe in the river before sunrise. Weeping Willow often slept out on the mountainside, watching the stars. He lived far from the capital and had embroidered on a handkerchief, which he never took out of his pocket, a phrase that he liked from the philosopher Pascal:

Everything was contained in these words, written by Pascal as a reflection on mankind’s modest place in the universe, but which Weeping Willow applied chiefly to his life’s dream: living apart from the world. How many kingdoms know us not.

However, no kingdom was really unaware of him. There were always rumors about him. He had been claimed as dead on several occasions. There had even been an article in the New York Times announcing his disappearance. Imaginations ran riot about him taking a mistress among the princesses of the Caucasus. Hidden children and secret marriages were invented for him. And this twenty-eight-year-old man, who was solitary and sick, was the subject of all these myths.

His mother, Maria, loved him more than her other children. Sometimes she would pay a surprise visit from Saint Petersburg. He would pretend to be convalescing sensibly and doing well, spending three days on the wooden terrace with her, sipping lukewarm tea. But he would creep away to cough into a pillow. And when Maria Fiodorovna, who looked more youthful than her son, disappeared as her carriage reached the other side of the bridge across the river, he blew her kisses with his slender hands. He always believed it would be the last time. He would stay there, listening to a bird, watching the trout in summertime, or noticing the snow falling off the tops of the pine trees in winter.

But on the morning of the tenth of July 1899, his farewells to this valley in the Caucasus were for good. Lieutenant Boissman, guarding the main entrance, had allowed him to drive off on his motorbike, against the advice of his family and doctors. The only thing the officer had mentioned was the bear.

“Someone spotted it higher up, on the river. Take my gun.”

Weeping Willow had declined with a smile.

Moments later, directly above the palace, he switched off the engine on a path strewn with pine needles. After surveying the world he was about to leave behind, he drove off at top speed westward, his shadow gently ahead of him and the roar of the engine deafening him. He overtook a horse-drawn cart transporting milk cans. The motorbike flashed past with the ten-liter fuel can that he had attached at the rear. He wanted to drive to the Black Sea and head along the coast as far as Constantinople. He had organized a boat there, in secret. His plan was to vanish.

After two kilometers, Weeping Willow slowed down, then stopped. He could feel some thick liquid in his mouth. When he tried to spit it out, his white jacket was splattered with blood. He turned off the engine by a ditch and bent over to cough.

He could barely get back on the motorbike. The cart laden with milk was trundling toward him. He knew he didn’t have many more days left to live, but he wanted to die alone, at sea. He had set it all up. He didn’t want to disappear into this ditch, in the middle of the mountains. He needed a few weeks of freedom, the only such weeks of his life, far from the gaze of onlookers.

The motorbike edged its way forward in slow motion, tracing a loop and sliding backward. The woman driving the horse cart saw the young man wobble from side to side as he clung to the handlebars. The engine cut out. Having recognized him when he had smiled and overtaken her a few minutes earlier, the milk woman climbed down. She didn’t know whether she had the right to approach him or not, but arrived just in time for him to collapse into her arms. He was covered in blood.

“What should I do, Your Highness?”

“Nothing,” he answered. “Nothing.”

His face was turning pale and his hands no longer had any strength left in them.

Horrified, the milk woman laid him down on the ground. She turned toward her cart to fetch a container of water. She wanted him to drink it, but he kept his teeth clenched. In the end, she washed his face instead. Then he lost consciousness. And yet, from the depths of his blackout, he heard her sigh, “He is dead. The tsarevitch is dead.”

She left him there alone in order to announce the news, abandoning cart and horse.

Half an hour later, twenty soldiers from the Palace Guard returned with Lieutenant Boissman. They found the motorized tricycle, the cart, and traces of blood on the ground. But the tsarevitch’s body had disappeared. The milk woman’s tears were flowing thick and fast.

“He died in my arms!”

The horse was no longer there either, having broken free from its harness. Meanwhile, Boissman was hunched over the bloodstains. The earth had been churned up and the bracken trampled by the side of the road. The lieutenant’s first thought was of the bear.

When he opened his eyes again, George couldn’t taste the blood anymore. He was breathing calmly. On hearing the milk woman’s words, he had experienced a deep sense of relief. The tsarevitch is dead. A sense of peace worthy of the great hereafter. His lungs were still filled with a burning sensation, but he was alive. And he was no longer the same person.

Five years ago, his older brother, Nicky, had become Nicholas II, tsar of all Russia. It was then that Weeping Willow’s disease had taken a turn for the worse. He hadn’t even been able to attend his father’s funeral. From that day on, he had become the crown prince, the next on the list: for Nicholas II had no son.

George the Weeping Willow might succeed his brother at any moment.

Ever since, he had been haunted by the desire to depart, to flee or to die. His tuberculosis had returned with a vengeance. The crown hovered above his head like a threat. All he wanted was to be able to watch the stars and to lie down on the heathery earth. He didn’t want to be emperor.

“The tsarevitch is dead.” These words had given him back his life. He thought of the Tsarevna, or Little Princess, the boat belonging to his grandfather Alexander. It was waiting for him on the Bosphorus, rescued at the eleventh hour from the scrap yard where it was due to be destroyed.

He considered how free he was as a dead man, and got back on his feet.

George was barely able to stand. He stared at the motorbike lying across the path. The woman hadn’t yet returned with the palace guards. He made his way over to the horse and undid its harness. Too weak to climb on its back, he whispered softly to it and made it kneel down slowly instead, like a circus horse. No sooner had Weeping Willow hoisted himself onto its back than the animal stood up. It was a draft horse that had never been mounted before, and it reared up as it tried to throw off its rider. Weeping Willow kept whispering, his arms wrapped around the beast’s neck. He gave a kick of his heels and together they galloped off, taking the path to the west.

Nobody recalled seeing a rider lying prostrate on his horse passing by. He didn’t stop for more than one hundred kilometers. The animal’s coat was covered in blood, but Weeping Willow was too far gone to notice. He was riding through the forests of Georgia.

At Chakva, on the shores of the Black Sea, he slid onto the sand in the middle of the night. The sound of the waves was music to his ears.

A little girl found him the next morning. She spoke Russian with an accent and stayed on her knees, singing to him, while her brother set off in search of grown-ups. Weeping Willow watched her without coughing: he didn’t have the strength. He could see giant bamboo canes above her.

The women finally arrived. They were on their way to work in the tea fields that covered the hills. They could tell at a glance that George was in agony. The families that lived in Chakva, on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, belonged to the Greek-speaking minority that had come from Anatolia. The mother of the little girl settled him into their house, in the heart of the bamboo forest, where everyone spoke Greek among themselves. Weeping Willow stood up several times to leave, but he never got farther than the door. He spat into a bowl, which the little girl rinsed out ten times a day.

It was the end, and he knew it. He had dreamed of dying on the waves, alone with the gulls. But he would have to make do with a simple view of the sea between the bamboo canes, and an eight-year-old girl instead of cawing birds.

The climate in this part of the Caucasus was almost tropical. The tea plantation was magnificently maintained. It was run by a Chinese man, Mr. Lao, who had left his country in order to manage one of the first plantations in Russia. He was never without the medal that one of the tsar’s ministers had awarded him for services to the Russian Empire.

When Mr. Lao came to see the sick man he had been told about by his workers, a woman raised the curtain with the invalid lying behind it and said, “He’s dying.”

“No,” countered Mr. Lao. “He’s not dying yet. He will die tomorrow.”

Next to him, the little girl shuddered.

The Chinese plantation manager stared at George, pushing his eyes open with his fingers. He tore off the sick man’s shirt and put his hand to his heart. Then he went away again, followed by the little girl.

That evening she returned with a cloth bag containing some small folded squares of paper. She opened them one by one, to reveal that each was filled with a fine powder. These were Mr. Lao’s remedies.

The first sachet contained a mixture of indigo, powdered bones, and gardenia. The second blended the roots of blackberry bushes and licorice with crushed-rice powder. The little girl boiled up a few pinches of these powders, and the water turned dark.

The next day, George was still alive. And the day after too. A week later, he wanted to sit on the steps and stare at the bamboo forest. After that, he was able to go and observe the workers in the tea fields. People wondered what he was doing still there.

He pinched himself when he woke up, to find out whether he really was still alive.

He could speak some Greek and most of the European languages. He made everyone laugh by asking why, in this plantation, only the women and children worked.

“What about you?” they asked.

And he shrugged.

“I’m convalescing, ladies.”

In reality, he had never thought about working. His only job was being born and then, every morning of his life, trying to come to terms with his birth.

One morning he went to take a look at Mr. Lao’s house. George hid between the trees to view the handsome white residence that gave onto the sea. One day, he would ask the plantation manager about the secret of his powers. Was Weeping Willow being cured? He heard a noise.

Mr. Lao was standing behind him, bowing, his head level with his knees, holding out a little red box as an offering.

“Take this for another fifty days.”

When George approached him, Mr. Lao knelt down, his gaze still lowered. He put the box on the ground, where it rested on a sheet of printed paper folded in four.

“Another fifty days.”

George tried to help him to his feet again, but Mr. Lao pressed his forehead into the grass, so that he was even lower. Then he stood up and walked slowly backward, inclining his head until he disappeared between the trees.

George picked up the red box. On opening it, he discovered further supplies of the remedies he was taking. Then he unfolded the piece of printed paper, which turned out to be the front page of a Moscow newspaper. The picture showed a coffin covered in flowers in the middle of Saint Petersburg Cathedral. A wide border in the color of mourning surrounded the article, which took up the entire page. The only printed words read: GEORGE ALEXANDROVICH ROMANOV IS DEAD.

So Mr. Lao knew who he was.

Weeping Willow never returned to the house in the bamboo forest. He left without saying a word to anybody. Barefoot and with a heavy basket under her arm, the little girl, whose name was Stella, watched him walking toward the sea.