Some of them would never make it out again. But Paris was a city of pleasure and escape rather than home and with the start of the First World War the bulk of the Russian community returned to their palaces and estates in the east. It was a glittering era funded by unimaginable wealth, allowing the privileged to bounced between the Riviera and Paris. Naturally, Russian artists followed the money, with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes taking the city by storm and Stravinsky shocking it with The Rite of Spring. They lived happily and lavishly, using their great wealth to acquire mansions, art, automobiles, and – for many Grand Dukes – charming feminine company. It drew some who were not welcome in the Tsar’s Russia but Rappaport focuses predominantly in those early years on the grand dukes and counts, the princesses and even the Dowager Empress who flocked to the city of light to enjoy its many pleasures. Rappaport begins during the Belle Epoque, when France was already drawing Russians westward.

Rappaport reintroduced me to that world – for it did exist – but also to the glittering era that came before and the harsher realities that followed, not quite suitable for 1950s celluloid. Far too many viewings of Anastasia as a child (I really, really loved Ingrid Bergman) had long-ago established Paris in my mind as the home of exiled Russians living a surreal mix of poverty and fantasy, dispossessed of their country and heritage but clinging to it nonetheless in a world where White Russian generals now ran nightclubs and, perhaps, a lost princess lived on the streets. I went into After the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport, an accessible history of the Russians who found their way to Paris both during the early years of the 20th Century and after the revolution, feeling well primed.