The truth about Countess Berdaiev Why does fate strive against Countess Berdaiev? Aristocrat very beautiful and very free, it belongs to the community of white Russians, these exiles who fled the Soviet Union after the revolution of 1917. Fantastic and passionate personalities, undermined by nostalgia and thinking of impossible projects, they had to find their place in a French society that looks at them like anachronistic vestiges. Seeking in love and in the dizziness of pleasures a remedy for their pain of living, divided between misery and opulence, ready for all the expedients to survive, they are the prey of all the false donors of hope and especially of their dreams. Already a victim of history who condemned her to exile and ruin, Countess Berdaiev is going to be involved in a matter of morals splashing the political milieu in the dark beginnings of the Fifth Republic. Freely inspired by the scandal of the Pink Ballets, this novel returns to the themes dear to Jean-Marie Rouart: the passionate love confronted with the brutality of the power, vis-a-vis a society which always wants to be moralistic.--Mollat.