Ah, Gogol, our Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol is a strange man, mysterious and always slightly mocking. Frankly, we have long been accustomed to his oddities: he will appear in a silk jacket in the middle of December, or tell us about a dead man who bought tobacco in a shop. But recently, over evening tea at the club, he let it slip casually:

“I have a relative...” he said, and somehow casually, “from Moscow itself. Yes, she will come, perhaps. On important business.”

Zhukovsky and I exchanged glances. Who, they say, is Gogol’s relative? And why such a tone, as if not a young lady, but the governor himself were coming to visit him?

But we did not ask. You never know - his soul is sometimes closed, like an Egyptian tomb.

Several days passed, and now - as I remember it now - a frosty midday, the air is crisp, there is not a cloud in the sky, the sun plays on the gilded crosses. We are sitting in Gogol's house, solving charades. Zhukovsky, by the way, had been trying to compose a poem without the letter "r" for three hours, when he heard the clatter of hooves, the barking of dogs and the jingle of bells.

"And here she is," Gogol said, somehow quite simply, and stood up.

We followed him. And here she comes in.

I must admit, I am a man who has seen things, but here... Here even I was lost for words for a moment. She was wearing a dress - oh, what a dress! The brides of tsars wear such a dress, and perhaps not all of them. A fur coat - white as the first snow, the same one that falls in Petersburg in silence, when the whole city freezes. And the jewelry... my brothers, Zhukovsky later whispered that the bracelet on her hand alone was worth as much as our fee for two years.

But everything would be fine - after all, there are many elegant young ladies these days - but... her face. Not her appearance, no, I will not write about it - it is not allowed. But her gaze. Her gaze was such that Dante himself would have curled his tongue into a ball, and he would not have been able to describe either heaven or hell....