Every so often, in the salons and ateliers of old Europe, a particular species of zealot makes his appearance: the convert who cannot let a meal pass without a homily, who turns the simplest encounter into a small theological occasion, and who, by careful degrees, makes himself magnificently impossible to seat beside anyone at dinner. Paolo Troubetzkoy was such a man. In the spring of 1909, in a half-empty banquet hall on the Moika, he rose before twenty bewildered guests and delivered a sermon that began with his love of life and ended with a warning about disease, while the meat courses cooled and curdled in front of them.
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