In her youth, she shone in the light and was known as the Russian Venus. Her close acquaintances included the Empress of Austria and the Queen of France. During her life, the princess saw five monarchs on the Russian throne, and her word could ease the fate of even the Decembrist rebel.

But descendants know it for a completely different reason. Even contemporaries recognized it as a prototype of Pushkin's Queen of Spades, an old countess who owned the mystery of three cards. The fact is that, according to rumors, the princess herself also owned such a secret. Moreover, she gained this knowledge after a major card loss to the Duke of Orleans from the greatest mystic Count Saint-Germain, who fell under the charm of northern Venus. However, later the princess was pursued until her death by a mysterious black stranger, constantly walking through the windows of her mansion.

Pushkin heard this story from the grandson of the princess. And even now this place is considered strange: if you look closely at the windows of the house before dawn, you can see an old woman threatening her finger. There was, they say, a case when in the dawn twilight a young man led an old woman across the road, and she immediately disappeared. Many people saw her ghost outside her mansion.

By the way, Tchaikovsky, who wrote the opera The Queen of Spades, spent the last years of his life not far from this house, at 13 Malaya Morskaya Street. A curious coincidence: PI Tchaikovsky was the largest collector of musical works written by the same Count Saint-Germain. But after the death of the great composer, this collection disappeared without a trace.

And one more funny coincidence: the pavilion in Neskuchny Garden, where the TV club of connoisseurs is filmed, was also once the property of the Queen of Spades. Maybe that's why the game “What? Where? When?” now begins with Herman's aria from Tchaikovsky's opera: “What is our life? The game!”