Then the palace was closed again, as the dastardly regime began quietly selling off the finest pieces in exchange for cash. The Second World War broke out; the Germans occupied Pavlovsk and vengefully blew it to smithereens after failing to take Leningrad. At the liberation, nothing remained of the place but four blackened walls. Pavlovsk was well and truly dead.

But then it was revived, thanks to the tenacity and ingenuity of its curators and restorers, who luckily possessed plans and drawings of the original building. Using these, they reconstructed the palace’s interior decor down to the last wainscot. Those treasures which had not been dispersed by the Soviets were brought out of hiding, and room after room Pavlovsk reemerged as it had been in the great days of the eighteenth century. Even its ghosts returned.

I savored the simplicity, facility, and freedom with which all these Russians spoke, from the highest state officials down to the friendly curators now surrounding me.

Ludmila Koval recounted that she was standing one day with one of her colleagues in the doorway to Queen Olga’s salon, when they both saw a woman in gray climb the stairs, cross the room, and disappear into the corridor. They ran after her, but found nobody.

Another time, one of the junior curators was relaxing in the salon on her own. She was sitting opposite a closed door which led into a bedroom, from which there was no other exit. With time, the parquet floor had buckled, and consequently there was a gaping crack under the door. The curator’s eye happened to fall on this crack, and beyond it she saw the hem of a long skirt slipping to and fro on the far side. She called out: no reply, but still the hem moved to and fro, so she ran to the door and opened it. The room was empty. Since then, the same phenomenon has been reported by several other colleagues.

I was ready to believe that this wing of the palace, left largely undamaged by the Germans, might still be haunted, but most of the remainder had been demolished and completely rebuilt. I didn’t see how the ghosts could possibly have survived. How wrong I was….

At the outset of the restoration work Madame A.V., who had worked at Pavlovsk for thirty-five years, was woken in the middle of the night by the jangle of the alarm. She went round the palace in search of whatever it was that had set off the bells. When she reached the Caveliers’ Room, which was the first salon to be restored, she clearly heard voices, steps, and the sounds of doors opening and closing. Not a soul was there and the reason why the alarm went off remained a mystery.

"I have no doubt it was ghosts," said Ludmila Koval. "There have been many such reports over the years."