(English translation would be "The Black Pestilence" in Three novels : the second volume, Chatto & Windus (Random Century Group), London, England, 1991.)

Nina Berberova is one of the many Russians that ended up in Paris after 1917. She was published late in the century. She wrote several stories and short novels, which depict (directly or indirectly) the life of an emigrant, pushed out of their country by circumstances.

The discomfort of being a foreigner (and that of knowing you'll be forever a foreigner) is constant, although it most often changes into a silent despair : for instance, in Le Laquais et la Putain (literally "the lackey and the whore"), a woman used to earn a living through the men she charmed finds herself getting too old for the trick to work. To survive, she ends up with a waiter from one of the establishments she used to frequent with rich clients. He can't believe his luck - she is beautiful, way above his worth he thinks - and she can't believe her fall, and can't hide the contempt he is too happy to notice. Everyone lives in the shadow of what could have been. Despair and love side by side is a common theme in Berberova's work.

Le Mal Noir tells the heartbreaking story of a Russian emigrant trying to get to a friend in Chicago. In order to find the money to travel, and like many poor Parisians, he goes through the hell that is the Mont-de-Piété, the state-owned pawnshop denounced by Zola, Hugo and the many revolutionaries of the 19th century. Let me explain how it works: the temporarily embarrassed can bring to the Mont-de-Piété anything they own worth a little. There, it is appraised, and their owners are given a third of its value. Moving forward, they will have to pay interest to keep ownership of whatever heirloom they brought, although it stays with the Mont-de-Pieté. To get it back, they will have to reimburse the initial loan.