The Queen of Spades

The story opens on a winter night in Moscow, Russia. A card game is being played until four in the morning at the house of Narumov, a Horse Guard. The protagonist Hermann, an officer in the Army Engineers and the son of a German, feverishly watches people gamble, though he has never played, calculating that the risks are too great. Tomsky tells the story of how his grandmother, Countess Anna Fedotovna, incurred a debt while playing the card game faro in Paris fifty years earlier. When her husband refused to pay, she learned a secret to winning at faro from the mysterious and notorious Count of St. Germain. Tomsky says she only ever told one man about it, Chaplitsky, but ends his story without saying how things turned out for the man.