This is a story of adventure and friendship-hatred of two extraordinary people, each of whom left a bright mark in the history of their country. Count Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov, a good friend of Emperor Alexander I and a talented military leader who resisted Napoleon himself at the Battle of Kraon, received a very unusual education in his youth. His tutor Gilbert Romm, a failed scientist, freemason and spy, and later a prominent revolutionary and "regicide" who voted for the execution of the king, tempered his ward like a blade of Damascus steel. He traveled with the boy in Russia from the White Sea to the Black Sea, from Karelia to the Ural Mountains, took him in search of knowledge to the world famous Swiss scientists and finally plunged into the fiery whirlpool of the French Revolution...