Her house on Millionnaya Street opened its doors to guests only after midnight. By this time, the entire high society gathered here, and among the admirers of the salon's hostess, Avdotya Ivanovna Golitsyna, were such celebrities as Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, Pushkin, and Karamzin. Surprisingly, her husband, Prince Sergey Golitsyn, never attended these gatherings. They did not love each other and tried to avoid communication. How did this happen?

During the reign of Paul I, it was customary to arrange marriages between nobles. One day he decided to create an alliance between the Golitsyns and the Izmaylovs. The couple was beautiful: the daughter of a millionaire and the son of a princely family. However, no feelings arose between them. At the insistence of the sovereign, they married, but their characters were completely different. Sergey Golitsyn was modest and silent, while Yevdokiya was energetic and passionate about entertainment. They did not grow close and even slept in separate rooms, eventually moving to different cities.

Yevdokiya settled in Naples and wrote to her husband asking for a divorce, but he did not respond. Soon she met her love, aide-de-camp Mikhail Dolgorukov, and a romance began between them. She wrote again to Petersburg requesting the dissolution of her marriage, but received no reply. However, happiness with Dolgorukov was short-lived: in 1808, he went to war with Sweden and died. Disillusioned in love, Yevdokiya returned to her homeland.

Later, she met the fortune-teller Lenormand, who predicted her death deep in the night. Since then, Yevdokiya stayed awake at night, and thus her salon on Millionnaya began to operate. Pushkin often attended these parties and even dedicated several poems to her. At the end of his life, Golitsyn himself requested a divorce to marry another woman, but Yevdokiya refused him out of spite. She died at night, just as Lenormand had predicted.