The director Vasily Katanyan has a recollection that links Elsa Triolet, her sister Lilya Brik and Marina Tsvetaeva through Yelena, the wife of the literary scholar Tager

Soon after emigrating from Russia, Ella Yuryevna Kagan married and became Elsa Triolet, moved to Paris, and in due course began making costume jewellery out of whatever came to hand (my greetings to a good dozen of the fashionable jewellers of today), even out of Metlakh tiles, the kind used for laying floors, skirting and bathrooms. These ornaments were bought by the fashionable houses of Paris (once again my greetings to the figures of the fashion industry of the twenty-first century, who consider themselves the discoverers of anything whatever).

But that is not the point. Marina Tsvetaeva saw such beads of coral, made by Elsa Triolet, begged them as a gift, not without effort, and naturally did not wear them but sold them. Here, though, it is no laughing matter: the poetess, who returned from emigration to Russia in 1939, was literally living in beggary, her belongings and archive had been held up at customs, work was very hard to find, and what she earned scarcely kept her from starving. Living like that, one would sell more than coral