On and off the Avenue; from Russia with love.(A la Vieille Russie store)

Lots of people walk past A LA VIEILLE RUSSIE, in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel (781 Fifth Ave.; 752-1727), gazing at the Faberge snuffboxes and Schlumberger clips in the window but never daring to cross the threshold. This is a shame, because once you're inside the place turns out to be a blast.

"The entrance is semi-formal for a reason,'' says the proprietor Peter Schaffer, who is wearing multicolored cabochon cufflinks and leaning over a desk that has a chart of Russian emperors under its glass. Schaffer's family founded the business in Kiev in 1851. "We have people -- royals, celebrities -- who come to us to escape from their bodyguards. They like to look around on their own, then slip out the back door.'' Big names have been shopping at A.L.V.R. since the beginning -- Carl Faberge himself was a client -- but they're not the only customers: prices actually start at around $150, for a nineteenth-century cup and saucer, and from there, Schaffer says, "you just add zeros.''

Even when the shop was in Kiev, it had a French name -- at the time, the upper classes spoke French, and Russian was reserved for children and servants. The Francophile roots paid off in 1921, when the business decamped to Paris. Twenty years later, in the midst of another international crisis, Schaffer's parents arrived on Fifth Avenue. "My father brought Faberge to this country,'' he says, though his stock is hardly limited to signed Russian pieces: a snarling mass of fifty-two gold-and-turquoise Victorian snakes that belonged to the Mexican actress Maria Felix recently graced the Fifty-ninth Street windows. "An incredible person, absolutely loved snakes," Schaffer says. "She and another snake collector, one of the Rothschilds, were always fighting over snake jewelry ...