When the musicians left at eleven, the air was still heavy with perfume, perspiration and smoke. The travellers decided to spend the night. Gustave noted that Maxime appeared exhausted and concluded that this could not be due merely to the intense revelry of the past four hours (with the occasional interlude for a bout of fucking, he added in an arch note). The photographer, who possessed an admirable, perhaps self-destructive, desire for precision, may have been contemplating the balance between light and shadow in his images, or whether the calotype would convey the perfection in scale and detail he had envisaged. Maxime always remained fully absorbed in his project – a raging mania for photography, Gustave called it – even while amusing himself with a whore or two. Kuchuk Hanem, who couldn’t bear to see a man unmoved by her charms, teased Maxime. ‘Would you like to take pictures of me while you’re here?’

‘Apologies, Mademoiselle. I only photograph historical monuments. Ours is a mission in the service of science.’ His tone was polite and distant, though he had already surveyed her legs and torso, appraised her proportions.

‘As you wish. Besides, I’m not the best at sitting still and keeping my mouth shut,’ she laughed coyly. She was a poor actress when she pretended to be humble. Maxime looked away and forced a cough.

Gustave went to Kuchuk Hanem’s bedroom while Maxime slept alone on the divan. Later that night, on her palm-branch bed, Kuchuk Hanem already found herself unable to recall whether she’d had an orgasm. To be fair, Gustave’s member entertained her well enough. Ditto his tongue. He was a perfectionist in matters of arithmetic; he took notes. Five times (he counted his coups, mon ami, not hers). The third was the most ferocious. The writer catalogued his virility in letters to his dear friend Louis Bouilhet.

After they made love, Gustave wiped his semen with a handkerchief and proffered it to Kuchuk Hanem. She raised her eyebrows.

‘My mistress in Paris treasured evidence of our heated couplings,’ he said.

In fact, Gustave was referring not to his mistress but to Maxime’s. In recalling his tumultuous affair with the poetess Louise Colet, he delighted in imagining her as a woman who archived all that was ephemeral, including his ejaculations. In return, she had given him a lock of hair from the deceased Chateaubriand, her literary hero.

Kuchuk Hanem demurred, little impressed by the notion of immortalising bodily fluids (a week later, she cursed Gustave, who had deposited a different sort of keepsake with her: syphilis). Gustave was disappointed that his passion for metaphor went unrequited. Louise would have behaved otherwise, he thought, for she was a writer who read poems composed in an elegant tongue and had translated Shakespeare; she was a creature with a capacity for abstract thought.