Most of what surrounded Bennett in that tiny studio was phallic, masculine, or heterosexual, for artwork depicting her persuasion wasn’t nearly as popular. Undaunted, she journeyed to all corners of the lamp-lit space, and in one, Bennett met an artist named Gustave. He sat on a wooden crate between rickety easels displaying his paintings, and now being quite fluent in French, Bennett struck up a conversation. Surprised to discover Bennett was a woman, the man quickly opened a shabby valise and pulled out a few sketches. She smiled, and he smiled, and it was on that night Bennett bought her first pieces of erotica. It would be decades before Gustave Courbet would paint the work known as Le Sommeil, but his libertine nature had been alive and well for so much longer than that oil on canvas.

When they climbed into their carriage that night to go home, Max listened as Bennett proposed that she, too, should hold a show revolving around erotica. A hundred years before, with her eye for art far greater than Max, he had turned all his galleries over to Bennett. Until then, most of Max’s wealth stemmed from his inheritance, thievery, and businesses he’d opened and closed as the world’s needs changed. Now, though, the lion’s share of his income was due to Bennett’s innate, almost uncanny ability to recognize what would sell and what would not. Therefore, by the time they arrived back at Max’s Parisian mansion late that evening, a show always and forever called Rapture was born.

It took Bennett ten years to gather not only the sculptures, sketches, and paintings she deemed worthy, but also the list of invitees. Their purses had to be thick and their interests diverse, and their need for privacy second to none for like the showing Bennett had attended years before, no masks would be worn at Rapture.

On a warm Paris summer night in 1851, in a gallery with windows shuttered to prevent spying eyes, affluent legislators and spoiled nobility pranced into a showroom replete with erotica of every shape and size. Statues of nude men and women in bronze, stone, and marble stood proudly throughout the space, their genitalia unfettered for all to see. Murals of big-bosomed ladies servicing their suitors filled two walls, and sketches, lithographs, and paintings depicting homosexual encounters were perched on easels and hung on plaster.

If Max’s chest had puffed out any further, the buttons on his vest would have flown across the room. The artists Bennett had chosen were talented, their brushstrokes precise, and their colors superb. The sculptures were neither lewd nor grotesque, the couplings they presented showing love and lust at its finest, and he couldn’t even find fault with a penis-legged table with vagina ornamentation. After all, Catherine the Great had possessed one quite similar.