For the next several years, Artopoulos and I remained inseparable. We luncheoned at noon most days, mostly at La Maison Dorée, but occasionally at the Café Anglais or the Café de la Paix, and we often dined in the evening too. We sent each other several letters a day, either by post or by pneumatique, and as soon as it was possible we had telephones installed in our respective homes. We were regular guests at the Lemaire salon on Rue de Monceau and Laure Hayman’s salon on Avenue Hoche. We shared a box at the Opéra and sponsored the same dancers at the Russian ballet. Artopoulos was fond of racing horses, and we were often seen together at the Hippodrome. With the help of connections, he eased my admission into the Jockey Club, despite my obscure origins. On Sundays we would go hunting, driving to his country estate in his Richard-Brasier, or riding along the shaded paths of the Bois de Boulogne, saluting the carriages of the grandes dames of Paris’s demimonde. In the summer, we holidayed in Cabourg.

Artopoulos was the epitome of the modern gentleman. His cigars were banded with personalized gilt paper rings. His shirts were from Worth or Redfern and were sent to be washed and pressed in London. When he hosted a dinner, he made sure there was always one footman for every three guests. All year round, he filled his home with great bouquets of flowers—preferably chrysanthemums—ordered weekly from Lachaume or Lemaître. He only drank coffee bought from Maison Corcellet, served from a small silver coffee pot engraved with his initials, AA, and with piping hot milk in a porcelain jug. At tea, he served petits fours from Rebattet and brioches from Bourbonneux. And, without ever asking for anything in return, Artopoulos always made me feel a welcome and natural part of his world, a world of soirées and masquerade balls, hunts and boating expeditions, cabarets and casinos. His generosity to me had no bounds. His only complaint, which he used on many occasions to taunt me affectionately, was that I would never look him in the eye.

Throughout this time, the Baudelaire Society flourished, thanks mostly to Artopoulos’s charisma and connections. He rebuilt it into the glittering social salon he’d described to me when first we met, using it to make his inexorable climb to the highest echelons of society. At its peak, around 1910, the Society boasted among its members such luminaries as the Comtesse de Chevigné, Robert de Montesquiou, Lucien Daudet, Comte Henri Greffulhe, Antoine Bibesco, and Anna de Noailles. The guestbook was pocked with such names as the Duc d’Orléans, the Empress Dowager, the King of Greece, the Serbian pretender Karageorgevich, Prince Karl Egon von Fürstenberg, and the banker Bischoffsheim. Even the Prince of Wales attended on one occasion, as the guest of Odile de Richelieu.