Dearest Papa,

I know you must be despairing that I will ever return to Bath, but this is to reassure you that I will be coming back soon. The portrait is finished.

First, however, I have been invited to travel to Paris on Thursday with my new friends, Ashton and Julietta Sims, and I hope you will not begrudge me this great adventure. Ashton Sims is one of the owner-directors of the publishing house, Kirkwall & Sims and his Italian wife is a great beauty.

I promise to send you a Carte Postale of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, or possibly of some poor beggarmaid prostrate at its portals. For I am told there are many dispossessed in Paris, on account of the city’s redesign by Baron Haussmann, but I believe I will have to endeavour to harden my heart towards them, in order to go SHOPPING with Julietta! Emmeline is lending me money for a few Paris fashions, but I have told her you will repay her.

From your contrite, loving and heartless daughter, Jane

Now, after being brought a breakfast of coffee and French patisserie in her room at the Hôtel Meurice in the rue de Rivoli, Jane was lying naked on her bed making such wild love with Julietta that she felt herself blush at her own abandon. Under Julietta’s instruction, Jane was now capable of exciting her lover to ecstasies – so she said – she had never before experienced.

‘Because you are so tall and strong,’ whispered Julietta, ‘it is as though you are a man and a woman, both together. My mind flickers in and out of seeing you as two people. And I cannot tell you how impossibly erotic this is. But we can take it even further, Jane, if you want to …’

‘I want to.’

‘Then I have a wonderful plan. It will be something about which I’ve often fantasised, but I have never dared to do it. Only with you, now, we are going to do it.’

‘Tell me the plan,’ said Jane.

‘No,’ said Julietta. ‘Now we are going to dress very smartly in our best day dresses and coats, and go out and you will soon see what I have in mind. And I know that we are both going to go wild with excitement. I feel almost faint thinking about it.’

Julietta’s ‘plan’ took them in a carrosse across the Seine, which, like the Thames, was awash with human sewage and all the detritus of city life and yet was lit with such a beautiful spring light that the tides of filth seemed only like intricate copper-coloured marbling on its sparkling surface. And in the variety of commerce on the river Jane felt she could discern a place whose clamour was all for wild indulgence and excess. She saw one barge piled up with nothing but bales of mink skins, another with a mountain of pineapples, another with a hundred cages filled with larks.

When they descended from the cab, in the rue du Bac, Jane noticed how warm the air was and as she savoured this, she felt that she had never been as enthralled by life as she was at this moment. Julietta had explained to her that Haussmann was tearing down the ancient, cluttered streets and wooden houses to lay out wide boulevards and apartment houses built in stone and embellished with ironwork and classical decoration. And the thought came now to Jane that she was Haussmann’s perfect acolyte, not only casting an admiring eye on his beautiful new vistas but herself undergoing a radical transformation, becoming a new person in a new époque. Her past was demolishing itself as surely as the old, narrow streets of Paris were disappearing. With Julietta, Jane Adeane was being reinvented.