So why, as the third of the five years he had promised Marc began, should Jules Blanchard be worried about his son?

It was instinct, perhaps. Instinct, combined with some observation. It seemed to him that Marc was drinking too much. Not that he was getting drunk, but once or twice when he’d dropped by in the evening, his speech had been a little slurred. Jules had told him to take more exercise, but he doubted that Marc had done so. Occasionally he’d go by the studio, a big attic space at the top of a house next door to a small emporium selling charcuterie near the Place de Clichy. There was no doubt that Marc was working. The place was full of canvases. But it seemed to Jules that too many of them were studies of naked women. Of course, that was to be expected in an artist’s studio, but he couldn’t help asking once: “Do you ever paint women with any clothes on?”

“Certainly, Father. When you got me that commission to paint Madame Du Bois, I not only painted her fully dressed, but wearing a hat as well.”

That a sketch also existed of the lady wearing the hat, and nothing else, was something there was no need for his father—or the lady’s husband—to know.

When he expressed his reservations to his sister, however, Éloïse was dismissive.

“My dear Jules,” she told him, “you are worrying about the wrong member of the family entirely.”

“What do you mean?”

“The person in the family who needs your care and attention isn’t Marc at all. It’s Marie.”

“She seems happy enough.”

“That’s because you like having her at home. But she’s almost twenty-three. She needs to find a husband. I’m sorry to say it, but for once you are neglecting your family duty. It’s high time that you did something about it.”

There were twenty of them, gallant young officers, sitting all together. They were in high spirits. As well they should be. For they were at the Moulin Rouge.

Not only that. Tomorrow evening, one of them was going to sleep with the most beautiful woman in Paris. But who?

The Moulin Rouge was a work of genius. It had been going for only a few years, but it was already a legend.

It was to be found at the foot of the hill of Montmartre, on the broad and leafy boulevard de Clichy that effectively marked the frontier where the serried order of Baron Haussmann’s Paris met the steep chaos of Montmartre. It occupied a former garden plot sandwiched between two respectable, six-story blocks, its large street-level front forming one edge of a platform. And upon this platform rose an almost full-scale model windmill, painted bright red.