Even by the exuberant standards of the Belle Époque, as this age would come to be known, the Moulin Rouge was preposterous. The louche old windmills on the hill above had always been there, but this bright red dummy down below was a loud affront to the baron’s bourgeois boulevard, and meant to be so.

As such, it was wonderfully French.

For if, since the time of Louis XIV, governments had tried to impose a stern classical order on the ancient, often tribal lands of France—each with their own dialects, each with probably a score of local cheeses—they hadn’t found it easy. And even here in the nation’s capital, the spirits of old medieval Paris, of markets and alleys, and jostling crowds, kept bursting up, like brightly colored plants and irreverent weeds, breaking through the tightly cemented surfaces and angry order of monarchs, bureaucrats and policemen.

The Moulin was just such a plant. It was colored bright red. It had the finest cabaret in Paris.

And everybody went there. Workingmen went there. Ladies of the night, of course. Middle-class Paris went there, and the aristocracy. Even Britain’s Prince of Wales had gone there.

The young officers were aristocratic. They were all brother officers in the same regiment. Most of the time, they might expect to be stationed in other places, usually on France’s eastern borders; but for the present they were stationed in Paris, and they were determined to make the most of it.

Like most of the aristocratic regiments of the day, they patronized a particular brothel. If the brothels of Paris were legally regulated, with twice weekly medical inspections, the grandest of them were like private mansions, whose rooms might have exotic themes—Moorish, Babylonian, Oriental. Whenever the Prince of Wales visited Paris, he frequented a very chic brothel where he installed his own bathtub, which he liked to fill with champagne. The house where the officers of the regiment went lay in the quarter between the Opéra and the Louvre. It was discreet, delightful, and was patronized by several great nobles.

But above all these lay the world of the private courtesan, the grandes horizontales. Though many were kept by a single rich man, others took lovers, sometimes for just a night at a time. The luckiest courtesans might marry a rich and elderly client, even one with a title; and if widowed young enough could live in a mansion of their own, and hold a salon—and take fresh lovers too, of course, as long as they understood that she expected to receive gifts, in cash or kind, for the interest she took in them.