And with those last bitter words, he turned and walked away. And Max knew that there was nothing he could do but watch his father go, and wonder if, having hurt him so much, he had lost him.

By 1936, L’Invitation au Voyage was a very special establishment. It was named after the famous poem in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, whose refrain expressed everything the place hoped to be.

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté

Luxe, calme, et volupté

Order, and beauty, luxury, calm. And sexual pleasure. There were two further things for which the house had gained a reputation: It was spotlessly clean. And it was always changing. In fact, it was a work of remarkable imagination.

The imagination of its owner, Madame Louise.

The French government had a very sensible attitude toward brothels, Louise always thought. It regulated them. The laws went back to the time of the great emperor Napoléon.

Not that regulation had been a new idea in Europe, even then. Back in the Middle Ages, the many brothels along the south bank of London’s River Thames were supervised by their feudal lord, the bishop of Winchester, who drew up the regulations.

In Paris, however, it was not the Church but the civil authorities who licensed the brothels. There were regular inspections and twice-weekly medical checks for all the women employed there. It was pragmatic, logical and responsible.

It was six years now since Louise had opened her brothel.

Perhaps, if she’d been colder, a little more ruthless, Louise could have followed in the wake of Coco Chanel—whose lovers, like the Duke of Westminster, included some of the richest men in Europe. But Louise had been too slow to understand the lesson that a woman’s fortune depended entirely on the circuit in which she moved. On the arm of a man who was very rich, she would meet other equally rich men, who cared very little for the rules of society, because they could make the rules for themselves.

True, in France—where it was well remembered that at the court of Versailles, a royal mistress might have more power and prestige than a queen—a mistress might be a highly fashionable woman, and not a person to be hidden away and looked down upon, as in many other countries. But even so, a well-to-do Parisian was unlikely to give her the social protection or the money she would need to progress beyond a certain point.

So Louise lived quietly, and she did not become rich, but nonetheless, by the time she was thirty, she had been the kept woman of several men who could afford to be generous, and together with the capital sum from her father when she reached that age, she had enough money to stop being dependent on others and to go into business for herself. That was when she had opened L’Invitation au Voyage.