“Very well.” She smiled apologetically. “The truth is, monsieur, that your arriving without an appointment this evening has placed me in a small difficulty. I don’t think I have a girl for you. But I should like to offer you something in recompense. On Sundays we are closed. That is my rule. If you care to come by on Sunday afternoon, I will show you all the rooms. Then,” she smiled, “you will be able to say that you have seen something that very few men have ever seen.”

He stared at her in amazement.

“You would really do that?”

“I would.”

“Then I accept, madame, with pleasure.”

“You are to come alone, monsieur. I am not turning my house into a public gallery.”

“Of course, madame,” he said. “I understand.”

She wondered if he really did.

He arrived promptly at four o’clock the following Sunday afternoon. Apart from herself and a couple of servants still cleaning the house, the place was empty.

It took her some time to show him all the rooms. He was quite curious. Two of the rooms were Belle Époque and very plush. Another might have come from the eighteenth century, shortly before the Revolution. She had a Napoleonic room. “At least three of our regulars,” she told him, “I am certain, imagine they were the emperor Napoléon in another life.”

The English Tudor room with its heavy oak four-poster bed also contained two Elizabethan portraits that caught his attention at once.

“They look genuine,” he remarked.

“They’re seventeenth-century copies, and heavily restored,” she told him. “But I got them through an English dealer I trust. They look well, don’t they?”

This caused him to ask if she had English connections, and she smiled.

“My parents were English, in fact. Highly respectable. My father was a banker. Fortunately they can’t see me now.”

“So that’s why your French is so pure. You learned it.”

“I did. In the valley of the Loire.”

Were her parents still alive? he asked.

“They were killed in a car accident, I’m afraid. Driving in the mist.” She shrugged sadly. “A long time ago.”

She could see he was intrigued by her creative efforts. She showed him the Wild West room next. Then a room draped as if it were a tent, with a low bed and many cushions.

“It’s like something from the Valentino movie: The Sheik,” he cried.

“Of course. It’s quite popular. We have one man—he comes once a week, always the same girl, always this room. He’s tall and handsome. They’re both into role-playing. They really get into it.”