“Get off, Ulysses!” A little vexed, Popeye apologized profusely. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him. Usually, he’s like a big teddy bear. Must be something he can smell on you.”

The smell of fear, I thought as I walked on.

Yves Dalanegra had had an architect design the house, an L-shaped mansion in the Californian style built from blocks of translucent concrete. A vast infinity pool offered a stunning view of the hills and the village of Biot. An operatic aria drifted from the half-open windows, the famous act-two duet from Strauss’s Rosenkavalier. Curiously, there was no bell by the front door. I knocked, but there was no answer, probably because the music was so loud. In true Provençal manner, I went around to the garden, heading toward the source of the music.

Dalanegra spotted me and gestured for me to come through one of the French doors.

He was just finishing a shoot. The whole house was one vast loft space that served as a photographer’s studio. Dalanegra’s model, now getting dressed, was a voluptuous beauty whom—I could tell from the staging and the props—the artist had just immortalized in the pose of one of Goya’s masterpieces, La Maja desnuda. I had read somewhere that this was Dalanegra’s latest obsession, reproducing old masters using plus-size models. The staging was kitsch but not tacky—a green velvet chaise longue, soft cushions, lace fringes, and gossamer sheets foaming like waves.

Dalanegra greeted me in English.

“Hey, Thomas. How are you? Come on in, come on in, we’re just finished!”

Physically, he looked like Christ, or—to continue with more artistic comparisons—like a self-portrait by Albrecht Dürer: curly, shoulder-length hair; a gaunt, symmetrical face; a neatly trimmed beard; deep-set, piercing eyes. His clothes, however, were a very different matter: embroidered jeans, a fringed buckskin jacket, and leather ankle boots.

“I couldn’t work out what you were trying to explain over the phone. I just flew in from LA last night and I’m extremely jet-lagged.”

He gestured for me to sit at one end of a long wooden table while he showed his model out. Looking at the photos plastered everywhere, I realized that men did not exist in Dalanegra’s work. They were banished, wiped off the map, leaving women to blossom in a world delivered from (male) evil.

When he reappeared, Dalanegra chatted animatedly about his daughters, then about an actress he had photographed who’d starred in a film based on one of my books. When he had finally exhausted these subjects, he said, “So, what can I do for you?”

2.

“Oh yes, of course I took that photo,” Dalanegra said.