At Oldway, Paris finds the problem with close study lies in what you inevitably find

It happened in the upper gallery first. He was squinting to look at a nobleman when he saw her emerging chin-first from the hazy crowd at the back. After a few days of tickling the ladies’ skirts, she appeared in the lower gallery, leaning on the gentlemen to make conversation. Just when Paris thought she surely couldn’t be bolder, he caught her winking among the assembled sisters in front, vanishing if he looked directly but reappearing the moment he tried to focus elsewhere; very true to life, he found. She was barefoot, possibly drunk. Teasing him in her ruthless way. He prepared himself for the day she would become Josephine in profile; in fact he was curious as to how she would carry the crown, if she would hate it on concept or allow an exception to her principle against adornment just this once if it meant she could rule the First French Empire.

But Isadora didn’t touch Josephine. She left the woman kneeling as she took the role of Napoleon himself, slipping the man around her shoulders and taking on his pose with perfect, sneering ease. She commanded control of every inch of his bodily empire, her eyes wild with power. Paris was humiliated by her impersonation. She remained as Paris drew near, impertinent to his attention.

When he tried to look away, she was everywhere. She was lodged in every face on the canvas, whether they were three tiers up in the crowd or holding the coronation robes or guarding the hall. She became the pope and the marble angels, she became Christ on the cross. His own ruthless mind had exposed him for what he was: a devoted admirer waiting at her stage door with a stack of her postcards clutched to his chest, her every articulation known to him, every one of her expressions lashed to his memory with unbreakable thread. He was a slave to her legion gaze.

It was time to go. He stood with some difficulty, bowing to the painting as if formality might ease his shame.

He avoided The Coronation from that day forward, turning his head when he passed. On the opposite side of the stairwell a terra-cotta bust of Neptune caught his eye, and he had to convince himself that under the floating heroic curls, the old man wasn’t laughing at him.

His work would be his comfort, now as always. Resolving to dedicate himself again to the study of architecture, he passed more nights in his office, suffering only a few hours of sleep at a time on the reclining chair, which the girls noticed and started making up like a bed. He took a few meals each day there and quit asking after the mail. The cook’s maid reported to the buyer that he was drinking absolutely no beer and less liquor as well.

There was work to be done, and nothing so intoxicating as expanding the empire. He wanted something more permanent in France, and he found a new lease south of the Paris city center, a grand old hotel in Bellevue. Signing the papers inspired the freeing sense of a lightened financial load, the excitement of a fresh enterprise, and the promise of the obliterative tide of industry. The property was in an ideal location, among parks and wooded areas, retrofitted for electric light, and included a lovely modern stage. They could open a school there and offer free tuition to urchins or at least employ them in the garden. If Isadora didn’t consent to teaching, he would hire Elizabeth and her man Max. They would support the day-to-day fees and advertising concepts and organize performances for the public. Once it got going, it would require very little in terms of his own operational involvement.

The thought began to bore him just as he signed the last of the documents. He preferred to occupy himself with ventures that held a real chance of failure, not this old academic route, its small gains on low risk. Because he enjoyed such a constant cash flow—a figure that could build two new schools a week if he wanted—solvency wasn’t important to him. He preferred the thrill of the venture, the success or failure coming in spectacular fashion. He liked to buy mineral rights in low-lying plains, or whole islands that ended up so overrun with pests that everything would have to be burned to the stakes and begun anew. He fantasized about finding himself in a situation where his good business sense would be rewarded, but until then he was trapped in a carnival game as broad as his life, and nobody would ever pity him for it.

The property at Bellevue would be the perfect place for Isadora to return to work. He would write to Elizabeth at once and ask her to set it up and bring her students from Darmstadt, so that when Isadora arrived, she would find accomplished girls and a comfortable bed. From there, she would remember what brought her to teach in the first place, the importance of training the next generation to carry on her legacy. She might not care for her own life any longer, but in the students she could at least see her ideas begin to manifest. That might be enough.