Book excerpt: A fashionable French painter is found strangled, a crime highly embarrassing for the Establishment as his wife, a lady of dubious morals, was in the news a year earlier when the President of France happened to die in her bed. And the last thing the authorities want is to revive the whole outrage. But Inspector Gautier is not a man to deflect the course of justice. Defying his chief, he uncovers some shocking scandals, one of them concerning no less than the Russian Ambassador, and his investigations culminate in an extravagant finale in Maxim's in its Belle Epoque heyday.