‘I will never forget his kiss’, the Princess Marthe Bibesco wrote in 1933, ‘so young, so strangely chaste, insistent, searching my lips and sealing them with his … a moment we both felt had been long in coming.’ The words smack of the bodice rippers she churned out, when times were hard, under the pseudonym Lucile Ducaux. They far outsold the impressive, cultish volumes she wrote under her own name, earning her the admiration of the Académie Française and causing Proust to acclaim her as one of the greatest stylists in French prose.

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