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took time and effort. Visits with hairdressers, dressmakers, hatmakers, masseuses, and other purveyors took up hours every day. The salons usually commencedaround nine and ended by one or two in the morning, but my grandmother prepared all week. Other nights we dined later, sometimes with a friend or two of hers and sometimes by ourselves.
    During her soirees, I was glad to remain upstairs, away from the men, the music, and the noise, hiding in the pale yellow bedroom where I would try to read. I was finally making headway through The Picture of Dorian Gray , a book I’d brought from home and tried but failed to read on the ship. I’d been too disturbed. I wasn’t sure if it was the novel’s foreboding tone that mirrored my mood or the fact that this was the last book my father had read before his death. Once I fell under its spell, Mr. Wilde’s story absorbed me and, for a short time, allowed me to stop thinking about everything that had happened to me and worry instead about what was happening to his characters. The novel was a dark, disturbing tale that excited me and made me afraid at the same time.
    My father had left annotations and marginalia in the pages that were not always welcome. Sometimes they made me feel closer to him; other times they caused me great sorrow, especially when I found something of particular interest and grasped anew, with a fresh stab of grief, that I couldn’t just get up and go find him so we could discuss what he’d written.
    The Picture of Dorian Gray was reported to be salacious, but my father said he thought I’d like it because it proposed some fascinating theories about the power of art.
    My father and I both loved art; he’d nurtured that love in me. I could get lost in a painting, become mesmerized by a fine piece of sculpture. Like him, beauty astounded me. Talent awed me. The magic of art—the transformative powers, the luscious hues, textures, patterns—it all absorbed me. I was fascinated by the way an artist took something he saw and then turned it into a personal statement. I loved seeing the world translated by these great poets of color and line.
    When I was thirteen, wanting to please my father, I’d taken uppainting in school. But I could never put down on canvas what I saw so clearly in my mind and was always frustrated. My teacher said that I had real talent and showed great promise but needed to learn to be more patient.
    One afternoon my mother found me in tears over a muddy watercolor and asked why I was so upset. I told her it was because I’d wanted to make Papa something that he would love as much as the paintings in the museums and on our walls at home.
    After she’d soothed me, she brought my father in, showed him what I’d done, and told him what I’d said.
    He tried to point out how good the painting was. No matter what he said, I objected that it was not good enough and that my effort was not great enough to create the kind of gift I wanted to present to him.
    “But Sandrine, you are my gift—don’t you know you are the treasure? You don’t have to become something you aren’t to please me.”
    But it was not just because the book was about a painter that my father gave me The Picture of Dorian Gray . He’d told me the occult aspects of the tale had stirred his imagination, and he was interested in discussing those with me, too. For a self-proclaimed rationalist, he found arcane and esoteric knowledge surprisingly fascinating and studied it with great interest. He wasn’t alone. From France to Russia to America, the occult was experiencing a major revival.
    My father believed it was a reaction to rationalism, materialism, and the exciting but frightening scientific discoveries being reported almost daily. Explorers returning from the Far East with stories of strange lands and mystical customs also fueled everyone’s imagination. My father had funded several of those expeditions, as well as others, to find the fabled Hermetic books based on