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It is a discreetly sensual act of disclosure, showing their pieces together in public. And assembling these lacquers also records their assignations: the collection records their love-affair, their own secret history of touch.

There is a review in Le Gaulois of an exhibition in 1884 of Charles’s lacquers. ‘One could spend days in front of these vitrines,’ writes the reviewer. I agree. I cannot trace which museums Charles and Louise’s lacquers have disappeared into, but I go back to Paris for a day to the Musée Guimet in the avenue d’Iéna, which now holds Marie Antoinette’s collection, and stand in front of their vitrines full of the mazy reflections of these softly gleaming things.

He brings these dense black-and-gold objets to his salon in the rue de Monceau, where he has recently laid down a golden Savonnerie carpet. It is finely woven from silk, made originally for a gallery in the Louvre in the seventeenth century. Its imagery is an allegory of Air: the four winds blowing their trumpets with fat cheeks, and everything is interlaced with butterflies and undulating ribbons. The carpet has been cut down in size so that it fits. I imagine walking across this floor. The whole room is golden.

5. A BOX OF CHILDREN’S SWEETS

To buy a little of Japan the best thing to do was to visit the place. This was the ultimate bit of one-upmanship of Charles’s neighbour Henri Cernuschi, or the industrialist Emile Guimet, the organiser of the Trocadéro exhibition.

If you could not match that, then you had to visit Parisian galleries for Japanese bibelots. These shops were known as places for encounters, popular sites for rendezvous for beau-monde lovers – rendez-vous des couples adultères, like Charles and Louise. In the old days, you would find these couples in the Jonque Chinoise, the shop in the rue de Rivoli, or its companion shop the Porte Chinoise in the rue Vivienne, where the galleriste Madame Desoye – who had sold Japanese art to the first wave of collectors – sat ‘enthroned in her jewels . . . almost a historic figure in our time like a fat Japanese idol’. Now Sichel’s had taken over.

Sichel was a great salesman, but not a curious or observant anthropologist. In a pamphlet published in 1883, Notes d’un bibeloteur au Japon, he wrote, ‘The country was entirely new to me: if I speak frankly I wasn’t interested in day-to-day life at all: all I wanted was to get the lacquers from the bazaar.’

And this is all he did. Soon after his arrival in 1874 in Japan, Sichel discovered a group of lacquer writing-boxes hidden under layers of dust in a Nagasaki bazaar. He ‘paid one dollar for each, and today many of these objects are valued at over 1,000 francs’. These were the writing-boxes that he sold – he fails to say – to his Parisian clients like Charles or Louise or Gonse for a great deal more than 1,000 francs.

Sichel continues:

In those days Japan was a treasure trove of art objects to be had at bargain prices. The streets of its cities were lined with shops of curios, textiles and pawn goods. Throngs of tradespeople would gather at one’s door at dawn: vendors of fukusa [scrolls] or bronze merchants carrying their goods in carts. There were even passers-by who would quite willingly sell the netsuke from their obi [belts]. The barrage of offers was so incessant that one was almost overwhelmed by a weariness and a distaste for buying. Nevertheless, these merchants in exotic objects were amiable tradesmen. They acted as your guide, bargained on your behalf in return for just a box of children’s sweets, and concluded business deals by throwing grand banquets in your honour which ended with enticing performances by female dancers and singers.

Japan was that box of sweets. Collecting in Japan encouraged a striking greed. Sichel writes of the urge ‘d’évaliser le Japon’ – to plunder or rape the country. The stories of destitute daimyos selling their heirlooms, samurai their swords, dancers their bodies – and passers-by