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It is in this new house that Charles replaces his lit de parade with an Empire bed. It is a lit à la polonaise hung with silks.

In a second-hand bookshop in Paris I find the sale catalogues of parts of Michel and Maurice’s art collections that were dispersed after they had died. A dealer had been bidding for the clocks, unsuccessfully, annotating every lot with the price as it had come up:10,780 francs for a Louis XV astronomical clock inlaid with bronze signs of the zodiac. All this porcelain, the Savonnerie carpets, the paintings by Boucher, the boiseries and the tapestries speak of the need of the Ephrussi family to settle seamlessly into society. And I began to realise that Charles’s new taste for Empire paintings and furniture as he approached his mid-forties was more than just a way of creating an ensemble in which to live. It was also a claim on an essential Frenchness, on belonging somewhere properly. And perhaps a way of putting more space between those first, jostlingly heterodox rooms and his authoritative life as an arbiter of taste. Empire is not le gout Rothschild, not Jewish. It is patrician, French.

I wonder how the netsuke looked here: it is in these formal rooms that Charles begins to grow away from them. His rooms in the rue de Monceau had not ‘learnt their optical catechism’; they were cut through by the note of the yellow armchair. They were congeries of different things to pick up and handle. But I feel that Charles is becoming grander. He is now called ‘the opulent Charles’ by a Parisian wit. There is less to touch here: you would not dare to pick up those Meissen vases in their bronze mounts and hand them round for inspection. The furnishings of these rooms are described by a critic after Charles’s death as the very best of their kind: they are ‘pompeux, ingénieux et un peu froids’, grandiose, clever and a little cold. Cold is right, I think, as I surreptitiously reach a hand over a velvet rope to stroke the arm of an Empire fauteuil in the Musée Nissim de Camondo in the rue de Monceau, for research.

I find it harder to imagine the vitrine opening and a hand havering over the netsuke in indecision between a scramble of ivory puppies and a girl soaping herself in a wooden tub. I’m not sure they fit in at all.

In their new house the brothers gave larger dinner parties and soirées. On 2nd February 1893 Le Gaulois records one in its column ‘Mondanités’. There was a ‘Very brilliant five o’clock last evening, at Messrs Charles and Ignace Ephrussi, in honour of the princess Mathilde,’ it records:

Her Imperial Highness, accompanied by the Baronesse de Galbois, arrived at the splendid salons of the avenue d’Iéna, where more than 200 people, the upper echelons of the Parisian and foreign world, gathered together.

Let us mention at random:

Comtesse d’Haussonville, in black satin; Comtesse von Moltke-Hvitfeldt, also in black; Princesse de Léon, in dark blue velvet; the Duchesse de Morny in black velvet; Comtesse de Louis de Talleyrand-Périgord, in black satin; Comtesse Jean de Ganay, in red and black; Baronesse Gustave de Rothschild, in black velvet . . . Comtesse Louise Cahen d’Anvers, in mauve velvet; Mme Edgard Stern, in green grey; Mme Manuel de Yturbe, née Diaz, in lilac velvet; Baronesse James de Rothschild, in black; Comtesse de Camondo, née Cahen, in grey satin; Baronesse Benoist-Méchin, in black velvet and fur, etc.

Among the men, notable men included:

The minister of Sweden, Prince Orloff, Prince de Sagan, Prince Jean Borghèse, Marquis de Modène, Messrs Forain, Bonnat, Roll, Blanche, Charles Yriarte Schlumberger, etc.

Mme Léon Fould and Mme Jules Ephrussi did the honours in greeting the guests, one in a gown of deep grey and the other in clear grey.

The elegant apartments were much appreciated, notably the grand salon Louis XVI, where one admired the head of king Midas, a marvel by Luca della Robbia, and Charles Ephrussi’s rooms, of the most pure Empire.

The reception was very lively, and there was a very beautiful