Following a cherished ritual, she would open the bedroom window wide and dreamily let her white muslin robe slip off her body and drift to the parquet floor. Then she would recline on the old sofa, which was loosely draped with Indian fabric, and for hours, sometimes the entire night, she would offer her nude body to the moonlight. Regardless of the season, Marie-France Lavoisier was faithful to this sensuous moon-bath rite. “It’s an extraordinary way to renew yourself,” she would explain to the incredulous lovers she abandoned in her bed on those nights. She had taken up this practice years earlier, during a trip to Africa—Togo, to be precise—where a tribal chief had enchanted her with his lectures on the enormous and unknown powers of the Earth’s satellite. Since then, this tenacious daughter of wine merchants from the Charente region had sworn by the sacred cycles of the moon. She was quiet and reflective during one phase, dynamic, potent, and even opportunistic the next.
