On the first of February 1892 Winnaretta received the news that her marriage to Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard had been officially annulled by the Curia in Rome. Now that the last impediments to her freedom were removed, she had only to wait for the completion of the newly constructed atelier and the composition by Fauré to make her official re-entry into the musical and aristocratic salon circles. But she was not able to celebrate her good news just yet. In addition to the financial problems with Carriès, and the consequent delay to the completion of the atelier, Winnaretta had another issue to confront: her social status. She had once again begun signing her letters Winnaretta Singer. Now merely an ex-princess, Winnaretta risked a descent from the upper crust back into the ranks of the socialclimbing bourgeoisie. Could she still draw the great ladies of the Faubourg St.-Germain all the way out to her home in Passy? Would her association with the musical circles of the avant-garde help or hinder her quest for social ascendance?

Let us leave Winnaretta temporarily, sitting in her mansion in the 16th arrondissement, mulling over her problems with unfinished projects, artistic crises, home decoration, and social position, and travel a short distance to the 8th arrondissement, in the quarter behind the Champs-Élysées. There, on that same first of February 1892, in a small apartment at 39 rue Washington, Prince Edmond de Polignac was contemplating some of the same issues besetting Winnaretta. Fifty-seven years old, all he had ever yearned for was to be a composer, recognized for his original music and his iconoclastic musical ideas. An inveterate dreamer, chronically inept with money, the victim of charlatans who had preyed on his credulity by luring him into “get-rich-quick” schemes, Edmond has recently lost the last of his small inheritance in the stock market. Earlier that week, his few remaining possessions had been seized by debt collectors, and he sat in the empty apartment, burrowed in the one remaining armchair, wrapped in a shawl, his head covered with a knitted cap.