Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares by James Lovegrove

business was.
    Holmes handed over his card, and the manservant invited us in to wait in the hallway while he went to see “whether monsieur le vicomte is receiving the visitors today”.
    The villa’s interior was decorated tastefully but expensively and exhibited a cleanliness that matched the neatness of its exterior. It was just the sort of house I would have loved to call my own, although at that time I never in my wildest dreams would have been able to afford it. A GP’s salary by itself, irregular and unreliable as it was, was far too meagre to cover the mortgage, and my accounts of my adventures with Holmes, though popular, had yet to make me my fortune.
    Yet somehow, for all the pleasantness of the surroundings, my unease would still not abate. Perhaps it was the fact of knowing that the master of this household frequented the Abbess’s brothel – and no doubt other places like it – where he took his delight with girls who were not even yet fully adult. Children of such a young age participating in the world’s oldest profession were not uncommon, but I myself could not fathom how any man could desire them as he might a grown woman. It seemed perversion of the rankest kind.
    The manservant returned and wordlessly ushered us through to a drawing room at the rear.
    Here sat a man in his mid-thirties, with hair artfully combed and curled and a moustache upon which great care and attention had been lavished, its tips teased into points with the aid of liberal quantities of beeswax pomade. A neat, straight scar traversed the left-hand side of his face, from cheekbone to jaw, but in spite of that, and a pendulous nose and somewhat too full lips, he was handsome, one might even say rakishly so.
    Giving a low, straight-backed bow, he introduced himself as Thibault, the Vicomte de Villegrand.
    “And,” said he, “I have the pleasure of meeting the incomparable Sherlock Holmes himself? In person? Why, this is an honour. Your renown has reached us even in France. Your methods, your prowess – formidable.” He turned to me. “You, of course, must be Dr Watson, his faithful chronicler. I salute you too, monsieur le docteur . Without you, the world would know nothing of this mighty Englishman and his achievements. You have done us all a tremendous service, sharing your accounts of Monsieur Holmes’s cases, and relating them with such skill too. Together, the pair of you represent all that is great about Great Britain. You are shining beacons of your nation.”
    It would be hard not to be unmoved by such praise. However, there was something a little unctuous about it. It was excessive and, I could not help but feel, insincere. And of course, knowing what I knew about him, I was hardly inclined to warm to the man.
    “Please, take a seat,” said de Villegrand. “Make yourselves at home. Benoît!”
    The gloomy-looking manservant stiffened. “À votre service .”
    “Tell Aurélie to bring us refreshments. Some sherry, I think. That is a very English aperitif to take of an afternoon, non?”
    While we waited for our drinks to arrive, de Villegrand regaled us with positive opinions of our country, of which he had many. He rhapsodised about Britain’s literary heritage from Shakespeare to Dickens, her empire (“on which ‘the sun never sets’, isn’t that what they say?”), her vitality, her prosperity, and last but not least her queen, whose long and exemplary reign, he said, almost made him regret that his own people had done away with their monarchy and embraced republicanism. When he began to wax lyrical about the British climate, that was when I began to think that, in some obscure Gallic manner, he was actually mocking us. I have never met a Frenchman, before or since, who had anything good to say about the weather in this island kingdom. I have never, for that matter, met a native Briton who did anything but moan about the rain, wind and fog that beset our homeland.
    Holmes must have felt likewise, for he