The four acts of a fictional French opera reference specific French folk stories: The Beast of Gévaudan, the tale of Bluebeard, the Comte de St Germain, and the Elephant of the Bastille. I imagined the constructed paintings as ‘sets’ for the hypothetical drama, drawn from folk stories but not illustrative of them. As a child I was given an old book of fairy tales dating from the 1930s, memorably illustrated in a Beardsley-esque style. Although I did not know it at the time, several of the stories were derived from folk tales interpreted by the French author Charles Perrault, and what has stayed with me was their blending of darkly “gothic” narratives with luminous French Baroque settings. This combination of dark and light that I find so fascinating seems to me to be uniquely Gallic, and distinct from the more earthy “gothick” that developed in English and German culture. Each “set” is constructed around a staircase in the form of a double helix, which is based on a beautiful cross-section drawing by Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, an 18 th century architect of the French Enlightenment.