Composer, pianist, world’s greatest organist (according to Liszt), conductor, expert on ancient music, playwright, poet, philosopher, caricaturist, mathematician, botanist, astronomer and archaeologist. Was there anything that Camille Saint-Saëns couldn’t turn his hand to? Not for nothing did Berlioz – who was an admirer – write: “He knows everything, but lacks inexperience.” One field, however, in which Saint- Saëns must be counted a novice, was in his relationships with women.

Camille Saint-Saëns in 1900 by Pierre Petit

Not that he lacked exposure. Born in 1835, he was brought up in Paris by his domineering mother and an elderly great aunt who taught him piano. A prodigious talent, he was performing at five, made his professional debut at 10, and was admitted to the Conservatoire at the tender age of 13. By 23, he was organist at Paris’s prestigious La Madeleine and he soon gained a reputation as one of France’s most accomplished musicians (Hans von Bülow called him “the greatest musical mind” of the age).

Holding out as a bachelor until he was approaching 40, against the wishes of his mother Clémence, he finally took the marital plunge in 1875, wedding Marie-Laure Truffot, the 19-year-old...