The year is 1899.

Paris here was a city caught between contradictions. Gas lamps burned against the night, their glow softened by the haze of cigarette smoke and chimney soot that lingered above cobbled streets. Horse-drawn carriages rattled over uneven cobbled streets, carrying aristocrats in polished finery while beggars lingered in shadows. Cafés spilled golden light onto the pavement, where poets, painters, and drunks alike debated truth and beauty until dawn.

The air was restless, full of the hum of voices and music that seemed to rise from every corner of Montmartre, where art and poverty embraced in equal measure.

At the heart of it all stood the Moulin Rouge, a temple of excess beneath its spinning red windmill, its blades slicing the Parisian night sky. The facade blazed with colored bulbs and painted banners, champagne, laughter, and sin. Inside, velvet curtains and gilded balconies framed a world where reality blurred with fantasy: can-can dancers twirled in a storm of lace and stockings, sequins catching the light like shattered stars. The music was thunderous, laughter louder, and the air smelled of perfume and wine.

It was a place where the poor could feel rich for a night, where the rich came to drown their boredom, and where dreamers, writers, lovers, and fools alike, believed, if only for a few hours, that a feeling like this could conquer everything.