David Todd: The Vile and the Louche (opens in new tab)

The Marquis de Morès was an extraordinary villain in an epoch crowded with the vile and the louche. After he killed a Jewish officer, Captain Armand Mayer, in a duel in 1892, a prosecutor seeking his conviction for murder drew a portrait that captured Morès’s scrappy life of endless reinvention: ‘Cuirassier in [the elite military school of] Saint-Cyr, meat merchant in Chicago, engineer in Tonkin, reserve second lieutenant in the dragoons, nightstick-major in the streets, marquis in the salons...