The story starts on the coast of Normandy, at Granville, where the young Christian grew up on a clifftop overlooking the sea and surrounded by the roses of his beloved mother, Madeleine. These splendors would become his main sources of inspiration. And then there was the Paris of the Belle Epoque! The Haussmannian architecture and the elegance of the day's fashions provoked in him a fundamental desire to create. But, as a member of a wealthy industrialist family, how could such a dream ever become a reality?