French painter, architect and writer Maurice Tranchant de Lunel was BOTD in 1869. Born in La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, Île-de-France to a mercantile family, little is known of his early life. He is thought to have attended Oxford University in England, where he befriended the writer Rudyard Kipling, returning to Paris in 1888 to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian. He worked as an architect and watercolourist, travelling extensively in French colonies including Senegal, Guinea, Morocco and Indochina (now Vietnam), inspiring much of his later work. Fascinated by the culture and architecture of Morocco – and the opportunities for sex with local adolescent boys – he settled in Fez in 1911. The following year, the French colonial government appointed him director of the Service des antiquités, beaux-arts et monuments historiques in Morocco, tasked with preserving historical monuments and antiquities in the region. He is best known as the architect of the Grande Mosquée de Paris (Grand Mosque of Paris), originally commissioned as a memorial to Muslim soldiers who died during World War One, and opened as a mosque and cultural centre in 1926. He also published a series of books on Moroccan and Algerian history and a series of children’s stories, song lyrics and proverbs. Like many homosexual expatriates, he developed an addiction to opium, falling in love with his 16 year-old drug dealer Marcel Khill, whom he introduced to friend and fellow addict Jean Cocteau. He retired to the Côte d’Azur in southern France, dying in 1932 aged 63.