Eventually in 1723, aged 40, he moved to Paris to see his treatise through the press. And there he stayed, for the rest of his long life. He fell in with a rich tax farmer, and became a member of his household for 30 years. At the age of 50 he tried his hand at opera for the first time, and the result, Hippolyte et Aricie, was a masterpiece. Two years later he composed an opera-ballet entitled Les Indes Galantes (roughly, “The Polite Indies”), one of the pieces featured at this year’s Proms. The word “Indies” here is stretched to include Turkey, Persia, Peru and North America, each of which is given its own ballet sequence.