That, said Adler, is when Robinson and her family decided to "turn the con."
Robinson told Grossman that she wanted her children back, impossible with him there. Knowing he had nowhere to go, Adler and her husband offered a deal:
If he'd leave, they would pay $12,000 for six months' rent at Mill Creek Farm, the Bucks County bed-and-breakfast. As a sweetener, they offered another $12,000 for art supplies.
Grossman accepted.
"Without buying him off," Adler said, "I don't know how we would have gotten rid of him."
A Bucks County idyll
On one hand, the arrival of Luc Sonnet in late December 2006 meant income at a slow time of year for James Brame, Mill Creek's owner.
On the other hand, Brame said, "I told him at one point I would be happy to refund all the money he had not yet used if he'd get the hell out."
That parting wouldn't come until June 4, with a moving truck and a police cruiser sharing the driveway.
In the interim, things on the farm got weird.
Sonnet - the only name by which Brame knew him - was given the Jefferson Room. It is one of five units in a colonial-era manor house on the 14-acre estate, which features stables, a pool, a tennis court, a pond - and a 44-by-20-foot workroom where the newly arrived artist wished to create a gallery.
Sonnet was to produce, display and sell his art there. Brame was to get a cut, although how big became a point of bitter dispute.
Today, there is only an empty, wainscoted room looking out on a pasture, with ceilings and walls freshly painted and the floor newly carpeted in beige - a project that, Brame said, cost more than $10,000.
"It's all here for Mr. Sonnet," he said.
But Mr. Sonnet never completed any paintings to put in it. By the time he left, he had more than a dozen large canvases here and there, Brame said, bearing only preliminary brushstrokes.
Instead of painting, the innkeeper said, he spent most of his time holed up in his unkempt room, which Brame had agreed to wire for high-speed Internet access. When seen on the grounds, Brame said, he skulked around slump-shouldered, a cell phone ever pressed to his ear.
A stream of female visitors came and went, disappearing into his room "to do whatever it was they did," Brame observed. "He said he specialized in nude photography."
Sometimes he marketed his services online as "Luc Sonnet Photography."
Emily Van Loon, a college student and model in Monroe, La., said he contacted her online at her MySpace.com page and by phone, inviting her to a shoot at the farm.
