The French archaeologist and statesman Théodore Reinach spent his family’s banking inheritance to live in exotic magnificence. In the early 1900s, he commissioned a house on a French Riviera peninsula with rooms frescoed in sea creatures and mosaicked with deities — all based on ancient buildings that he had documented on Delos island in Greece.

Mr. Reinach’s property, Villa Kérylos, has been open for decades (in nonpandemic times) as a museum in Beaulieu-sur-Mer near Nice. In recent years, it has also served as a muse for the writer and historian Adrien Goetz. His novel, “Villa of Delirium” (New Vessel Press), blends fictitious characters’ experiences at the Reinach estate with historically accurate descriptions of the building’s evolution and the occupants’ accomplishments and fates.

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Théodore and his wife, Fanny — in real life, and in Mr. Goetz/Leccia’s telling — lived near equally privileged relatives from the Ephrussi and Rothschild families, who built a pink Florentine palazzo on their patch of Mediterranean waterfront. The engineer Gustave Eiffel,1 whose nearby Italianate house is wreathed in balconies, traveled in the same cultured circles as the Villa Kérylos’s Jewish architect, Emmanuel Pontremoli.

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• 1. Mr. Leccia remembers taking drawing lessons from Mr. Eiffel and delightedly watching Mr. Pontremoli and Mr. Reinach ponder design choices for the house. The book describes the architect and the owner obsessing over window latches, tableware modeled after archaeological finds and streamlined blond furniture “with turned feet, bronze scrolls, or huge nails, to give an impression of asceticism and refinement.”