Moulin, a shopkeeper's son, entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1855 but was unable to afford to continue the lessons and had to become a language teacher in Paris to support himself. He subsequently studied with Auguste-Louis-Marie Ottin and with Antoine-Louis Barye.His bronze statue "A Lucky Find at Pompeii" ("Une Trouvaille à Pompei") (1863) depicts a nude boy with a spade dancing for joy with one leg raised, because he has unearthed a Roman statuette. His nude pose reflects that of the statuette itself, possibly indicating that the statue depicts the excavator "imagining" himself in the original statuette's pose. The statue won a medal at the Paris Salon of 1864 and became his most famous work. The life-size original was bought by the French Government for 7,000 francs and exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in 1867. It stands on a tall pedestal in the Musée d'Orsay alongside Alexandre Falguière's "Winner of the Cockfight" on an adjacent pedestal - another bronze nude dancing boy poised on one leg that had also been exhibited at the 1864 Salon.