“When I came back to Washington in the mid-1970s, something was different. I wasn’t going to be a roving wild man anymore. I met Mara, and she got pregnant, and I got married, and that was fine. I was ready to settle down, and she was a great beauty. The talk of the town. Suddenly we had a life to support. She wanted to entertain, so we needed a fancy house in Georgetown. She wanted to raise perfect children, so we had private-school bills. She wanted to take holidays in fashionable places, so there were travel bills. It cost a lot of money, and it was very hard for me to tell her to slow down, to remind her that I was just a journalist.

“So we began to operate close to the edge financially. You don’t understand what that’s like, do you, Truell? You’re a kid. The biggest expense you’ve got to worry about is dinner after a movie on Saturday night. But when you’re married and have kids, the bills add up. I went to Sellinger after I had been back home awhile and told him the numbers didn’t work—I was going to have to quit unless he could find some way to supplement my pay. He did his best, but it wasn’t enough.

“And then one spring about fifteen years ago, I did something stupid. I was having dinner with my friend Salan in Washington, and I was complaining about my midlife crisis. That’s always a tip-off for spooks, you know, when middle-aged men start whining about how tough things are. I told him I was broke, and that Mara was demanding that we go somewhere exciting that summer. Maybe I was asking for it. Probably I was. That night Salan mentioned that a friend of his had a place on the Riviera, at the Cap d’Antibes, that would be empty for part of August, and maybe I would like to use it.

“So I said sure. I figured it would be a little condo near the beach. But it was an estate on a hill near the Hôtel du Cap, overlooking the sea. It had a pool, and a guesthouse, and a half-dozen servants who came with the place. Mara and I were there for most of the month. All our neighbors were oil sheiks and movie stars and zillionaires. I made a feeble attempt to pay when we left, but Salan’s friend wouldn’t hear of it, and who was I kidding? To rent that place for the month of August, for real, would have cost a hundred thousand dollars. So I just said thank you.