Bowman seemed to know the menu intimately. “You’ll never go wrong with the house specialties here,” he advised. I put myself in his hands and ordered what he suggested—a seafood sausage to start, and then a ragout of pigeon.

“And for wines, what do you think? Let’s start with a bottle of Meursault ‘Les Luchets,’ 1987. And with the pigeon, a nice Burgundy.” He scanned the list. “A 1985 Vosne-Romanée, I would say.”

My head was spinning. Bowman had just spent three hundred dollars of Philip Sellinger’s money on the wines alone. He looked as happy as a man could possibly be. I don’t know what I had expected from Bowman. He was such a senior correspondent, such a legend among younger people at the paper, that he had always been a kind of cardboard cutout for me. What I hadn’t fathomed was his raw charm, the way he drew you irresistibly into his conspiracy of good food, wine and talk.

When the sommelier had poured the wine, Bowman lifted his glass in my direction. “Here’s to the Paris bureau chief of The New York Mirror. You have what is quite possibly the best job in the world, and you’ve done brilliantly with it. I hope you’re enjoying it.”

“I’m having fun,” I answered, “but I won’t be unhappy when the silver carriage turns back into a pumpkin. Celebrity and journalism don’t coexist very well.” That was the truth, and I wanted to be honest with Bowman that night, to connect, to establish a relationship.

“Enjoy it, Eric. You wrote a great story. A bigger story, maybe, than you realize.”

“What do you mean? I’m not following you.”

Bowman looked at his glass. “This ’87 is actually very good, isn’t it? Jean-Claude only gives it a ‘thirteen’ on his vintage chart, but I think it’s better than the ’88, which gets a ‘sixteen.’ De gustibus, non est disputandum. Am I right?”

I had no views whatsoever on the relative merits of the ’87 versus the ’88. I asked my question again. “What did you mean about the story being bigger than I realized? It feels pretty big already.”

“Hmmm,” he said, turning his gaze from the glass of Meursault back toward me. “Let me ask you a question about that story, if you don’t mind. It was obvious to any sensitive reader that you were in possession of a telephone intercept from the National Security Agency. That’s about the most sensitive information the U.S. government can obtain. The mere fact that we can intercept internal communications in France is a very big secret in itself, I suspect. Which raises the obvious question: Why was that transcript given to you?”