René put himself in the middle of everything, bouncing on his toes with the pleasure of the gathering of people around him. He turned to me constantly to make sure I felt welcome in his home. My eyes kept being drawn to his thick, lush, dark gray hair. That a man in his mid-sixties should have such an amazing head of hair seemed symbolic of his love of life. I had never seen anything like the vivacity of his dark eyes or the energy he exuded: flirtatious, joking, eager for everyone to be happy, showering compliments around him like sunshine on that unremittingly rainy day.

Remembering Claudine’s query about wolves, I concentrated on not doing anything barbaric and on getting through the first course. The first time I ate one of Claudine’s meals, the first course had been a salad she asked me to mix. Enough said.

The second time I ate one of Claudine’s meals, she had served sausage. I had comfortably finished half the slices of it on my plate when Sébastien held up a sausage-laden piece of bread and regarded it amorously. “Mom, this is delicious. What’s in it?”

He wanted to know what was in sausage? Was he crazy or just trying to sabotage me? I turned to glare at him but then remembered: the first time he had spoken to me, he had described the contents of blood sausage. He was worse than crazy; he was French. In his sanest moments, he would not only want to know, discuss, and think about what was in his sausage, but salivate over the details.

“Oh, that? I think it might be horse. It’s horse, isn’t it, Jean-Charles?” Claudine checked with her husband.

Jean-Charles did, indeed, believe it was. Yum, yum, yum. Nothing quite so good as horse.

Beauty, screamed my next bite of sausage as I bit into it, Black Stallion.

This Feast of Kings was my third meal prepared by Claudine, and I already knew what the first course was: smoked salmon. I hate fish. I’ve hated it since the day I was born, and I used to have to eat it raw all the time in Tahiti, where people kept serving me poisson cru as a special treat every time I went anywhere for dinner. What kind of culture serves innocent guests raw fish, I ask you? What kind of culture serves innocent guests horse, for that matter?

The slice of smoked salmon Claudine put on my plate flopped all the way across it and hung limply off the edges. The appalling odor of salmon rushed up at me.

I took a deep breath and dug in, smiling and chatting while I worked my way through it. I only had three stomach-wrenching bites to go when Sébastien glanced over at my plate. “Mom! You didn’t give Laura salmon, did you? Fish always makes her want to throw up.”