I had to admire the English desire to humor natives. The dazed diner stumbled over to the table and actually performed wait service for the ladies.

“No one’s ever going to believe me about this,” I told Sébastien. “They always think I’m exaggerating when I tell these kinds of stories.”

“Well, weird things do seem to happen to you more than anyone else.”

“No, I just like to brag.” I speared a bit of meltingly tender confit de canard. “Other people are more discreet.”

“Yes, not everyone thinks of weird things as some kind of life achievement. Would you like a bite of tripe?”

“Sébastien. There were edible things on the menu, you know.”

“It’s delicious.” He sliced another odd-textured bite and closed his eyes as he chewed. “I don’t know when I’ve had better.”

“Just let me pretend you’re eating something else, all right? Don’t keep telling me what it’s called.”

Freshly appalled at how many things I insisted on missing in life, he went back to his meal.

Our dessert was sweetened crème fraîche and a bowl of lusciously ripe strawberries, by which I don’t mean the American supermarket fruit. Ours needed no extra sugar. Finally, stuffed and replete and desperate to get off those charming little benches, we steeled ourselves to pay the bill.

The task had been beyond many. Several diners had abandoned it altogether, either promising to return the next day or stuffing an approximation of what they owed under their plates. We couldn’t imitate them. I had to have a proper bill to get reimbursed, so we tracked Marcel down at another table, where he had managed to squeeze in with four other diners. The diner crushed to the wall was starting to turn purple.

Marcel paused in his toast to his fellows and got briskly down to business. “Tell me what you ordered.”

“Baked Camembert salad.”

He scrawled a row of zeros on a napkin.

“Andouillette.”

His head snapped up. “Andouillette or andouille?”

“Ah, you’re right, andouille, sorry.”

He shook his head, narrowing his eyes and waving a minatory finger. “Because it’s not the same thing.” He added another row of zeros. The pen wasn’t working properly, so he circled over a few times, tearing the napkin.

“Confit de canard.”

He nodded sagely. More zeros.

“Strawberries and crème fraîche for both of us.”

000×2. He carefully totaled up the zeros. “Oh, and then that bottle of wine you had. Let’s say three hundred francs. That suit you?”

I looked at Sébastien, who is in charge of handling his more difficult countrymen when necessary. He laughed, although I’m pretty sure I detected a note of alarm in there somewhere. “We’ve got to have a real bill.”

Marcel sat back, dismayed at our impractical behavior. “That’s going to cost you more.”

“That may be, but we’ve got to have it.”