They didn’t have to stick their heads out far for Jean-Charles to spot a live one. In fact, they barely had to start looking moist. Staring down at a slit of flesh starting to open, I had a brief, flashing image of the female sexual organs but decided I really didn’t want to go there.

Jean-Charles gave the snails about ten minutes, then dug his hands in. I was impressed. I mean, I, personally, would have used gloves.

He paused, his hands full of snails, one of which curled immediately around his index finger. “You are going to help, aren’t you?”

A pair of gloves didn’t seem to go with that question. “Er . . . um . . . yes. I was just trying to get a good idea of how it was done first, that’s all. Wouldn’t want to accidentally mix up a live snail with a dead one.”

I had a strong suspicion Jean-Charles was giving me a gift. But it was a challenging gift. Could I take his culture straight, undiluted for foreigners? And if I could, here was a shot of it in all its fascinating richness.

I inspected the snails carefully and then selected the biggest, brownest one, with the cleanest shell, and delicately closed my fingertips around it. I flinched. My choice had gotten slimed on the far side by a fellow escargot. I placed it as quickly as possible into a second crate, where the live ones went; but having lost my snail-slime virginity, I felt I might as well keep trying to impress my future in-laws and so continued picking out snails.

Sébastien, whose fault this was because he had been worth changing my life, wandered into the backyard at that moment and spotted what was happening. He grinned and sat down on the bench to watch, a safe distance from the proceedings. I glared at him. He stretched out his legs and blew me a kiss.

“Now,” Jean-Charles announced, once all the live snails had been triaged into the new crate, “we’ve got to make them drool.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Drool,” he said. “Baver. You know, vomit their insides out.”

“Oh, do we?”

Jean-Charles tsked and shook his head. “Don’t want to eat that slime.”

To accomplish the vomiting part, he propped the crate at an angle against the cherry tree and sprinkled a healthy handful or two of gros sel or rock salt over the snails, then splashed them again with a little water. Pretty soon, foam emerged from the shells, followed by the snails themselves, and last their drool. When Jean-Charles lifted the crate fifteen minutes later, snail drool dangled through its holes like multitudinous strings of pizza cheese, although oddly enough, less appetizing—at least to me. Sébastien would later have some things to say about American pizza commercials that would make me realize all was relative.