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Chapters (45)
  1. Cover
  2. Blame Iton Paris
  3. Copyright Notice
  4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  5. Book One
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-one
  27. Book Two
  28. Twenty-two
  29. Twenty-three
  30. Twenty-four
  31. Twenty-five
  32. Twenty-six
  33. Twenty-seven
  34. Twenty-eight
  35. Twenty-nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-one
  38. Thirty-two
  39. Thirty-three
  40. Thirty-four
  41. Thirty-five
  42. Thirty-six
  43. Thirty-seven
  44. Thirty-eight
  45. Thirty-nine

Oddly, a few days later Titi called. I flinched and nearly hung up when he identified himself on the phone, but caught myself. If he didn’t believe my story about Indy accidentally stepping on the hang-up button, it would just make things worse. Like the time I hid in the apartment and pretended I wasn’t there while an enormous, rugby-muscled man rang the doorbell insistently for half an hour, and he turned out to be Sébastien’s father. I discovered this because Sébastien finally showed up from work and let his father in, making it pretty hard to hide the fact that I’d been there the whole time. Boy, that had been an awkward evening. But trust me, Sébastien’s father does not inspire door-opening confidence in a female home alone who doesn’t know who he is.

“Our village is having its fête the weekend before you leave,” Titi said. “You and Sébastien will come, won’t you? It can be your bon voyage party.”

Claudine called to repeat the invitation a couple of days later, worrying me by still being on speaking terms with me. It didn’t seem normal. “You can’t leave France without participating in a village festival,” she said. “You’ve got to come.”

I swallowed the bait.

Bruno and Titi actually lived in Paris; but some eighteen months before, they had bought a stone farmhouse centuries old not far from Paris, in a minuscule village near the beautiful medieval town of Provins. On one of our first visits out there a few months before, we had ridden a slow, rattling old train to Provins. Bruno and Titi picked us up at the station and took us on a tour of the city before we left. Gray and covered with moss and lichen, intact ramparts framed two sides of the old part of Provins, and bright banners hung over the gateway. We walked along the old defense ditch at the base of towers of all shapes—round, square, octagonal—and then climbed up them to look down at the town. Inside the walls, little shops sold honey and spécialités à la rose, rose-flavored local specialties whose recipes had been brought back from Arabia by Crusading knights. Kids roared up and down the cobblestoned streets on their mopeds, girls clinging on behind the boys.