Since Sébastien obviously realized that, I had to assume she was mentioning it for my sake. “I wish we could have a marriage in France, too,” I said. How could anyone not want a celebration where you wheeled champagne out in wheelbarrows and danced on a wood floor thrown together in the middle of a garden? But a guilt trip over Pierrette was not enough to make me want to break my own mother’s heart. My parents were more than two decades older than Sébastien’s parents, and they were simply not going to get on a plane and fly to some foreign country at their age.

“Do you?” Claudine beamed at me. “Bruno, why don’t you ask the mayor if we could borrow this dance floor for the wedding? It would be perfect for it.”

“A French wedding on top of a U.S. one would just be too complicated,” I said. And we didn’t have any money. Nine months of an instructor’s salary was not going to redress the past year’s financial catastrophe, let alone give us the resources for two big weddings.

Bruno nodded thoughtfully. “Well, if you decide you want to do it here, you’re welcome to use the farmhouse. That goes without saying.”

“And we’ll all help,” Claudine said. “But you know that.”

The auto-da-fé note to this village gathering, two suckling pigs impaled on spits, rotated gently over coals. The pigs looked very much like the nursing children they had been a couple of days ago, little feet curled up under their chins, an iron rod coming up their anuses and out of their mouths, flesh orange-black from a night of roasting. Crowds flocked to this infanticide. “How cute!” they exclaimed. “They look delicious! Almost done, do you think?”

“That’s a good way to feed a lot of people,” Bruno suggested. “If you wanted to have a wedding here, we could roast cochons au lait like that. Or lamb.”

“No,” Titi said immediately. “It takes forever. You have to think about who would watch over it while we’re all at the ceremony.”

A shadow fell on their faces. “Papa always did that,” Claudine murmured. René had been too sick to come to this village festival, although it was the kind of thing he loved. She tilted her head up to the sky and gazed into blue. “He would have loved to dance you around at your wedding,” she murmured to me. “He really loves you.”