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Back Blame It on Paris
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

You’re right, he’s cute,” my friend Adela agreed as soon as she saw him, when baby sister Tory was long gone on a train down to Madrid and probably still snickering. I just hope somebody fed her blood sausage while she was in Spain, that’s all I can say. I had had the best intentions about not going back to Le Relais, but a few nights later it was my turn to pick the restaurant, and Paris has such limited choice in restaurants I could only think of one.

I was not flirting with the waiter, as I had to keep telling un-perceptive people. I am not given to pursuing stunningly gorgeous men who could date supermodels. I’m just not that into hurting myself. However, now that I had discovered Le Relais, I did think it was a great place to eat, with great food, a great view, and even a convenient location, if you carried assault rifles and could get enough similarly armed people to go with you. The assault rifles were absurdly hard to obtain in France, but living in the Cité Universitaire, at least I had plenty of friends.

Some of them were crazy, though. Adela was a case in point. “So ask him out,” Adela suggested for the tenth time. She was starting to sound like a broken record with that idea, but then, I’d heard insane people could be obsessive. On this occasion, we were standing outside the fastidiously elegant displays of Fauchon at the place de la Madeleine. Little tartes stretched out in the window before us, pristinely perfect: glazed with orange or powdered with sifted white sugar around an imposing F stencil that revealed the cake beneath. Over our heads, the trademark Fauchon pink canopy sheltered us from the fine drizzle of the dark evening. Behind us, the Acropolis-style Église de la Madeleine dominated the place with its Corinthian columns. Cars circled around it in a pattern of red and white lights and blinking yellow turn signals, the lights glistening off the damp pavement. Napoléon had originally commissioned Madeleine as a Temple to His Glory (Napoléon’s, not God’s); the structure had been consecrated to God instead after his exile but had remained ambiguous in appearance ever since.