“It’s almost eleven on a Tuesday night,” I said. I was feeling some injustice here, given that Titi and Bruno’s little village didn’t even have a restaurant several days a week, nor any bar within forty minutes, the reason they maintained a very good cellar. “Besides, didn’t people want to eat more than anything?”

They all looked at me.

“I guess we could go back into Atlanta,” I said.

Atlanta was an hour’s drive. The women of the group would unite in a block so cold it would freeze the South Pacific.

“Well,” Jean-Charles said, “there’s always the champagne for the wedding.”

“No!” I jumped up. “You got it unbroken from Paris to Milan to Atlanta, you got it through customs—how do you guys do that?—sorry, the point is, it’s not going to get drunk now.”

A very unhappy group of French males followed the women into the Waffle House. Our party took up three red vinyl booths, and Jean-Charles, Titi, Bruno, and Martine’s husband Jacky ended up together at one of them. Although the significant others of all men were present, appearances suggested four unattached French males were in the room, and our waitress took an instant liking to their table. In her forties, with hair only starting to lose its sprayed stiffness now toward the end of her shift, she leaned forward and tried to offer them a friendly welcome: “Soooowowloooyaaaaaaaaaaallstaaaaaaathotel?” Unfortunately, they had studied an archaic version of English in school that had consonants in it and could only gape at her.

“So how long are y’all staying at the hotel?” she repeated to me when she got to the only table with someone who spoke her language.

“At least through Sunday.”

She smiled. “Well, you have to tell them to come back.”

“Could you bring us some grits?” Sébastien asked eagerly. “A big bowl.”

“Grits?” Claudine repeated.

“You just have to try it,” said Sébastien, who had taken to grits with enthusiasm. “It’s a Southern specialty.”

Once the giant bowl arrived, we passed it from table to table so everyone could try some of its contents. Busy showing our table and the table behind us how to eat grits, Sébastien and I didn’t realize we had left the four men to blissful experimentation. They dug in happily, apparently quite pleased with the dish, and only paused when their server returned.

She gazed down with the deep calm of a career waitress. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone put steak sauce on grits before.”

They smiled up at her, clueless. She reached across their table for the sugar and proffered it, still speaking as if they could understand her: “This is what I put on it.”