I didn’t realize my error until an hour or so later, when Martine wandered up, plate in hand. “This is delicious. Who says Americans can’t cook? That was a wonderful meal!”

I looked past her and saw that the other French did, indeed, look quite replete.

“That wasn’t the meal. Those were appetizers. Hors d’oeuvres.”

“Really?” She clutched her stomach, alarmed. “But they covered the whole kitchen table and all of the counters.”

“That’s the main course.” I pointed to David, who had just opened his smoker and was starting to pull briskets out of it. Cameras flashed. All ten French photo albums of the trip contain multiple shots of that moment: the great deck looking over a creek in the heart of a Southern forest, and big David angling in toward the meat, smoke whirling around his head as he pulled great chunks of beef out of black depths.

The men gathered around this scene in deep excitement. “Ooh-la-la,” my sister Anna said triumphantly, listening intently to their conversation. She had her long, kinky-curly blond hair tucked behind her ears and was wearing brand-new white Keds in honor of the guests. She wanted them to know Americans could be classy, too. “See? I understood something. I told you I was good at French in high school.”

In fact, all of my siblings had limbered up their high school French by this time, and the French had limbered up their high school English. These preparations didn’t make for a vast range of conversational possibilities, but they were actually managing quite well as long as everyone kept dodging the gesticulating plates and glasses. It’s hard to communicate in two non-shared languages without using your hands.

I wandered over to the smoker after the feast, to find David deep in explanations of grilling to his French male audience. David’s remnants of high school French concerned mostly pronunciation, which was why he tried so hard to get everyone else to pronounce Say-bas-tee-YON’s name right; but the fact that no one could understand him hadn’t slowed him down.