“You don’t know what these village priests are like here, Laura,” Sébastien said. “He’s eighty-two.”

“We’re already married by the Catholic Church. What would he try to do, invalidate the sacrament?”

“Probably,” Claudine said. “Let’s just go with the baptized story, all right?”

The meeting with the baker was more straightforward. It took us three tries to track her down, but once we did, we had no trouble choosing our pièce montée. Out of the pages and pages of cream puffs she showed us—stuck together in conical towers, Eiffel towers, castles, fishing boats, churches, bells—one design stood out: an old 1920s convertible car. “Jean-Charles,” Sébastien and I said simultaneously. We couldn’t wait to see his face.

Last on the list of meetings was the organist. I had tried my best to get a specific address out of her when we had caught her for a split-second between baptisms. “Oh, it’s easy to find,” she said. “St.-Jude-Vieille-Maison, right by the church.”

“Could you give me the street name and number just in case?”

A slender, tense woman somewhere in her late thirties, she looked at me as if I had posed an indiscreet question. “It’s right by the church. St.-Jude-Vieille-Maison.”

“Did she tell you where she lives?” our curé double-checked when he spoke with us.

“Oh, do you know?” I asked, relieved. “Where?”

“It’s easy. The house right by the church, in St.-Jude-VieilleMaison.”

St.-Jude-Vieille-Maison did not appear in our big yellow book of road maps, but the book did show a St. Jude and a Vieilles Maisons (plural), although not exactly side by side. Still, the priest and the organist had considered their directions obvious enough. Optimistically, we set off.

The narrow départemental roads twisted and wound through fields and forests, never wider than a single car. Fortunately, population was sparse enough that this narrowness didn’t present a problem as often as it could have; I had only seen the aftermaths of two head-on collisions in our errands so far. While Sébastien drove, I took to peering far ahead over the fields for any advance warning of a car heading our direction.

I also tried to keep an eye out for all villages on the horizon that could possibly be the organist’s. When we were lucky, the intersection of one road with another would be marked with a white arrow and the name of the next village in each direction. We therefore hoped that if we managed to get within a couple of kilometers of St.-Jude-Vieille-Maison, an arrow would point us the rest of the way. If a village happened to number its population in the three figures, we sometimes got lucky enough to see its name appear on the white arrow signs a little early in the game, perhaps two or three intersections in advance. St.-Jude-Vieille-Maison wasn’t such a village.