We eventually reached a compromise. Among all the other things we still had to do, we would make six hundred kebabs, twelve enormous bowls of six different salads, half a dozen different roasts, and hundreds of interesting tidbits as appetizers. Fortunately, half the desserts were ready, and the other half were being brought by the baker. It took another two hours into the night to calculate the exact quantities needed of beef, lamb, chicken, pork, turkey, haddock, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, mushrooms, carrots, cabbages, prunes, zucchini, pineapple, melons, grapefruit, celery, radishes, broccoli, cauliflower, and wheels of cheese. At which point Sue and Dwayne had still not shown up.

“I think Claudine and I will head back to Paris tonight and go to the market from there,” Jean-Charles said.

“If you see a car broken down on the side of any road on your way in, stop and check, okay?” I said.

They didn’t see one, but about half an hour after they left and everyone trooped, in various stages of sobriety, up to bed, a car crept down the circular gravel drive and stopped before the green gate with its cardboard sign, “Laura and Sébastien Are Here. Push Hard to Enter.”

It was 2:00 A.M. The house was pitch-black. Everyone was asleep up narrow, worn, wooden stairs that could be reached only through a door some distance from the main one.

“We came in,” Sue said, when I found them asleep in their car at seven the next morning. “But we didn’t know how to find anyone, and we were afraid it might not even be the right house, so we went back and slept in the car.” Her bright red Annie curls were as crushed as it was possible for them to be, and freckles stood out on her pale face. The inside of their car still smelled new, fresh from the rental, but it had been entirely littered with chocolate wrappers.

“What happened?”

“It took us five hours to get out of Paris, although we rented the car at the Orly airport so that we wouldn’t ever have to drive near Paris. I don’t know how it happened. We hauled all our luggage from the hotel to the Métro, down to Orly, and through Orly to the car rental place, just to avoid Paris traffic; and we must have driven past our hotel twenty times.”

“I think Sue started crying about the tenth time,” Dwayne, the driver, said reflectively. His wavy brown hair had held up overnight in the car, but his freckles looked as prominent as Sue’s against his pallor, and his eyes had deep circles under them.

“And we ran out of the chocolate from that A la petite fabrique shop you showed us the fifteenth time. But we didn’t want to stop for more just when we might be making progress.”

“I have serious logical issues with French road signs,” Dwayne said. “Serious ones.”