After a moment’s hesitation, Michel agreed. By the time he had walked across town, stopping briefly to peer into the Roman theater and arena, his nephew appeared to have convened the entire quartier: an instant celebration, champagne corks popping like strings of firecrackers as Michel was pulled in the door and embraced by everyone there, three kisses to the cheeks, in the ProvenÃsect;al manner. It took him a while to get to Francis, who hugged him long and hard, talking all the while as people’s camera fibers pointed at them. “You look just like my father!” Francis said.

“So do you!” said Michel, trying to remember if it were true or not, trying to remember his brother’s face. Francis was elderly, Michel had never seen his brother that old. It was hard to say.

But all the faces were familiar, somehow, and the language comprehensible, mostly, the phrases sparking image after image in him; the smells of cheese and wine sparking more, the taste of the wine yet more again. Francis it turned out was a connoisseur, and happily he uncorked a number of dusty bottles, Châteauneuf du Pape, then a century-old sauternes from Château d’Yquem, and his speciality, red premier cru from Bordeaux called Pauillac, two each from Châteaux Latour and Lafitte, and a 2064 Château Mouton-Rothschild with a label by Pougnadoresse. These aged wonders had metamorphosed over the years into something more than mere wine, tastes thick with overtones and harmonics. They spilled down Michel’s throat like his own youth.

It could have been a party for some popular town politician, say; and though Michel concluded that Francis did not much resemble Michel’s brother, he sounded exactly like him. Michel had forgotten that voice, he would have said, but it was absolutely clear in his mind, shockingly so. The way Francis drawled “normalement,” in this case meaning the way things had been before the flood, whereas for Michel’s brother it had meant that hypothetical state of smooth operation that never occurred in the real Provence— but exactly the same lilt and drawl, nor-malement. . . .

Everyone wanted to speak with Michel, or at least to hear him, and so he stood with a glass in his hand and gave a quick speech in the style of a town politician, complimenting the women on their beauty, managing to make it clear how pleased he was to be in their company without getting sentimental, or revealing just how disoriented he was feeling: a slick competent performance, which was just what the sophisticates of Provence liked, their rhetoric quick and humorous like the local bullfighting. “And how is Mars? What is it like? What will you do now? Are there Jacobins yet?”

“Mars is Mars,” Michel said, dismissing it. “The ground is the color of Arlesian roof tiles. You know.”