“My car,” said Pascal, who drove fast in a classic, old, and much-loved Porsche. “I’ll sell my car. I’ll get a dull car. That would help.”

“I’ll sell mine too.” She smiled. Gini drove an ancient Volkswagen Beetle. Pascal, who did not admire this vehicle, gave her a serious look.

“A sacrifice I couldn’t permit. Besides, we’d have to pay someone to take it off our hands.”

“We could live on vegetables.”

“We could.” He drew her closer to him. “Turnips. Parsnips.”

“No new clothes for the next ten years.”

“A better idea. I prefer you without clothes, in any case.”

“I could change careers. Stop being a journalist. Become a merchant banker. A corporate lawyer. An advertising whiz kid…”

“I think not. That would be a waste. Look at me, Gini.”

She turned to face him; his arms encircled her waist.

“Do we want this, Gini?”

“Yes. We do.”

“Then let’s get it,” said Pascal.

From that moment onward he was as she most loved him—very energetic, very charming, very steely, and very French. First the owners of the apartment, then their agents, then the bank, began to give way under his onslaught: the price, it seemed, might after all be a little negotiable; the mortgage might be, after all, increased. Returning to Gini’s apartment, with its forlorn For Sale sign, he found her a buyer within a week. At night, when to his annoyance and chagrin—for Pascal himself did not observe office hours and despised those who did—the bank or real estate agents could not be reached, he covered hundreds of sheets of paper with calculations. Sum after sum, all the sevens neatly crossed. He added up their expenses, his child support payments to his ex-wife for Marianne, the mortgage payments, the cost of heating and travel and—Gini saw to her amused delight—wine and bread.

“Wine?” she said, leaning over his shoulder. “That’s a luxury. Cross that off.”

“To you, my darling American, it may be a luxury. To me it is a necessity.”

“You’ve left out electricity.”

“Candles?” He looked at her with a smile.

“Insurance?”

“Damn. I’ll have to call Max.”

He called Max there and then, as—Gini suspected—he had intended to do from the first. He told Max that he was enjoying being wooed by the Correspondent very much, but if Max wished courtship to lead to marriage, the dowry would have to be increased.

“I have been doing sums,” Pascal said. “I had allowed for wine but not electricity. A foolish oversight…When you come to dinner with us, you see, Max, in this wonderful place we mean to have, it would be useful to be able to cook for you—Oh, really? A ballpark figure? What is that?”

There was a pause while Pascal, who understood the term very well, listened intently. He then named a sum of money. Gini paled; Max said yes.

And so it had become theirs, all this wonderful space. Pascal went to see an antiques-dealer friend with a warehouse on King’s Road. After an excellent lunch, and several hours of fierce Gallic bargaining, he acquired a bed. It was a high, wide, glorious four-poster, once the property of a king’s mistress—or so the dealer claimed. It had pillars carved with vines, and its original hangings of worn scarlet silk. He kept the purchase secret, and had the bed installed on a day when Gini was out interviewing a very dull and self-satisfied Cabinet minister. When she came home that spring evening, there it was.