As beautiful as they were, two words now described these dishes: bad karma. François wanted to give them back and forget the whole thing. I was willing to get rid of them, but I did not want to give them back to his mother. I also didn’t want to sell them; I figured their bad karma would extend to any money that we made from them.

A home for families of children undergoing long-term treatment at a nearby hospital was having a benefit auction. I contacted the organization: Were they interested in a seventy-piece set of antique Limoges? They were.

After the auction, we received a letter thanking us for our donation and informing us of the selling price. We were thrilled that somebody now owned a beautiful set of china that came with no strings attached. More important, we were happy to have helped out a family that was dealing with a gravely ill child. And, if feeling good wasn’t enough of a reward, we were now considered “major donors” to the organization.

For the next few years, we were honored guests at a handful of dinners for major donors, all of which were held at elaborate homes where the paintings on the walls were not reproductions. These were catered events with valet parking. At the time, we owned one car, a Honda with a large ding on the side. I always suggested to François that perhaps we should park our car a few blocks away and walk. François refused, insisting that, should he suddenly wake up and find himself a multimillionaire, he would like to think of himself as the type who wouldn’t be a slave to status symbols, the type who would still remember the little people and the cars driven by the little people. “Plus,” he added, “maybe the valets will get mixed up and give us a BMW.”

At these dinners, we met all sorts of people whose names graced museums and large institutions. These were people who had not had a financial worry in three generations. At age twenty-six, François and I were by far the youngest guests. Knowing that our days at these swanky shindigs were numbered, we tried to make the most of them by trying each and every one of the desserts.

We never did tell my mother-in-law about the china. She never accepted our marriage; even the birth of our children did not soften her. We eventually stopped having contact with her.