AS A BOY, Didier had been obedient to a fault, studying what his parents suggested, paying attention to the intricacies of the family business as soon as Leon thought he was ready. What an earnest little student! Even his boots had been perfectly, tidily laced. From the time he was ten, he’d known he was expected to take over the winery. He spent afternoons in the office, studying accounting and marketing, and because he was handy mechanically he also apprenticed briefly in the different departments, where, although the foremen knew he was only sampling what for them were their lives, they worked him hard. At his father’s suggestion he studied industrial engineering in college, with an eye toward modernizing the plant. Right after graduation, and with his father’s blessing, he took a one-year position at a tile works in Pennsylvania. An excellent way, they both thought, for him to broaden his knowledge of factory management.

Now, when Didier tried to imagine the young man who’d set off for Doylestown, he saw him as if through the bottom of a basket. Tiny glimpses, brightly lit, the rest blocked by strips of cane. He’d known nothing about himself, and almost as little about anyone else. He had no sense of why the workmen resented his endlessly observing eye or the drawings he made of their tasks. And when he gathered up his sketches and equipment and left the plant for his room—he was lodging in his employer’s house—he seemed to leave everything rational behind and cross over into a dream.