The Suitors

Weekend of July 28



THE FAMILY



Marie Ettinguer Laure Ettinguer

Flokie Ettinguer Edmond Ettinguer

THE PILLARS



Gay Wallingford Frédéric Hottin

THE REMAINDER OF THE LITTLE BAND



Odon Viel Laszlo Schwartz

THE ODDBALLS



Georgina de Marien Charles Ramsbotham

THE END-OF-JULY REGULARS



Jean-Claude Girault Astrid Girault

THE NEWCOMERS



Alvin Fishbein Vanessa Courtry

Nicolas Courtry Barry Sullivan, aka Anagan




SECRETARY’S NAME BOARD



M. and Mme. Edmond Ettinguer Master Bedroom

Mme. Laure Ettinguer Flora’s Room

(Arrival from Paris Air France Friday 5:00 p.m.)

Mlle. Marie Ettinguer Ada’s Room

(Arrival from Paris Air France Friday 5:00 p.m.)

Lady Gay Wallingford Peony Room

M. Frédéric Hottin Chinese Room

M. Odon Viel Turquoise Room

M. Laszlo Schwartz Lilac Room

Count and Countess Henri Démazure

(Departure 5:00 p.m. for the flight to Florence)

Viscountess de Marien Annex: Peach Room

Earl of Stafford (Charles Ramsbotham) Annex: Lime Room

M. and Mme. Jean-Claude Girault Annex: Coral Room

(Arrival via rental car approx. 5:00 p.m.)

M. Alvin Fishbein Yellow Room

(Arrival 6:00 p.m. by their own means with M. and Mme. Courtry)

M. and Mme. Courtry Sasha’s Room





On Fridays the house hummed with a kind of industrious tension like the buzzing of a beehive. It was flower day. And if our head butler hadn’t been chafing in a rest home, he would have been as busy as a bee. Roberto, a florist by training, customarily returned from the market with a van full of flowers of different scents and sizes intended for the various rooms in the house. He usually selected dahlias, thistles, lavender, cosmos, or amaranths for the loggia; branches of mulberry, wild angelica, or hawthorn for the entrance hall; and a selection of sweet peas and heirloom roses mixed with lady’s mantle, snowball bush, or astrantia for the table centerpieces. As for the room bouquets, they tended to include hydrangeas, dahlias, poppies, or phalaenopsis orchids. After unloading the van, Roberto would swiftly closet himself in a room equipped with copper sinks, next to the pantry, where he spent a good part of the morning creating bouquets he then placed throughout the house.

Fridays were also filled with the comings and goings of departing guests and new arrivals, so that day saw the Démazures leave for Italy as the Giraults arrived for a stay at L’Agapanthe, as they always did toward the end of July. Well-bred without being pedants or socialites, the Giraults were considered dream guests by their friends, who invited them for visits the length and breadth of France all summer long. Jean-Claude was known as a man of “exquisite” taste—a vague but pertinent term for his many qualities of refinement. To begin with, he was soigné, elegant in the English style but without ostentation, a personable man who always made a good impression. Judiciously modest and discreet with regard to his success in the field of furnishing fabrics, he was a good sport and a man of fair play in hunting, tennis, golf, and cards who appealed to men as well as to women, whom he charmed with seductive but lighthearted compliments. Astrid, on the other hand, was usually described as “a good sort,” for she was a touch provincial and completely maladroit, quite capable of saying to me, for example, “You see, Laure, you and me, we’re alike: frumpy in our youth, we get better as we get older.”

But she liked to be of service, was very practical, knew the addresses of such places as a good lampshade shop, and had pull at the most sought after schools in Paris. None of us would ever have held her gaffes against her, since it warmed our hearts to forgive her so benevolently.





Friday, 6:00 p.m.



Hearing the enthusiastic level of decibels resounding from the loggia as we rang the front doorbell at L’Agapanthe, Marie and I knew right away that the Giraults had arrived. Every year, the opening of their present was a welcome ritual: “Is it what I hope, what I think it is?” my father would cry, gazing at a wicker tray wrapped in opaque cellophane, which he would feverishly tear open to make sure that he really would find candied fruit. Then, after asking a butler to bring him a dessert knife and fork, he would make their silver gilt gleam against the flesh of the fruit as he sliced it in delight, while comparing its colors to the ochers of the Nabis and the vermilions of still lifes painted by Chardin or Zurbarán.

“Right, shall we go on in?” I asked Marie, in a voice tinged with stage fright, like an acrobat about to go before an audience.

It was clear that this weekend would be decisive for our future and that it was my turn to play the lead part. I owed it to Marie, who hadn’t completely recovered from her heartrending disappointment of the previous week. And I’d have only myself to blame if I got nowhere, because I was the one who’d chosen our last guests—well, Nicolas Courtry, in any case, who’d been my first love. I still spoke to him regularly on the phone, even though I hadn’t seen him since three years earlier, when he’d moved to New York. And when I asked him for help, he had suggested Alvin Fishbein, a professional acquaintance.

“But I’m not sure if he’s your type.”

“Doesn’t matter!”

“Even if I don’t know him well enough to guarantee that he likes women?”

“Why do you say that?”

“His plane … is pink.”

“Aha! That is interesting!”

“Listen, you want a rich guy, single, and available for the last weekend of July, you can’t be picky, come on! Anyway, the pink plane might well be explained by the fact that he’s a toy manufacturer …”

“You’re right, he’ll be just perfect,” I’d said that day.

For I’d expected that the sale of L’Aganpanthe would no longer be a problem by the time I met Alvin, about whom I’d completely forgotten in the meantime.





“Well, don’t get your knickers in a twist!” said Marie, slipping her arm through mine as she warbled “Frédéric’s song,” which we hummed together as we headed for the loggia.

Foie de veau with the Giraults

What could be more rigolo

Than to sip sublime porto

In the evening chez Girault?

Jean-Claude and his fine bon mots

Fresh from that day’s Figaro

It was oh so comme il faut

This evening spent with the Giraults …



Flanked by Gay, Frédéric, Odon, Laszlo, and the Giraults, my parents formed a picture that I recognized as soon as I entered the room, because it hung permanently in the museum of my memory, with landscapes and scenes of domestic life at L’Agapanthe.

It was a group portrait.

And yet, like all the tableaux in that imaginary gallery, the portrait was composed by the superposition of my memories, in this case those of my parents and their guests, seated year after year in the same room, on the same sofas, around the same tea service. Until that moment, I had thought that L’Agapanthe was the frame and sometimes the subject of these images, but I suddenly understood that the house was closer to a material base (like a painting under glass) on which the images were made and without which they would not exist. Would they vanish with the sale of L’Agapanthe? I wondered, and I felt a cold wave of anguish, because I could not imagine myself without such moments, such touchstones, such landmarks, for they gave my life a permanence and continuity on which my equilibrium depended. I was thus particularly attached to the immutable character of the house and quite attentive to every detail susceptible to change.





Trop bien élevé

[Too well brought up], 2007, by Jean-Denis Bredin*




… Bourgeoisie, wretched bourgeoisie, dear bourgeoisie! On my mother’s side, good taste reigned supreme. One loved fine furniture, rare books, great writers, music, pretty women: not from pleasure, but to satisfy the requirement for refinement. Virtue, intelligence, and social success were prized, of course, but these were secondary values when compared to good manners. Only distinguished people with “elegant” occupations mattered. Neither things nor animals escaped this rigorous selection. As a child, I didn’t dare bring home my little comrades for fear they would be judged inferior. Money revealed many things: this family claimed to use it with distinction and to good ends, while others, with stinginess or ostentation, put their money to mediocre use. And it was in order to behave “with distinction” under all circumstances that the adults in my mother’s family always smiled and, even at funerals, concealed the slightest sign of emotion. It was vulgar to cry, plebeian to complain, banal to laugh out loud. And so I have kept the memory of impassive faces, barely touched by chilly smiles, that all look alike. Few gestures. An almost uniform tone of voice. Neither imagination nor disorder ever disturbed that harmony. Everything was sacrificed to appearances. I knew this. And suffered, envisioning what might happen when they closed the doors of their bedrooms, removed their masks and, in the darkness, took off their clothes.

… On my father’s side, it was only virtue that counted: work, loyalty, seriousness. Refinement was suspect, a sign of frivolousness, a pretext for expense and licentiousness. This bourgeoisie wanted to ignore the fact that it was wealthy, spent only what was strictly necessary, loathed luxury, stayed mostly at home, and knew no other distractions besides family and friends. “Respectable people” were those who worked a lot, led regular lives, fulfilled all their duties. Doubtless they were bored. But boredom was like the furniture or the servants: unnoticed. The reasons for living and dying were obvious and eternal. Amusements were undertaken only in moderation. Any suffering was borne with discretion. Even death provoked no revolt, as long as one died with dignity.

… These two bourgeoisies ignored each other, and probably despised each other. The one claimed to be virtue incarnate, and the other, the embodiment of elegance. Each accused the other of being narrow-minded and annoying, or flighty and perverted. They never saw how similar they were, attentive only to appearances, so distrustful of life!





“What are those dreadful things?” I exclaimed, pointing to two tall glass cylinders of cloudy water, placed at either side of the couch on the veranda, in which bundles of lilies stood leaning like brooms in a closet.

My mother sighed. “Oh, spare me. It’s the new head butler. He finds this more elegant than our bouquets …”

“Ha! Well, he’s done quite a job on us!” Marie said sarcastically, noticing that our coffee tables now held plates of gravel bearing square vases filled with cacti and sticks of dark wood.

“You did say something to him, I hope?” I asked.

“Yes, but … the time it takes to fill a new order … He won’t be able to change the vases until Monday.”

“My poor Flokie,” Gay said cheerily, feeding a morsel of cake to Popsicle, “at least it’s a change from Roberto, who sprays all your bouquets with Visine!”

“With eyewash?” marveled Astrid Girault. “Whatever for?”

“Really, dear: to make them look dewy fresh!” Gay laughed.

“Gracious, I never would have thought of it!”

“And on top of that,” added my mother, “speaking of domestic problems, just imagine: the chef is marrying off his daughter tomorrow and has found us a replacement for the day.”

The Giraults then launched into the story of how they’d just bought a house in the hinterlands of Nice, but I was listening only distractedly to their tale, musing nervously about the imminent arrival of my guests as I watched squirrels clambering through the parasol pines, when my father startled me with a sudden question.

“So, girls, who are your clients?”

“Well, Nicolas Courtry is the only one I actually know,” I replied. “There will also be his wife Vanessa, and a friend of his, Alvin Fishbein, whom I’ve never met.”

“And speak of the devil!” announced Frédéric, who had detected the crunch of gravel out in the courtyard.

I soon heard a faint exchange between my guests and the butler who directed them to their rooms, so I thought I still had a little time before the new arrivals would join us in the loggia. And then a sublime creature materialized in the doorway! Hypnotized by her beauty, Laszlo missed his cup and poured tea into his saucer, while Frédéric cried gaily, “My gosh, Penelope Cruz! What a good idea to invite her!”

And it was true that the young woman standing before us and looking faintly embarrassed closely resembled that Spanish actress. But she was even more beautiful.

“I’m … Nicolas’s wife. I’m looking for Laure,” she said softly, batting her eyelashes.

“I’m Laure, and welcome, Vanessa!” I replied.

“Nicolas would like to see you. He’s upstairs.”

“Ah? Fine, I’ll go see what he wants. I’ll leave you to introduce yourself.”

I went up the stairs four at a time to the main entrance hall, where I found two men I had no time to acknowledge and Nicolas, who, far from greeting me with his customary effusiveness, cut right to the chase.

“Here’s the situation: your suitor (don’t worry, he can’t speak a single word of French) doesn’t go anywhere without his yoga teacher. But what I’ve just learned is that he wants to have him stay in a room next to his.”

“Which is, naturally, out of the question.”

Nicolas seemed so worried that I added, “But we can find him a hotel room nearby.”

“We could always try …”

“I mean, with advance notice, that would have been another story, but as it is, he’s got some nerve!”

“Yes but, put yourself in his place! He was so astonished to be invited that I told him you weren’t people who stood on ceremony, that you’d really welcome him. So now, to have to explain that the house rules are so strict …”

“Oh, I see …”

“Well, listen, I did my best to get him here and it worked! That’s why I’m telling you, I’m not going to be the one to break the news. You’ll have to deal with it, however you want.”

“Which one is he?” I asked, glancing at the other two men just long enough to make me hope my guest was the tall one, rather handsome in a smoldering way, and not the one with the pasty complexion and a ponytail.

“The tall one,” replied Nicolas to my great relief, before introducing me in English: “Laure, here are Alvin and Barry, also known as Anagan. Alvin, Anagan, let me introduce you to Laure, who is our hostess, and the dear friend I have told you about.”

I gave them a big smile before describing to Alvin the situation with the house, unfortunately (and most unusually!) completely full, and the charming little hotel that would certainly have room for Anagan, whom I placed in the capable hands of Roland, the chauffeur. But although I blithely ignored my suitor’s extreme irritation, I had by no means dealt completely with the problem of his guru, I gathered, when Nicolas informed me that Anagan was not only Alvin’s yoga teacher and spiritual guide, but also his cook.

“His cook!?”

“Yes, didn’t I mention that? Your suitor is a vegetarian or vegan, whatever, because I don’t really see the difference.”

“This gets better and better,” I groused, escorting the American to his room, and when Nicolas seemed about ready to start in again, I spoke up first: “Yes, I know: I asked for it, I got it, but still …”

The second we entered the Yellow Room, Alvin interrupted me to ask if he was allowed to move the head of his bed to point north, because otherwise he would be unable to sleep, and seeing my amazement, he added that this was one of the golden rules of feng shui.

“Of course,” I replied.

“I have the feeling we’re going to have some fun,” Nicolas told me as we watched Alvin drag his bed around.

“We can only hope.” I sighed, leaving Alvin in his care until dinnertime.

I still had to ask my mother to put up the guru and speak to the chef so that he would allow him into the kitchen.

“It seems your guest is rather eccentric, so we can certainly allow him the same leeway we give Charles, with the excuse that he’s an English lord!” she said before busying herself with finding a room for the yogi and asking Roland to get him settled there.

In short, she was so pleasant about the whole business that I was at first disconcerted. Then I realized that she was critical only of people with whom she was familiar, and Alvin’s lifestyle was so different from her own that she had no point of comparison from which to judge him. And I couldn’t help noting, watching her adopt this benevolent and open ethnological approach to him, that she seemed content to be relieved of her role as the supreme arbiter of gracious living by this case of force majeure.

“In your opinion, this yogi, do we invite him to sit with us?” she asked.

“I think not, since he’ll be in the kitchen!”

“How silly of me, of course. Anyway, luckily for your vegetarian, this evening there is a soufflé.”

The sea was still glittering like sparkling amethysts when Alvin arrived for cocktails, wearing a shalwar kameez ensemble, a collarless Indian shirt of tunic length worn over loose pajamalike pants gathered at the ankle—a sartorial choice that seemed like a manifesto it was up to me to interpret. Stalling for time, I wondered whether the subtle exoticism of this beige and off-white palette was intended to evoke the Eastern subcontinent … or perhaps Western beatniks, or hippies? I didn’t want to succumb too quickly, as a psychologist, to the reflex already prompting me to examine Alvin’s possible relationship with his parents. One of the pitfalls of my profession!

Still, I couldn’t help thinking that his choice of clothing betrayed a desire to step outside the family circle.

Then I brought myself to heel: Alvin was not one of my patients but a suitor, so I would do better to consider him strictly from that angle. And noticing once more that he was handsome in a dark, Jeremy Irons sort of way, I imagined him dressed differently to see if I liked him: tall, graceful, aristocratic, he would no doubt be stunning in a dark suit. When Alvin spoke to my mother, however, my retouched vision of him went up in smoke.

“L’Agapanthe faces the northwest, does it not? Did you know that with an earth element between the building and the sea, whose energy circulates toward the house—while firmly anchored by the Lérins Islands near Cannes—L’Agapanthe has the ideal site of ‘the earth dragon’s lair,’ like Hong Kong, where the energy entering the bay is safeguarded by Victoria Peak?”

Convoluted as it was, Alvin’s compliment struck me less than did his gestures, because he punctuated his delivery by holding out his right hand, palm up, and systematically ticking off his points by bending each finger back in succession with his left index finger, as if seeking to give structure to his little speech. Well, I thought, so much for trying to set himself apart from the average American with his clothes and his yoga and meditation! Alvin still exhibited American behavior patterns, like that mania for counting anything and everything on his fingers. Next he’d be raising his arms and twitching two sets of fingers to sketch imaginary quotation marks, those clichéd precautions demanded by political correctness whenever a controversial subject crops up.

The truth was that I was particularly annoyed by all the American gestures that have spread throughout the world via that country’s many TV series. As disastrous as their fast food, American behavior has insinuated itself into the smallest corners of our rituals, changing even the way we pass around the holy-water sprinkler at funerals! I’d observed that instead of crowding around the coffin the way we used to do, we all now stood a few yards away with the patient docility of model citizens, a routine we felt obliged to adopt when waiting everywhere from now on, from the post office to customs clearance to restaurant lines, stepping one by one over imaginary boundaries on the ground. And at funerals, as it happens, this is truly inconvenient, since the single person up at the coffin has to go back to the other mourners to hand over the aspergillum to someone else, making everyone wait that much longer.

But, given the flippancy with which I’d recruited my suitor, I reflected, I might have had worse luck, because he did seem intent on being courteous to my mother.

“Laure tells me that you live in New York?”

“Yes, for part of the year, since I also live in California.”

My mother hesitated to go on, for her familiarity with the genteel neighborhoods of Manhattan risked proving useless in conversation with this bohemian, and she refused to make a fool of herself trying to find out if they knew anyone in common, under the pretext of knowing lots of people there. Still, she did venture to ask, “And where in New York do you live?”

“Fifth Avenue, at 998.”

“No!” exclaimed my mother, who couldn’t believe it.

Because she knew all the prestigious buildings on the Upper East Side by heart and by name, considering only those built before the Second World War, such as 720, 740, and 778 Park Avenue, or 810, 820, 830, 834, and 960 on Fifth, to mention a few. Not forgetting 998, which occupied an entire block and still had apartments with columned ballrooms and extensive servants’ quarters. All those buildings were co-ops run by powerful owners’ committees, which made buying an apartment there more difficult than joining the Jockey Club.

But Alvin went on to tell her about his mansion in Rhinebeck, on the Hudson, a gigantic main house with an annex containing an indoor tennis court and a white marble swimming pool.

“Was that the house of the So-and-so family?” asked my mother.

“Yes, it’s where they used to organize ‘white weekends’ in the 1910s.”

“What are those?” I asked, to join the conversation.

“Cocaine weekends,” replied my mother with disarming casualness.

With a pang, I realized that my mother’s cocaine dependence had completely slipped my mind since the previous weekend, when Marie had convinced me that her addiction bothered my mother even less than if she’d suddenly developed a sweet tooth. And there she was, indeed, as lovely and serene as always.

“Do you know the Lachmans?” she asked, encouraged by the tokens of upper-echelon tribalism Alvin had just given her.

“No, I can’t say that I do …”

“Oh, you must, that’s the l in Revlon: there was Charles Revson and Charlie Lachman …”

I thought I saw Alvin wince in distaste at the bowl of shelled peanuts into which we were all happily plunging our hands for a nibble, which suggested that hygiene was clearly one of his pet peeves, but before I could ponder his reaction any further, Nicolas and Vanessa made their entrance onto the terrace.

Since Nicolas had come often to L’Agapanthe when we were together, Vanessa had been informed of our house rituals regarding dressing for dinner, and she had gone all out. What’s more, this was a woman who, living in Manhattan, habitually dressed to the nines for a little dinner in a corner bistro.

She was wearing a very short baby-doll dress in red organza and bronze shoes like a web of laces that added another six inches to her already endless legs. And the combination of her slyly “innocent” dress and her bewildering shoes startled our gathering into an eloquent silence. Unless we were, quite simply, stunned by her beauty. Because beauty is a strange thing, exciting stupor and fascination more often than desire. And Vanessa seemed used to seeing her beauty freeze timid men and neurotic women—when it didn’t provoke such bedazzlement that those around her just stared, deaf and dumb.

I imagined how frustrated she must feel by thinking of my son, who was often both pleased and angry that I loved him too much to love him properly whenever I found myself distracted while listening to him, overcome by the joy of seeing him, there in front of me, so healthy and so handsome.

Vanessa must have had real personality to want so much to cut through the screen of blinding beauty that obscured her, I thought, as I watched her make an effort to get us to talk to her and return to our conversations, but the poor thing could not keep us from gazing at her. Even worse, Odon started talking about beauty itself.

“Do you agree with Allison Lurie’s idea that beauty, far from provoking desire, more commonly inspires love?”

That was too much for Vanessa, who blushed and began to stammer, but Nicolas came to her rescue.

“I agree wholeheartedly, my dear Odon, because I’m head over heels in love with my wife. Now, has Alvin told you that he’s the champion of air rights?”

“Madame, dinner is served!” bellowed the head butler.

“Air rights? What are they? You must tell us all about them over dinner,” said my mother, rising to lead the way.





MENU



Soufflé Mornay

Sole Murat

Salad and Cheeses

Mille-feuille with Raspberries





Dinner began in general confusion. Alvin thought we were crazy when he saw our reaction to the tables in the dining room, which the new head butler had decorated with his disastrous floral arrangements. He had also seen fit to set out plastic bottles of mineral water in order to avoid having to serve us from our silver carafes! Although our American guest definitely disapproved of the plastic bottles, which offended him more from the ecological than the aesthetic point of view, he found the vases of cacti and weathered wood very New Age, in a Sedona, Arizona, sort of way, and he rather liked them. What he really didn’t understand, however, was why our animated conversation took place mostly after the butlers had left the room, like those secret confabs in children’s camps and boarding schools after lights-out, when the volume of noise varies according to the proximity of adult supervision.

As for my mother, she made an effort not to take offense over Alvin’s worries about the menu, because although he had obviously decided to eat what was put in front of him without making a fuss, he was finally compelled to ask, “Are the eggs organic?”

Finding his question absurd, since—organic or not—the chef always bought the best products at the market, my mother bluffed without blinking an eye: “Absolutely.”

She almost lost patience, however, when Alvin asked her if he might have an egg-white omelet instead of the delicate marvel of eggs, butter, béchamel, and Gruyère on abase of impeccably soft-boiled eggs soon to be placed before us and which never failed to elicit cries of admiration from the most hard to please of our guests, such was the skill required to bring a soufflé Mornay to perfection. Then, rallying to her initial open-mindedness toward this new guest, my mother rose to the occasion: “Why not!”

“So, these air rights?” asked Laszlo brightly, to lighten the atmosphere.

Alvin explained that after making his fortune in toys, he had moved onto real estate and dealt a great deal in the rights to use and develop the empty space over buildings in New York.

“I don’t understand. Who would be interested in them?”

“Well, developers intending to put up buildings taller than the limit anticipated by the local zoning map. Because all a developer needs to do is buy the air rights over adjacent buildings and turn their space into extra stories for the building he wishes to construct.”

“You mean that the lower the neighboring buildings are, if they’re small houses, for example, then the more air they have to sell, and the higher the developer can build?”

“Exactly.”

“Unbelievable … and how much does the open airspace cost?” asked Laszlo.

“Between 213 and 430 dollars a square foot, let’s say 50 to 60 percent of the sale price of a plot.”

Frédéric was electrified. “But that’s a gold mine, your angle! Because I figure that, if they have the choice among several adjacent properties whose airspace they can buy, the developers must set all the neighbors against one another and force them to accept an offer that is nonnegotiable.”

“Yes,” continued Alvin, “unless on the contrary the potential seller finds himself in a solid position as the key to the developer’s entire project, which requires that he purchase not only his air rights but those of all his neighbors.”

“Ah! Because that can go on ad infinitum?”

“No, only within the framework of one city block.”

“Fascinating …”

“Oh, wonderful, filet of sole Murat, I love that!” exclaimed Jean-Claude, taking a generous helping of fish, potatoes, and artichokes from the proffered serving dish.

“Do you eat like this every day?” asked Alvin, in the mixture of surprise and indignation adopted by an American citizen who sees someone throwing something on the ground or cutting in line.

“Yes, why?” replied my mother, honestly surprised.

“But it’s such a rich diet, I don’t see how you can stand it …”

Alvin then delivered a minutely detailed rundown of the calorie counts in our dinner, followed by a dietetic sermon on one’s ideal weight, a screed that entailed deep discussion of proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, vegetarian diets, omega-3 benefits, oils from fish, argan, and borage, flaxseed oil supplements, and iron pills—or better yet, iron in liquid form, to avoid constipation—and that brought us to the salad and cheese course.

My mother leaned toward Jean-Claude to tell him just what she thought of this nonsensical chemical babbling. “Rich! Rich! In the first place, we eat chicken, fish, or pasta, not proteins or hydrates of carbon, whatever that means!”

My mother was about to explode, while the rest of us were succumbing to boredom like a congregation benumbed by a Sunday sermon. And since it was easier and more courteous to change the subject instead of trying to shut him up …

“Alvin, I fear you are talking to a brick wall. Why don’t you talk to us about your interest in yoga?” I asked.

Alas, we realized that we were in for another dose of pontification when he announced that “diet and yoga are linked, because digestion requires a level of energy incompatible with …”

So we were treated to a course on Jivamukti yoga while Marcel served us the mille-feuille with raspberries.

“Five thousand years ago, India gave birth to yoga, which means ‘union’ in Sanskrit. Its goal is to attain an understanding of the interdependence of all forms of life …”

Too beaten down even to consider reacting, we simply relaunched him now and then so we could eat our dessert in peace.

“Yes, but what about Jivamukti?”

“It was created in 1984 in the United States. And it shifted the practice of yoga in America from an esoteric ritual observed by a few initiates to a discipline followed by sixteen million Americans.”

Suiting the action to the word, Alvin began fiddling with the fingers of his right hand again, but this time with confident ease, as if he’d delivered this particular litany many times before.

“The definition of Jivamukti yoga is ‘liberation through life,’ meaning a way of being in the world. Reserved for those who seek to expend intense physical effort, it has won over such adepts as Sting, Christy Turlington, Donna Karan, and Gwyneth Paltrow.”

“But what is it exactly?” I asked gamely.

“There are five pillars of Jivamukti instruction …”

But instead of listening to Alvin, I was waiting for the moment when he would start ticking things off on his fingers, which he then proceeded to do.

“The first pillar, nonviolence or ahimsa, might be described as: recognize yourself in others, in humans as well as animals. The second pillar, devotion or bhakti, stipulates that we must offer all that we experience to a higher entity than ourselves. The third pillar, meditation or Dhyana …”

“Well, now, that’s certainly much clearer,” exclaimed Frédéric sweetly at the end of Alvin’s lecture, while the rest of us sat speechless.

Floored by Alvin’s virtue and gibberish, we were about to leave the table when the butler came to tell me that my son was on the telephone.

Wondering if he’d timed his call to reach me just after dinner, I went to the “phone booth” (it looked rather like a confessional) just outside the living room, in which you had to sit down on the banquette to activate the ceiling light.

“I can’t go to sleep, Mummy! Do you think it’s serious?”

At first I dealt with this lightly, but I soon realized that Félix was really worried. My idiot ex-husband had managed to terrorize him by predicting disaster if he didn’t get “a good eight hours of sleep.”

“But what will happen if I sleep less? Or more?”

Although I tried to soothe him, his anxiety kept him focused on that quota of hours.

“You see, it’s eleven now, Mummy, and the au pair’s going to come wake me up at eight, so if I don’t fall asleep in an hour, I won’t get enough …”

It was hard to stop his looping. And my growing ill temper wasn’t helping my attempts to calm Félix down. What infuriated me wasn’t that his father would want some time to himself in the evening to be with his new companion, which was only reasonable, but that he would as usual formulate his needs and desires in the guise of an educational principle. Why would he upset a child on vacation like that? He should have told our son, ‘I need to be on my own now, so why don’t you hang out in your room, do some reading or play until you get tired.’ Félix would already be asleep instead of phoning me—and developing a sleep problem it would probably take me at least six months to get rid of! In the end, I comforted him as best I could, at least I hoped so, since I couldn’t do more over the phone.

When I returned to the living room, I sat down next to my father in the vague expectation that he might comfort me, but before I could open my mouth he began telling me how entertaining it had been to sit next to Vanessa at dinner.

“She’s a living doll!” He beamed. “She told me that until Nicolas came along, she’d only been interested in stuffy, affected guys who were always droning on about something. Who could have imagined she would ever find pomposity attractive!”

Was it the ecstatic twinkle in my father’s eyes? The attention he was paying to the American beauty instead of to his daughters? Whatever it was, I found myself blowing up at him.

“Fine, then I can assure you that Alvin takes himself seriously enough to be her kind of guy! But luckily Nicolas won’t have to worry—first, because Vanessa seems crazy about him, and second, because I’ve decided to put the moves on Alvin to get him to marry me so that he can buy L’Agapanthe, since you’ve put it up for sale without even consulting us …”

Taken aback, my father looked at me in puzzlement for a moment but then acted as if he’d misunderstood me or just hadn’t heard correctly. And instead of asking me to repeat what I’d said or replying in his usual way, he turned without a word to my mother, who was freshly appalled by the butler’s latest blunder: setting out tea bag packets of every color on a coffee table, like magazines in a waiting room.

“Tea bags, how awful!”

“And fanned out, like a shop-window display!” added Astrid, to show that she, too, found the sight distasteful.

Alvin asked around if anyone could give him the house telephone number, since his BlackBerry seemed unable to get any reception and he was expecting some phone calls.

“My poor fellow,” replied Charles, “the technology at L’Agapanthe is still stuck in the 1920s! It would be no help at all to you if I provided the phone number here, because when the ancient switchboard rings, no one hears it, and if you answer when it rings in the booth next to the living room, picking up the receiver while sitting in front of a skirted vanity table and a tarnished mirror is positively a trip backward in time!”

“But then what does everyone else do? Am I the only one not to get any reception?”

“Some of us have resigned ourselves to our fate and even learned to appreciate this peaceful atmosphere of a spiritual retreat, while the others—and I am one—haunt the driveway like poor damned souls just outside the entrance gate, where the reception’s a little better. But it can depend on the rooms: which one are you in?”

“The yellow one.”

“Lucky you! If you go stand by the window, you should get some reception.”

“And the Internet?”

“Here again you’re in luck, because this is quite a recent development: Edmond and Flokie have just had a bathroom remodeled into an office equipped with an Internet connection. But I’m warning you,” added Charles with a sly smile, “there’s stiff competition for access to this lifeline!”

The sudden swoop of a dragonfly over the sofa drew my attention away from Charles and Alvin, whom I was only pretending to listen to, since I felt I deserved a breather, so I let Alvin shift his interest to the Giraults, who were busily chatting with Georgina, Marie, Frédéric, and Odon. Determined to remain mopey and ill humored, I contemplated my father, flushed with love, talking to Vanessa and Nicolas who, against all expectation, wound up saving my dinner party.

In fact, they were a huge hit when they told us about the role-playing game they liked to get up to at winter resorts. Nicolas enjoyed pretending to be a domestic tyrant in front of skiers lined up at lifts, who make the ideal public for his kind of performance. He would hand his skis off to Vanessa to carry and swat her on the butt, saying in a loud, grumpy voice, “Get going, you dope! I’m paying, you’re lugging, that’s how it is!”

And Vanessa would meekly comply, as the onlookers stared in appalled astonishment.

Then Vanessa explained to us that the reason their little number (which made them laugh until they cried) was so convincing was … that she actually was a submissive woman and her husband a bully.

“Oh, really?” cried Laszlo, Charles, and my father with one voice.

“Decide for yourselves,” she said and began a story about the university studies she’d undertaken (rather on the late side), all because she felt stupid and uneducated after skipping them when she was younger while trying to make her way as a model.

After pausing for sympathetic expressions of commiseration from the misty-eyed gentlemen in the audience, Vanessa continued.

“The only problem was Nicolas, who was dead set against my plan and insisted that my passion for studying was unseemly and even perverse.”

“Surely not!” I exclaimed, commenting ironically on the idiocy of men with an up-front bitterness not unrelated to my father’s earlier attitude.

“Oh, yes, but the worst thing was, you see, that Nicolas was right! It was perverse. In his place, I would have been jealous, because I went off to my classes as happy as a lark, even though I did feel sorry for him, dying of boredom in his office. So one day, to buck up his morale, I went to Madison Avenue and spent a fortune. I came home completely bushed, naturally, after such a marathon of shopping. Then when Nicolas counted the number of bags and saw that I was too exhausted to give him the slightest little caress …”

And here Vanessa heaved a huge sigh.

“… well, he begged me to go back to school!”

Dazzled by Vanessa’s cheek, the gentlemen turned toward Nicolas in wonderment at how he’d managed to win such a prize, only to find him already deep in conversation with my mother.

Nicolas is short and rather ugly, but he has charm, confidence, and never feels obliged to make a show of his success.

“What does he do in life, anyway?” my father asked me.

“He made a fortune on the Internet, but don’t ask me how, I have no idea.”

At that point Alvin, repressing a yawn, got up. “I’m sorry to run out on you like this, but I’m the early-to-bed type, and I meditate at sunrise. Good night, all!”

Alvin’s departure prompted others to follow suit, and Marie and I soon found ourselves with Nicolas and Vanessa, who seemed unwilling to call it a night.

“Some Trivial Pursuit?” I suggested halfheartedly, then did my best to take an interest in a game won handily by Nicolas, a history buff.

“Who crowned Clovis, the first king of the Franks, at Reims?”

“Archbishop St. Rémi. ”

“Who discovered Greenland in 982?”

“Eric the Red.”

Since the jet lag was in their favor, our guests appeared eager to keep going all night, and Marie seemed ready to stay up with them.

“I’m about to drop,” I announced. “Would it destroy you utterly if I toddled off to bed?”

And I did.