The Suitors - By Cecile David-Weill Page 0,30

for a dinner party, I thought proudly.

My mother called over the guests seated at her table. “Odon, Polyséna, Frédéric, Henri, Marie and Bernard, you are with me.”

“Doesn’t this remind you of school, when the teacher gathers her students on the first day of classes?” quipped Frédéric, to ease the newcomers into our protocol.

“Odon, you’re on my right; Frédéric, Marie, and Polyséna—do please stop chatting, naughty, naughty! Bernard, sit on my left. And Henri, between Marie and Frédéric.”

Inheriting those who hadn’t been summoned, my father solemnly brandished the paper on which his table seating plan had been scribbled.

“Here we all are in the same boat, cast adrift by Flokie,” he announced facetiously.

For just as my mother fulfilled her duties as hostess with the utmost devotion, my father took equally seriously his role as the class clown.

“Let’s see,” he murmured, slipping on his glasses. “But I can’t see a thing with these! I must have left my reading glasses in the library. Laure, dear, would you do the honors?”

“I’ve got the thumb!” Gay crowed triumphantly, having turned over her César plate to check.

“Oho! Much better than getting the finger!” Frédéric called over gaily from the other table, and the two friends exchanged fond smiles.

Jean-Michel was on my right. Without any misplaced pretensions, I naturally assumed that he would strike up a conversation with me, if for no other reason than that he had clearly been trying to bone up on the appropriate social conventions. He would thank me for his invitation to L’Agapanthe as a lead-in to some friendly or simply polite chitchat. He did nothing of the kind, however, and merely smiled at Laetitia, seated on his right. When I recovered from my surprise, it dawned on me that he had been avoiding my sister and me ever since his arrival. Of course I had noticed how he’d been all over my mother, but that was quite probably his idea of the proper courtesy due the mistress of the house. And I had the impression that flattering his “elders” was right up his alley, but so what? That was hardly a dishonorable means to achieve social success, after all. But between that and imagining that he was really trying to avoid Marie and me … His stubborn silence was suggestive, though; still, I really couldn’t see myself having such an effect on a supposedly intelligent man, so I wondered: was he nervous at the prospect of speaking to me, or simply worried that he would commit some gaffe?

Jean-Michel seemed to be studying the napkins and bread and butter plates next to the chargers by César, which we were discussing as the butler replaced them with soup plates of marbled yellow-glazed faience from Apt. In matters of etiquette, I would have been glad to whisper advice to him, but everything in his manner indicated that he would take my kindness for condescension. Too bad! He could just wonder away. As he would surely do throughout the entire dinner.

Debating, for example, when to begin eating what was on his plate. And he would discover that unlike in the United States, where it is customary to wait for everyone to be served before picking up one’s fork, it is the mistress of the house or the most prominently seated woman at the table who gives the signal, even before all the gentlemen have been served. Sitting on my father’s right, Gay would thus be our “hostess.” The butler would then serve the men, and my father last, who might be left on short rations, moreover, for the platter sometimes offered only slim pickings by the time it reached him.

In the same way, Jean-Michel might well be perplexed by the semicircular salad plates, or the dessert plates that would presently appear with a silver-gilt fork and spoon, along with a finger bowl to be placed with its doily to the left of his dinner plate.

Too bad for him, I thought again, and then my generous nature recovered its aplomb and made me fiddle with my bread-and-butter plate, on my left, to show him innocently which was whose.

Laszlo, meanwhile, was grimacing as he bent down sideways and exclaimed, “Can someone enlighten me as to why mosquitoes always attack your ankles? And aren’t they unusually ferocious this year?”

“You’re telling me,” replied Jean-Michel, who started scratching in turn.

Ah, now I’ve got it, I thought, since Jean-Michel obviously had no difficulty smiling and talking with anybody but me. I then put him to one last test, handing him a