small bottle of mosquito spray I’d taken from my little evening bag.
“Here, it’s my constant companion. What can I say? Mosquitoes adore me.”
Nothing. No reply. Aside from a feeble smile of thanks before using my spray.
Having no doubt observed my mounting irritation at Jean-Michel’s awkwardness or rudeness (and frankly, at this point I didn’t care which), Laszlo jumped in to rescue me from the lengthening silence. “But the worst time is at night!”
“That’s because like all insects, they don’t sleep,” observed my father, a fountain of information on all creatures great and small. “Sleep only becomes possible when the brain has reached a certain size. Butterflies, for example, do not sleep, whereas whales, orcas, and dolphins sleep with just one brain hemisphere at a time, which allows them to swim without ever stopping.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t like me?” I wondered. But after all, that wasn’t any reason not to speak to me! Just look at that stuck-up stick Laetitia, whose hitherto unsuspected passion for nature documentaries was making my father happy to chat with her. Oh, well, as if I gave a damn! Why should I let a moron like him bother me? I decided to ignore Jean-Michel and join the conversation Gay was whipping up about Marie Antoinette.
“I’m reading a most amusing book by Caroline Weber about Marie Antoinette called Queen of Fashion, in which she describes how the young queen used her opinions and prejudices about dress to demonstrate her influence on the court, which she systematically challenged in the realm of fashion.”
“Isn’t that what Louis XIV had already done?” I asked.
“True, and Marie Antoinette was in fact greatly inspired by him. But she democratized fashion. First with her overdressed and even over-the-top style with those coiffures, the utterly insane bustles, which had such a success that she made the hairdressers and couturiers of that era rich. Then she turned fashion completely around with the simplicity of her shepherdess period at the Petit Trianon, inventing the minimalist white muslin dress worn without a corset—which became all the rage, just like Coco Chanel’s famous little black dress did.”
“Have you read Antonia Fraser’s book?” Laszlo asked.
“No, but I did see the Coppola girl’s movie.”
“Oh, a disaster!” he replied.
“I thought it rather pretty, with all those candy colors,” I said.
“So did I,” Gay chimed in. “Everyone jumped on her. But the film wasn’t pretending to be historically accurate. And it was full of familiar faces.”
“Such as?” Laszlo prompted.
“Natasha Fraser, Antonia’s daughter; Hamish Bowles, a Vogue editor; the socialite Pierre Ceyleron …”
“I’m sure they’re all wonderful people, but they proved unable to save that insipid excuse for a movie. Besides,” Laszlo concluded, “I don’t think anything can top the biography by Stefan Zweig.”
Gérard began to serve the main course, sea bass grilled over fennel, and I still hadn’t exchanged a single word with Jean-Michel. Since my decision not to let that bother me, however, I had made some progress on this question. And I had understood, after trying to put myself in his place, that he was able to chat with Laszlo or my father because he felt all of them were on the same ladder of financial and professional success, albeit at different levels. He could not, however, carry off a casual conversation or exchange with me or my sister because he was lost and had no frame of reference in our house. Wasn’t that why he’d insisted on bringing along his car and driver? To carry with him a bit of his world and a token of his success, to help him confront “the upper crust” of which Marie and I, with our pedigrees, were the incarnation? Because with us he must have felt lacking in something essential, an ease and elegance of being that requires generations to breed true.
And he was doubtless right. Not everyone has enough brio to show, as Laszlo did, that one can be a little Hungarian Jew from the gutter—as he described himself—and dazzle the most snobbish and intolerant people. Jean-Michel’s manners, for one thing, distressed me in spite of myself: his way of saying bon appétit; his elbows on the table; his knife and fork laid obliquely on either side of his plate, like the idle oars of a drifting boat. I could tell myself all I wanted that this wouldn’t have irritated me had I found him attractive, but I wasn’t sure it was true. Because I was conditioned by my upbringing, even though I found such conventions absurd. (As a proper Englishwoman, for