"You shut up too," Mathilde muttered, now brushing a thread from her ample skirt. "What a prig you are, Jules."

If her son felt injury at this inconsistency, he did not show it. He concentrated instead on loading a triangle of buttered toast with all the beluga caviar it would bear and conveying it slowly and carefully to his mouth. As cautious as he was, a few oily, shining beads fell into his lap. Mathilde lowered her lids and looked the other way.

Across the room, Claude Fougeray smiled stonily at his wife and daughter, not easy for a man whose hyperthyroid condition afflicted him with a pop-eyed stare of permanent, outraged surprise. "Let them look down their long noses at us, these damned du Rochers," he said. The tight smile faded to a sneer. "Look at them. I could buy all of them put together, if I wanted to. I have-"

Leona Fougeray, tiny, vivid, raven-haired despite her fifty-three years, interrupted her husband. "Yes? I’d like to see you buy Guillaume du Rocher." Her mobile lips turned downward. "And you’re drinking too much. As usual."

"Goddamn it," Claude whispered throatily, bald head lowered like an angry bull’s, so that his neck, thick and stubby at the best of times, all but vanished. "I didn’t say Guillaume, did I? I said anyone in this room. Do you see Guillaume in this room?"

Leona, on the verge of replying with heat, thought better of it and settled for glaring reproachfully with her intense, jet-black Italian eyes. This was lost on Claude, who glowered at the ancient Aubusson carpet, an artery throbbing sluggishly at each temple.