Mathilde turned to her son. "That’s your second martini. Where did you learn to drink martinis?"

Neither were these comments acknowledged. Jules du Rocher’s plump arm swept the long-stemmed glass from the tray directly to his lips, which he smacked loudly after downing half the drink.

"What are they doing here, is what I’d like to know," he grumbled, openly staring across the room at another threesome, who sat stiffly in their high-backed wing chairs, as removed and alienated as if they’d been walled off.

"If I’d known they were really going to be here, I assure you we would still be in Frankfurt," said Mathilde, grimly watching her son drain his glass with a second swallow and then go grubbing with a pudgy thumb and forefinger after the anchovy-stuffed olive at the bottom.

"Don’t do that, Jules," she said disgustedly.

"Well, why don’t they put a toothpick in it, then?" he asked, not unreasonably. He capitulated, however, bringing the glass to his lips, upending it, and helping the olive into his mouth with a pinky that followed it in rather more deeply than Mathilde thought strictly necessary.

That, said Mathilde’s look, is repulsive. Unconcerned, Jules concentrated on liberating the anchovy with his tongue, then munching with deep satisfaction; first the anchovy, then the olive.

"Now, Mathilde," Rene said reasonably, "if Guillaume invited the Fougerays, he must have had a very good reason. And you know he’s not being late on purpose. He’s probably forgotten about the time; you know how absentminded the old fellow’s been getting."

You, his wife’s eloquent look said, are not the person to talk about absentmindedness.

Rene took no offense; indeed, he seemed to take no notice. "So why upset yourself?" he continued. "There’s no point, is there?"

Indeed, there wasn’t. The patriarchal Guillaume du Rocher convened these "family councils"-formal meetings of the dwindling and far flung du Rocher clan- whenever it pleased him, and he ran them however he wished. If it was increasingly in his nature to be high-handed and eccentric, well, that was to be borne with good humor. What choice was there?