château they owned in the Loire Valley.
Jeanot, Papa and Maman cheerfully piled into the DeSoto to spend some time in the country, but even with all the windows open, the aging car’s interior was stifling. They’d stopped three times to add water to the leaky radiator. That the automobile had traveled 260 kilometers without a major mishap was a miracle, Papa said. Papa insisted the “American beast” had carried them safely through the sheer force of his will.
The château was the architectural equivalent of the aging car. The circular coachway leading to the front entrance was rutted with missing cobblestones. To Jeanot’s horror, in the entranceway, Babette and Dédé Bourillot of the potato gun and naked Nazi fiascos, stood, holding hands, Babette smiling her welcome.
Jeanot felt as if the DeSoto had run over his chest, as if his guts had been torn out and eaten by a savage cannibal Zhivaro headhunter.
So, apparently, did Papa. “Ah non! Non non non! C’est l’idiot avec le pistolet à patate!”
The idiot with the potato gun seemed no happier to see the St. Paul family. Dédé scowled, whispered something in Babette’s ear. She giggled and the sound further bruised Jeanot’s heart. They turned and skipped away, still holding hands. Jeanot let himself slide to the floor of the DeSoto.
He moped through the afternoon and in the evening decided to go catch frogs at the estate’s étang, a walled pond that in earlier times had been the château’s water supply. Maman equipped him with a swatch of red felt tied at the end of long piece of string. The idea, she said, was to fool the frogs into believing the cloth was a piece of meat. Frogs, being both stupid and carnivorous, would take the bait, swallow it, and Jeanot would reel the string in with an amphibian at the end. It made sense in a strange way so he spent forty-five minutes being ignored by frogs too numerous to count. He caught one with his bare hands, tried to feed it a morsel of the cloth but the beast was adamantly anti-felt. He was about to shove the offended animal in his pocket when a pair of soft arms enveloped him from behind.
Babette.
He dropped the frog, tried to slither away from the two-timing hussy but she refused to let him go. She whispered, “I’m so glad you’re here,” and then, “Dédé smells like onions. It’s really dégoutant.”
Monsieur Bourillot, Dédé’s journalist father, had once written a long article for Le Figaro about the benefits of healthy eating. Papa had read it aloud at the table with great distaste. Monsieur Bourillot had propounded the theory that onions were beneficial to dental hygiene. The Bourillot family—father, mother and son—he wrote, each ate an onion a day. Their splendid teeth were the pride of their dentist, but the entire family emanated an onion soup smell that Jeanot and his family found disturbing.
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