Daily Blague

My French lesson yesterday was better than most, even though I had a hard time thinking of anything to talk about. Until, that is, I remembered our lunch at the Grande Cascade a year ago last November, when we went to Paris for Thanksgiving. Perhaps because we had made the reservation through the concierge at the Park Hyatt, where we were staying (on points), we got what seemed liked the best table in the room, right at the prow of the gentle bow window overlooking the Bois de Boulogne. The three closest tables were as interesting to us as we must have been to them. At the one behind Kathleen's back, an engagingly insolent rich thirtysomething spent a lot of time not looking at his mistress. Oh, it was obvious that he wouldn't have been allowed to marry her; she was very beautiful, but not beautiful à la française. He was wearing an impeccable three-piece suit but no cravate - insolence itself. Dressed, in contrast, as if by Edith Head, there sat at the table that would have been alongside us, if tables at the Grande Cascade were anything like that close together, "our little bishop," as we have referred to him ever since. Yes! A  genuine évêque, complete with scarlet cummerbund and doting parents. We thought that he was rather young to be a bishop, but, hey, how old was Richelieu? It is not easy to summon a taxi to the nether reaches of the Bois late on a Sunday afternoon, and the bishop, who was compact and tidy but quite, how you say, imbu de soi (full of himself), threw such a discreet little fit when the meal was over that the restaurant arranged for him to be transported by one of the busboys, in the busboy's very small hatchback. An episcopal carriage it was not! (The parents sat in the back, of course.) We got the bishop's taxi, when it arrived ten minutes later - and, oh, the traffic. Remind me to walk next time!

At the third interesting table sat a couple of a certain age - an age more certain, shall I say, than ours. I did not see them, because they were behind me, but Kathleen provided me with regular weather reports. What began as thinly-veiled hostility, with the wife doing her best to glare at us without seeming to pay us the slightest attention, gradually cleared into almost sunny, friendly approbation. "Ils devraient eu peur," I said to M Portes at my lesson, "que nous fussions des américains bruyants."

And that got me onto the subject of "braying Americans." More about them anon.