“How long have you been with me, Margaret? Three years?”

“Six years, Madame.”

“Six years. And you still do not know how to make a proper terrine? It’s almost unbelievable. This terrine tastes like a baby’s bottom. It’s tasteless, mushy, horrible.” She swept the offending dish off the counter and into the trash.

“Now do it right.”

Margaret, choking back tears, dipped below the counter to retrieve another glass dish.

“And you, Jean-Pierre, don’t look so shocked. Your daube has become unacceptable. Just unacceptable. The meat should be so tender it shreds with a fork—your daube is bitter, burnt. And look, look how you’re doing that. Where did you learn that? Not from me.”

In her eagerness to get across the kitchen, Madame Mallory pushed young Marcel out of the way, and the apprentice stumbled, gashing his arm painfully on the sharp edge of the steel stove.

Madame Mallory bore down on Jean-Pierre and the roasting pan, aggressively snapping large tongs. And this unsettled the staff even more, for the tongs were from her personal cooking utensils—kept locked in a leather case under the main counter—and they meant business.

“Guinea fowl need to be turned, turned every seven minutes, so the juices flow through the meat. I’ve been watching how you work. You manhandle the birds. You’re so rough, like a farmer. You have no feel for game. You must be delicate. See? Look how I do it. Can you manage that, you imbecile?”

“Oui, madame.”

Madame Mallory stood in the middle of her kitchen, her large bosom heaving, her face mottled with red blotches of rage. And the staff stood frozen in the glare of her majestic fury.

“I want perfection. Perfection. And anyone who doesn’t deliver what is expected of him will be terminated.” Mallory picked up a terra-cotta dish and smashed it on the floor. “Like that. Like that. Do you understand? Marcel, clean that up.”

Madame Mallory blew out of the kitchen, pounding up the wooden stairs to her attic rooms. For a few minutes, as the smoke cleared, the survivors in the kitchen found they were too shocked to speak, too stunned to fully comprehend what had just happened.

Luckily for them, however, Madame Mallory’s attention was suddenly focused elsewhere. She pounded furiously back down the stairs and this time shot out the front door. “What are you doing?” she screeched across the forecourt.

The mayor, crossing the street, stopped in his tracks. He turned slowly with his shoulders hunched up about his ears.

“Gertrude, damn it, you scared me!”

“Why are you slinking about like that?”

“I’m not slinking.”

“Don’t lie to me. You were going into that place for lunch.”

“And what of it?”

“And what of it?” she mocked. “Aren’t you the mayor of this town? Aren’t you meant to preserve our way of life? You shouldn’t be encouraging these foreigners. It’s a disgrace. Why are you eating there?”

“Because, Gertrude, the food is excellent. A nice change.”

My heavens. Like he’d hit her. Madame Mallory let out a horrible squawk, and then turned abruptly, fleeing back to the safety of Le Saule Pleureur.

It was most curious that the very things Madame Mallory hated most about Maison Mumbai—the hysteria, the lack of professionalism—now took root in her own impeccably run restaurant. Chaos overwhelmed the endlessly rehearsed rituals of the two-star inn, and Mallory, although she would never have admitted it, had only herself to blame for this turn of events.

Margaret, the sensitive sous chef, spent the evening kissing the crucifix around her neck and trembling as she went about her duties. Jean-Pierre was still stewing over Mallory’s claim he had “no feel for game,” and throughout the evening he cursed a blue streak and violently kicked the stove’s steel side panels with his wooden clogs. And young Marcel was so rattled he thrice dropped plates when the kitchen’s swinging doors suddenly slammed open.

Nor were things much better out front. The wine steward was terrified Madame Mallory might find another stain on his tunic, and that evening he took unusual pains to stay spotless, pouring wine from as great a distance as possible from the table, his bottom unattractively stuck out into the aisle. And when he aerated wine in a glass, he swirled the wine in the crystal with too much nervous energy, sloshing the precious amber out onto the floor, much to the guests’ annoyance.

“Merde,” said Le Comte de Nancy, swiveling in his seat at the latest metallic boing coming from the kitchen. “Monsieur Leblanc. Monsieur Leblanc. What the hell is going on in the kitchen? The noise is impossible. The plate smashing in the back. Like some Greek wedding.”

That night guests innocently stepped over the threshold of Le Saule Pleureur, expecting, like always, to be whisked away in a soufflé of fine dining. Instead, they were met at the door by a wild-eyed Madame Mallory tugging at their elbow. “Have you been across the street?” she demanded of Madame Corbet, owner of an award-winning vineyard two villages down.

“Across the street?”

“Come on. Come on. You know what I am talking about. The Indians.”

“The Indians?”

“I don’t want you in my restaurant if you’ve been across the street. I repeat, have you been across the street?”

Madame Corbet nervously looked around for her husband, but she couldn’t see him, as he and Monsieur Leblanc had walked on ahead into the dining room.

“Madame Mallory,” said the elegant vintner. “Are you ill? You seem rather feverish this evening—”

“Ah, pff.” Mallory waved the woman away, disgusted. “Take her to the table, Sophie. The Corbets are incapable of telling the truth.”

Luckily for Madame Mallory, at that moment a bread boy bumped the aisle-hogging wine steward, and that bump in turn jogged pouring wine all over Le Comte de Nancy’s arm. It was the count’s roars and curses that prevented Madame Corbet from hearing Mallory’s insulting and intemperate remark.

Shortly after ten thirty p.m. Monsieur Leblanc acknowledged to himself the evening was in the toilet. Two guests were so insulted by Madame Mallory’s harsh questioning at the door, they immediately turned and left. Other diners picked up on the electrical charge in the air, the stress that crackled through the service, and they complained bitterly to Monsieur Leblanc how they were unsatisfied by the evening’s fare.

Enough, Leblanc decided. Enough.

He found Madame Mallory in the kitchen, standing over Jean-Pierre as he prepared a dessert of fennel ice cream and toasted figs with nougatine. She had just grabbed the duster of powdered sugar from his hand. “This is one of my specialties,” she raged. “You’re ruining it. Look, like this. Like this. Not like that—”

“Come,” said Leblanc, taking Mallory firmly by the elbow. “Come now. We must talk.”

“Non.”

“Yes. Now.” And Leblanc forced the chef out back, into the fresh night air.

“What, Henri? You see I’m busy.”

“What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see what you are doing?”

“What are you talking about?”

“What are you doing to the staff? Is it this unnatural obsession with the Hajis? You’re acting like a madwoman. You’ve got everyone on edge. You even insulted your own customers, Gertrude. My God. You know better than that. What are you doing?”

Mallory placed a hand on her chest as cats hissed somewhere out in the night. In her eyes nothing was worse than disrupting a customer’s dining experience, and she was disgusted with herself. She knew she was out of control. But even so, admitting she was wrong never came easily to Madame Mallory, and the two old culinary comrades stood tensely in the dark glaring at each other until Mallory exhaled, a deep release of breath that told Leblanc everything would be all right.

She slipped a wisp of gray hair under her black velvet hair band.