Jacques, dressed in a tailored blue suit, stacked the last peach and turned his head in my direction as I eased shut the front door.

“Chef! You won’t believe it. I cracked it. I know who they are.”

Again I was visited by that overwhelming sense of weariness.

“It’s a young couple. I am sure of it.”

Jacques made me come over to the podium and his leather-bound volume of research to pore over his reams of hastily snapped photographs.

“See? It’s all here. Look.”

Normally a man of great elegance and reserve, Jacques lost all sense of proportion when it came to restaurant critics. He loathed them. In fact, his great ambition in life was to unmask the anonymous Guide Michelin inspectors who secretly reviewed restaurants and doled out Michelin’s coveted stars. His strategy, these last several years, was to photograph guests he thought could be the Michelin critics, in the foyer, as they left our restaurant. He would then take his rogue’s gallery of photos to Bib Gourmand–designated restaurants, modest-priced brasseries and bistros that were the Michelin inspectors’ personal favorites, according to the guides’ own definition, and where they took their own families on their days off.

For years now, Jacques systematically dined in his free time at the unpretentious Bib Gourmand restaurants, comparing his portfolio of snapshots with the room full of diners. It was complètement fou, of course, like looking for a needle in a haystack, and this was the first time he had ever found a match.

“Look. It’s the same young couple. They dined here on the fourth. And then here they are again, four days later, over at Chez Géraud in the 16th arrondisement. I am sure they are Michelin inspectors. He has a rather sneering look about him. Don’t you think?”

“Yes. Possibly. But—”

“Well, I am sure of it.”

“Actually, that’s the son and daughter-in-law of Chef Dubonet from Toulouse. They were here in Paris that week on a research mission. They’re opening a bistro. I personally sent the young couple to Chez Géraud.”

Jacques looked crestfallen.

I tried to smile sympathetically, but it was halfhearted, and I moved on quickly before he could engage me further in his bizarre obsession.

The center room’s jasmine arrangements, faintly perfuming the salon, were from Chez Antoine over in the 6th arrondissement, and were strategically placed among the sea of tables to create a permanently soft and scented air.Le Chien Méchant’s china was made to my design at Christian Le Page; the heavy silver flatware, it, too, was stamped under my instructions at a family-run factory in Sheffield, England. The stemware, Moser crystal, was handblown in northern Bohemia. The dining room linen, crisp and white, was not machine-made in Normandy, but from Madagascar, hand-stitched by Antananarivo women. And everything the guest came in contact with—from the wineglasses right down to the Caran d’Ache pen to sign the bill—was etched with Le Chien Méchant’s insignia, a tiny barking bulldog. Mallory had taught me that details make the restaurant, and no one could say I didn’t learn my lessons well, for I even twinned each table with a mahogany footstool, on which the women could rest their precious handbags.

My front-room staff was crisply snapping linen, draping it over the tables; the faint piano tinkling of Duke Ellington’s “What Am I Here For?” drifted out from the hidden speakers. An apprentice at the sideboard, wiping down crystal, he saw me surveying the dining room from the darkened wing of the restaurant, and he nodded respectfully in my direction as the cut glass in his hand flashed sharply in the light.

“Bonjour, Chef,” cried several waiters as I passed through the salon.

I waved and pushed through the kitchen doors in the back.

Chef de Cuisine Serge was at the gas rings holding a heavy cast-iron pan handle with two hands, a towel across the grip, pouring hot goose fat into a ceramic bowl. The kitchen smelled sharply of just-cut shallots and simmering fish stock. Jean-Luc, a sixteen-year-old apprentice from a farm in Normandy, was standing by, looking on, until Serge barked, “Go put on a glove and help me!” The apprentice, startled by this unexpected command, turned in a panic, but Lucas, my commis, was ready at his side, helpfully handing him a glove.

No sooner had the earnest boy thrust his hand deep inside the mitten than he screamed and shook his wrist, sending the glove and a bit of sheep’s intestine flying across the kitchen. The entire staff instantly burst out laughing, none more so than the ruddy-faced Serge, who was laughing so hard his entire body jiggled and he had to hold on to the side of the cooking range to steady himself. The apprentice tried to smile and look game, but in fact looked a sickly white, but for his protruding ears, which were a purplish red. Pranks and boxed ears—that was how Serge broke in the young staff.

I had no patience for Serge’s antics at that moment, so I backed out of the kitchen and headed to the spiral staircase, to my office and the accounting department up on the second floor.

Maxine, one of my accountants, her hair in a twist atop her head, smiled warmly as I clunked up the stairs, and I think she was going to say something sweet and coquettish from behind her computer terminal, but at that moment Mehtab, sitting at the desk in the back of the room, said, “Have you not finished with last month’s accounts? My God, Maxine, hurry up.”

Maxine turned toward my sister and snapped, “You gave it to me two days ago, Mehtab. Don’t hand me the data late and then get like that. It’s not fair. I am finishing them as fast as I can.”

I ducked my head down and waved vaguely at the two of them as I quickly crossed the room to my office and shut the door.

Finally alone, I collapsed on the swivel chair behind my desk.

For some minutes I took in Madame Mallory’s floor-to-ceiling collection of antique cookbooks, the valuable archive she had bequeathed to me and which occupied half my office. I took in Auguste Escoffier’s notes, the great chef’s rough ideas for an 1893 Savoy dinner that I had purchased at Christie’s, neatly framed on my desk. I looked at the amusing handwritten note of thanks from President Sarkozy, hanging by the door, cheek by jowl with my honorary degree from the École hôtelière de Lausanne. I looked at all these precious artifacts, always a source of great personal joy, and still I could not avoid the facts.

My hands were shaking.

I was not well.

Chapter Fifteen

I am furious. Just furious.”

Madame Verdun, shocked by her own vehemence, quickly turned her attention back to the coffee table to pour us a smoky tea from china that had once belonged to her grandmother. She sat at the edge of the white silk couch exquisitely embroidered with birds-of-paradise, and the image I have now is of an angry woman sitting stiff-backed and erect in a cloud of black chiffon, her hair an intricate cocoon of finely spun strands, translucent in the light, as if a chef had taken a blowtorch to sugar and woven threads of the candied filaments through her hair.

Through the French doors behind the widow, the garden was a riot of color—camellias and wood sage and flowering bilberry—and I tried not to let my attention drift over her shoulder to this enchanting scene outside. But I most confess I was unsuccessful, as finches and squirrels darted back and forth from a bird feeder, as a team of monarch butterflies fluttered drunk through the purple haze of a butterfly bush. It was all so much more attractive than the gloom of Madame Verdun’s private parlor, where Paul’s death hung heavy in the air, where the stone floor was cold and the lights dimmed for a house in mourning.

“I will never forgive him, and when Our Lord calls me home, I will make Paul pay for what he has done. I promise you, that impossible husband of mine, he will get an earful. Or worse.”