"This is your daughter, Madame?" asks Vidocq.

"Our maid," says Mother, in a voice stiff as whalebone.

"Ah, I see loveliness is a prerequisite of living chez Carpentier." His lips graze the knuckles of the young woman's hand. "What pretty fingers. Like precious corals strewn across a beach."

Charlotte's face, I should say, is always a kind of mottled coral, from bending over fires and clambering up stairs. At this moment, though, something violet bleeds up through the strata of skin. Mother, no fool herself, steps forward and, in the tone used by elderly marquises with dustmen, thanks Vidocq for bringing her son home to her.

"Why, think nothing of it! " he cackles. "It was my dearest-"

"Good day, Monsieur."

He's still there when the door closes on him-scratching his ribs, twisting his mouth.

"So nice to make your acquaintance," I hear him say from the other side.

There is nothing shining in Mother's face, but there seldom is. I can recall her laughing only four times in my life. (Four times more than my father.) Hers is a face for storing time in. Even her limestonecolored eyes, which must once have been beautiful, seem layered with years in some precise and biologically determinable way, like a shelf of sedimentary rock.

"We had no idea where you were," she says.

"I know."

"You might have left a note."

"I am very sorry, Mother."

"As if I don't have enough to do without wondering if you're dead or dying or I don't know what. As if I don't . . ."

She seizes a shawl from the nearest hook, and her voice, when it comes back, is low and snappish, like something prodded out of its corner.

"Well, take your coat off, for goodness' sake. Naturally, your boots are filthy. Never mind, there's no time to brush them. Our guests are seated for dinner."

Fr om the momen t we first had to take in boarders, Mother persisted in calling them guests. Behind this affectation, I've always believed, lies a thin dry vein of hope. Guests leave, don't they?

Whereas the three young men crowded round our dining table give every evidence of staying. Forever, possibly. In the beginning, Mother had vowed never to take students because she had heard they eat too much bread. But in the Latin Quarter, you don't get much choice in the matter. Students are as numerous as the stars, as ineradicable as rats.

These three arrived in a pack of their own: stout comrades from the ecole de Droit. They immediately took the liberty of calling my mother Mama, a name she loathes but feels obliged to answer to. Their names are unimportant. (I'll forget them, anyway, as soon as I'm gone.) Let us call them by their defining traits, beginning at the bottom of the power chain with Lapin. Rabbity face, rabbity soul. Next, Rosbif, named for his favorite meat (too expensive to be served here) and for the way he dines on the f lesh of others. Finish with Nankeen, named for the elephant-leg nankeen trousers he sports in the summer, with stirrups of rust-colored braid. The son of a Rouen magistrate, Nankeen is the wealthiest of our boarders, which means that, for 1,500 francs a year, he gets to sleep in my father's old bedroom (with whomever he has brought back with him that evening). Also, he gets to take his coffee in the courtyard, beneath the lindens.

Tonight, the three students are engaged in the preprandial ritual of baiting Mother's fourth tenant: a retired professor of botany, fully eight decades along. The students call him Father Time. This is not an honorific. Father Time wears a ragged necktie and polishes his shoes with egg yolk. For the last year, he has been selling off his orchid volumes, one by one, to pay the rent and even so is two months behind. Mother might have evicted him long ago, but he is an old friend of the family, although neither he nor my mother ever speaks of days past.

"Father Time! " shouts Rosbif. "You've got something in your beard, old boy."

"What'd you-I didn't quite-"

In addition to his other infirmities, Father Time is nearly deaf. He used to bring an ear trumpet to the table, but the students took to tossing croutons into it.

"There! " cries Rosbif. "I've got it! Why, I do believe it's a grub. Imagine, gentlemen, a whole colony of fauna living in Father Time's beard."

"Call the exterminator," says Lapin.

"No, too hasty, my friend! We must call in France's greatest scientists. There are species here entirely unknown to man."

"Charlotte," says Mother, gently unfolding her napkin. "The pears look delicious."

This is her way of changing a subject. It is also her way of cloaking her own economies, for she is most lavish in praising what has cost her the least. The pears, for instance, cost two liards apiece. The potatoes were bought (slightly rotten) for ten sous. The mutton she personally haggled down to a franc and fifty centimes. She will praise them in that order.

"Thank you, Madame."

Charlotte's voice is barely audible as she circuits the table. How distracted she is ! She must still be feeling Vidocq's lips on her hand. I watch her wandering out of the room, only to wander right back in. I watch her pour cream into Lapin's wineglass. And when she tries to take my plate before I've even started eating, I finally have to tap her on the wrist.

She gives me a private grin, and I give her one back. Because I don't know what she's about to do.

"Monsieur Hector," she announces, "has had quite the adventure today."

One by one, the three students tilt up their faces, set their knives down. The room grows still.

Mother moves swiftly.

"Hector has been hounded for an entire afternoon," she says, "by a perfectly dreadful man. Who smells of spirits and bear grease and I can't even say what all else."

A few more seconds pass as the students decide whether this resolves the question or merely suspends it. They are just reaching for their knives again when Charlotte's stage whisper stops them in midmotion.