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Luc waved me off. That was the old Luc. The sober Luc. That was before we’d bonded, before the count had come and gone back to Paris. He pushed open the doors and pointed to a table. “Speakerphone,” he said.

The call took all of ten minutes. I was fairly drunk, and there wasn’t a lot to say other than that it was going to be a great spot and, yes, we’d bring the composers back a wheel of Camembert cheese. When we hung up, Luc walked over to the table and plunked down a massive book of maps alongside my brandy glass. “Zees, ees a souzand years old,” he said. But what he meant was “Let’s mess around with zee count’s antiquities.”

We looked at the thousand-year-old map book. We looked at five-hundred-year-old history books. Luc handed us Roman coins from Julius Caesar’s time. An ancient sword. He unlocked boxes of more coins and jewelry. He opened an armoire filled with garments that people wore only in places like Versailles, or a Madonna video. We chased one another around with the swords. We tried things on. It was surreal.

At one point Luc dropped something breakable. Glass, crystal, ceramic—I don’t remember. But he was fairly devastated. The count would not be happy. As he cleaned up the mess, to cheer him up, I may have intimated that Betsy thought he was cute.

Back in the parlor downstairs Luc set to formally wooing Betsy, who was clearly disturbed by this development. Soon after our return the phone rang. Luc answered. It was someone back at the agency in New York. Luc said that they wanted to speak with my boss. “They probably want to know if we can arrange a horse-drawn carriage to meet them on the tarmac when they get off the Concorde,” I said. Everyone stopped to see how the call went down. No matter what, it was a major buzz kill. Because things were going so well and we were having such a good time, we felt New York could only ruin it for us. Plus, we were dreading the ostentatious show of force that was about to descend upon us.

Or not.

Soon after he picked up the phone, my boss’s expression changed. He stopped smiling and his eyes widened. Not with fear, but certainly he looked surprised. “Uh-huh,” he said. And, “You’re kidding me?” And, “Her, too?” And, “What about Keith?” And, “Who else?”

When he hung up, our boss stared at the wall for a moment. “What happened?” we asked. “Who’s coming?”

“No one’s coming,” he answered. “No one is taking the Concorde or any flight from New York to Paris. They’ve all been fired.”

While we had been drinking with Luc and the count and prepping for our shoot, everyone who mattered back at the agency—the president, the creative director, the head of account services, and more—had been whacked. The new management that had recently been put in place had begun a reign of terror. I looked at the count’s family portraits on the walls. Like them, we had temporarily escaped the revolutionary carnage by hiding in the country behind the moat of the Château de Canisy.

The news triggered a flurry of wild speculation about the fate of the rest of the senior management, ourselves, the commercial we were shooting, and the agency itself.

And of course it led to more drinking.

After a while it was as if the call had never happened. Fire everyone as long as we get to stay a few more days in Normandy. It was about this time that Luc began to chase Betsy around an antique dining table and then down a hallway. Later she would knock on our bedroom door again, terrified again, claiming that she could hear Luc breathing in the hall outside her room. I told her not to worry, although earlier I’d thought the eyes in one of the family portraits had followed me across the parlor.

It was like starring in a very special episode of Scooby-Doo.

On acid.

With subtitles.

The next day Kenny and I got up early to drive our wives to a train station twenty kilometers away. We got lost. They missed their train to Paris, and would probably miss their flights back to New York. We had four hours before what is probably the most important part of any production, what my yogurt