But Olivier, Lord Migraine. He was aglow, his cheeks red, wreathed in smiles. He wiped the corner of his eye. He declared, good grief, he had come home. It was the greatest evening of his life. And when he left they made a space and he came down toward me in all his glory like a bride.

BY THE TIME of our arrival in Connecticut, the once detestable Parrot could have no other name than Friend. He was certainly imperfect, as friends must always be, often very irritating, but he had aligned himself against the mob, suffered both jail and Philadelphia, ministered to my pain, and made me laugh. When, on the carriageway of Old Farm, he pushed me violently, in full view of our hosts, I knew myself the object of a strange and savage love.

My noble blood urged me tell him, All is well dear old fellow, I have caught her eye, she has brushed my hand, and yet every single action I performed was calculated to hide from him the truth.

He was my most unusual friend, but he had first been the marquis's man, and he could not possibly have occupied this post so long without honestly delivering what was asked of him. As was clear on the first night I saw him in Versailles, he was a specialized creation. Under the marquis's influence he had become convict, maid, architect, cartographer and botanist, although never anything but what the marquis wanted. He may have been an ultra-royalist spy. He had been Monsieur's clerk and secretaire. He had, this very year in Paris, packed his trunk with carbon paper, and who knows what other materiel d'espionnage. He had been dispatched to America to protect me, yes, but also the Garmont name, a task that involved, more than anything, alerting my mother to affairs of the heart.

As I hope I have made clear, my mother was a religious woman, an ultra-royalist and an aristocrat, but in certain matters she could be as shockingly direct as a peasant. She would never ask her servant, Is Olivier enjoying himself, but rather Is she a Protestant? and Ont-ils baise?

In my letters I could make the most exquisite American woman appear repulsive to her eyes, but I could not expect M. Perroquet to dissemble on my behalf.

I had already been careless and indiscreet, but until we arrived at the top of the hill and looked down across Old Farm, and I beheld the great acres and gentle hills spread before us, and the arm and elbow of the Connecticut River embracing the onion fields, the deep alluvial soil, the fat red Friesians at pasture, only then-well before the town meeting-did I realize how seriously my courtship might be taken. This was not Versailles. It was not a question of crossing the boulevard de la Reine in search of les plaisirs anglais.

Thus I had entered Old Farm with that prickling feeling in my neck, such a frisson as when walking tipsy along the high walls of the Seine at night. When I heard the cello I knew I could easily fall and break my neck.

In brushing this young woman's hot hand I was flirting with something that was unimaginable, and if I had fallen in love with America generally, then I was both engaged and disturbed by the daring and beauty of Amelia Godefroy. I found myself almost numb with desire and terror. At any serious level, such a liaison would be unthinkable, but there was no other level from which to choose.

To arrange to meet and talk together in private would, in France, have been a matter of some complication, but America was not France. In the United States, Protestant doctrines combined with a very free constitution and a very democratic social state; in no other country was a girl left so soon or so entirely to look after herself. There were no chaperones to deceive. There was no great difficulty in arranging to walk with Amelia Godefroy. I did not misunderstand this walk at all, for in truth I had gone on certain other walks and had observed that the American girl never completely ceases to be in control of herself. She enjoys all the permitted pleasures without losing her head to any of them. And her reason does not loosen the reins even though she often seems to hold them loosely.

In short, I had no one to deceive but my own servant who would still be sleeping at the hour appointed.

The morning was cool, and the ghostly cattle walked in a blanket of mist which lay across Amelia Godefroy's own small herb garden and wrapped itself around her pastel cloak. Her raw woolen bonnet revealed a perfect oval face with very definite brows. Her nose, she might forgive me saying, was somewhat pink, but that was as befitted the climate, and it was a very nicely shaped nose sitting attentively above a perfectly swollen upper lip. She had been cutting thyme as I approached, but now she set her basket on the stile.

For a moment neither of us said anything, and in that extraordinarily familiar silence, a dove cooed. She laughed frankly, then was embarrassed and drew on her gloves.

"Perhaps I can show you my father's landscaping. It is best I call it that, or else you might not notice that anything had been done. My father," she said, not caring to hide the mischief in her eyes, "wishes to prove that man can be civilized without geometry. He has a thesis"-how I adored that lip-"but it is much more pleasant to walk through the landscape than listen to its explanation."

Soon the pair of us were plunging into the Godefroys' neglected grasses which were, in all their autumnal collapse, an extraordinary contrast to his barbered trees. These last he had gathered in two elegant platoons of perhaps twenty each, standing at attention in a field of late-mown grass. The design allowed low-lying reddish shrubs to exist in a territory between the wild and the cultivated, and these were arranged with borders which sometimes pushed their way like a coastline into the lawn and at other times into wild grass. In this same mood the master had embraced the natural forests, added water features, paths, and carriage roads, all in a way that would blend in with the natural beauty. Even the gardeners' cottages seemed to grow out of the natural surroundings. In my mind I saw my mother's eyes, as they might, in appalled triumphant secret, seek mine across a dinner table.

Miss Godefroy had led me to the tamped yellow path along the river. "Tell me where you live," she asked. The path was so narrow we must be careful not to bump each other and we were as careful and careless as you might expect. "I have never been to France. I cannot imagine what it must be like."

"We live very much in the past, I fear." I spoke not quite sincerely, for I affected to mock my country, a bad habit for a French commissioner, but one learned on the job. And yet I spoke truly for we French had not yet cleared a way forward from the past. We were stuck in the slough between what had been and what might be possible, and whatever avenue we sought was mired with mud and blood and the horrors of misrule. We fiddled here. We fiddled there. And all the while the great lava flow of democracy came inexorably toward us.

"I was thinking last night of your fields," she said softly, "and how they have surely been farmed for centuries, so there must be-am I right?-a certain softness to the contours, even the hedges and ditches."

When last night had she thought this? Lying in her bed? My ditches?

We pushed on along the river, heedless of where we might arrive. Yes, I thought, she imagines our fields very well. "Your town meeting rather shook me to my bones," I said. "I am still reverberating."

I thought, I should not have said reverberating. I might as well say I dreamed about her all night long.

I felt myself blushing, which of course only made it worse. "What exactly are we discussing, Miss Godefroy?"

"Democracy in America," she said. "You were interrogating me."