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horns. That’s the hourvari. It means the deer has pulled one of its tricks to confuse the hunt and they’re stuck. Usually, they take the hounds back to the point where the scent was strong and see if they can figure it out from there. For everyone not on a horse, it’s a time-out.”
    Farther down the lane they came across a lively alfresco cocktail party. Cars were pulled up haphazardly with trunks open, while people in dark green loden or Barbours milled around with glasses, gesticulating with long sandwiches made from baguettes and the riches of the terroir. The atmosphere was even more aggressively jovial than an art gallery opening.
    Capucine was far less than pleased at the idea of running the gauntlet between the parked cars. The bubble of her bucolic contentment had already been rudely popped, and now she was going to be subjected to one of those horrible country moments when people she had no memory of would know all there was to know about her. Perfect strangers would tell her how much she had grown and what a pretty little woman she had become. She felt like screaming. Miraculously, Alexandre saved the day.
    “You old dog!” a voice rang out. Alexandre replied with the exuberant whoop he reserved for his best cronies. His interlocutor was dressed in the standard getup of hunt followers, loden overcoat, corduroy britches buckled just below the knee, and muddy green Wellington boots. What set him apart was an entirely incongruous flowing white beard and a brightly colored silk kerchief tied around his neck. The general effect was of a wild man of the mountain in borrowed clothes.
    The two embraced warmly with loud back thumping. The newfound friend held Alexandre at arm’s length and exclaimed, “You, here of all places! Drink this immediately. It’s something I’ll bet you don’t get every day. A true Domfrontais Calvados, one-third pear brandy and two-thirds Calvados.”
    Appreciatively sipping his Domfrontais, Alexandre introduced his long-lost friend to Capucine. He was an artist who specialized in etchings and oils of hunt scenes.
    “I’d heard you’d married, but I didn’t believe it. But now that I am confronted by the plenitude of madame’s pulchritude, the scales fall from my eyes,” the artist said, bowing from the waist and performing a perfectly executed baisemain .
    After three tiny silver timbales of the Domfrontais—which struck Capucine as packing even more of a punch than regular Calvados—they heard the warble of the horns again.
    The “ bien aller! ” An excited ripple went through the crowd. This time it was the artist who explained to Alexandre, “They’re off. The hounds have found again. Time to get going.” Cars were started, baskets were thrown pell-mell into trunks, and the crowd moved off in an excited procession, leaving a faint gray haze of exhaust fumes.
     
    For the second day in a row, the afternoon ended at the Pharmacie Homais. This time it was for another sacred duty of every French pharmacist: supreme arbiter of mushrooms. Homais carefully spread Alexandre’s harvest on a table and picked through them one by one until he finally wrinkled his nose, put one aside, and studiously washed his hands with great thoroughness.
    “ Amanite vireuse, ” he said as solemnly as an oncologist announcing a particularly pernicious form of cancer. “Not quite as lethal as its cousin, Amanite phalloïd, but it will definitely do the job. Mind you, it looks almost exactly like an Agaricus silvicola, which is what all of these are,” he said, pushing a number of mushrooms into a pile. “Even a very experienced collector could easily have been fooled. Everything else in your basket is guaranteed to be perfectly healthy.”
    Capucine looked very closely at the poisonous mushroom isolated at the edge of the desk and could see no difference whatsoever from its “guaranteed” brethren.
    “I wrote an article about this particular killer just last year,” Homais continued,