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said a word about sending him to our room. Why would she do that? No matter what he told her, she had no right to offer our room to a stranger. And look what happened. He ate our pâté. My husband and I love pâté.”
    The inspector and the doctor, who evidently understood some English but did not speak it, agreed that all sensible people loved Lyonnais pâté and that Yvette’s behavior was suspicious.
    “Perhaps he was a friend of hers, and when she told him about the gift in our room, he wanted to have it,” I suggested. “Then he became ill before he could remove the evidence of his theft. Jason and I would never have known the difference if Monsieur Levasseur had consumed both the champagne and the pâté and disposed of the evidence.”
    “But if that is the case,” said Inspector Roux, “why would she send you to the room when she knows the friend was there enjoying your repast?”
    I thought about that. “To frighten me? She seems a very spiteful woman. And what did she say about the person who brought the pâté to the Charlemagne? Could she describe the delivery man?”
    “Just as a messenger in the green uniform, she said. She could not remember more.”
    Our first courses arrived at that point, and I dipped hungrily into my soup, a thick tomato broth, fresh-tasting and tangy with the exotic flavor added by the strings of ginger. Ginger is another of those many foods once thought to be an aphrodisiac, although professors at the medical school in Salerno during the Middle Ages stated in verse that it was good for all sorts of things. Maybe I should try writing recipes in verse for my columns. Or maybe not. To this pairing of tomatoes and ginger, the small, salty shrimp provided a lovely contrast. And there was crusty French bread. Even as exhausted as I was, I wouldn’t have missed that soup. “The identity of the messenger may be important if Monsieur Levasseur is found to have died from pâté.”
    Both men protested such a blot on the culinary escutcheon of Lyon, but I pointed out that someone might have added poison to the pâté. Where once such a thing would never have occurred to me, I had recently encountered so much crime during my travels that I easily conjured up that scenario.
    “But madam, if that should be so, then you or your husband are the intended victims. Have you enemies in Lyon? At the university?”
    “We hardly know anyone here,” I protested. Albertine Guillot! I thought. Can she be harboring a grudge over her poodle, Charles de Gaulle, who made such a pest of himself in Sorrento that they had to put him in a kennel? Surely not. Albertine and I became friends of a sort before the meeting ended.
    When I finished my soup, the men were being served a second course. I was so upset at the thought that Albertine might have sent us poisoned pâté and then skipped town while we were dying that I called the waitress back and ordered dessert. On my first perusal of the menu, I had noted wistfully a dish called Crousillant aux Framboises. At that time I overcame my interest by reminding myself sternly that I was no longer eating desserts. I had eaten enough desserts on the cruise to last a lifetime.
    But now, with the thought that Albertine might have planned my death by pâté, I needed dessert, and it was delicious, a crispy bag of filo dough, tied at the neck and containing raspberries and almond cream on a plate drizzled with raspberry coulis. Did they bake the cream-and-fruit-filled dough and then run it under the broiler to brown and crisp it? If the men had ordered dessert, I’d probably have had another serving.
    “Let us hope the mysterious Monsieur Levasseur died of natural causes,” said the inspector, who was enjoying a hearty sausage and potato dish. “If not, madam, I will inform you as soon as the doctor discovers the cause of death. In the meantime you and your husband should take care. Eat in restaurants. Give no one access to your food and drink,” he advised. “I