Fancy French Café

Last night, I went to a fancy French café with my good friend Marie Smith, née Jones. We got dressed up to eat there, as a jacket and tie are de rigeur in that restaurant. I also put on some of my favourite cologne. Marie has such finesse, a sense of joie de vivre and that special je ne sais quoi. She is also a gourmet. À propos of nothing, she asked me if I had tasted the café au lait, the pie à la mode and the potatoes au gratin. I told her I wasn't very hungry and just wanted to taste the hors d'œuvres. She told me that the maître d' was very avant-garde in his menu. In a strange case of déjà-vu, she told me that she had seen our friend Julie with her fiancé. Julie was wearing a plunging décolletage, and an ugly corsage on her lapel. She looked like a femme fatale in a film noir. Very risqué! And he was also wearing a very ugly boutonnière. They looked so gauche! Marie explained that he was nouveau riche; in fact, he was a newly published author who used a nom de plume to write his roman à clef. I was enjoying our little tête-à-tête when our dinner arrived. "Bon appétit," Marie wished me. During dinner, the talk turned to politics. There had recently been a coup d'état in a Latin American country. She explained to me how the bourgeoisie felt that this was a cause célèbre and wanted to adopt an attitude of laissez-faire. She also told me some off-colour jokes, which I won't repeat here, but I will tell you that they were full of double entendre. Finally, at the end of the evening, we had the pièce de résistance: a dessert of crèpes Suzette, poire Belle-Hélène, and crème bruléé . At the end of the evening we bid each other adieu, and promised to meet again before Julie's wedding. Which reminds me, I forgot to RSVP!