It had been a hectic and rather mystifying week in Paris for Monique Calhoun, and the United Nations Annual Conference On Climate Stabilization hadn't even started yet.

She actually felt relief, dutifully guilty relief, but relief nonetheless, that Father was halfway around the world working on some foredoomed project to desalinate the Hanoi marshlands and had taken Mother with him.

Dining at Bayous et Magnolias would be familial duty enough under the trying professional circumstances.  The phone conversation with her parents had made it all too clear what life would have been like had they been in town and she been unable to escape living en famille in her old room in the apartment on the Avenue Emile-Zola.

Out of town or not, they had felt thoroughly snubbed even at half a world's remove when she had thanked them for their kind offer but told them she'd be staying at the Hotel Ritz.

"The family home is no longer good enough for our woman of the world?"

"Really, Maman -"

"How on Earth can you afford a suite at the Ritz?"

"I can't, Father, no human, can.  Bread & Circuses is paying for it.  Do try to remember that this is not a vacation trip back home, I'm here on syndic busiiness!"

"Still, Monique, wouldn't you feel more comfonabie at home?  You'd have the whole place to yourself."

"Of course I would, Maman," Monique had lied.  "But I need the suite at the Ritz for an office."

The latter was at least half true.  Bread & Circuses' Paris branch had two floors in a converted Hausmannian apartment building right behind Trocadéro, she would be using their staff when necessary, and they could have found her office space there.

But she was here to run VIP services, which meant sticking close to her charges, most of whom would be put up at the Ritz or hotels like it.  Besides which, she was authorized to rent herself a first-class suite on the expense account.  It was a sweetheart of a job, but somebody had to get to do it.

The Ritz had been, well, ritzy enough for a couple or so centuries for the word to have passed into several languages, and Monique's suite, though by no means the top the hotel had to offer, had a bedroom approximately the size of her parents' living room, a salon approximately half the size of their entire apartment, and a bathroom larger than her studio apartment in New York.

The suite was decorated in a bizarre mélange of Louis-the-Something-or-Other Rococo and Retro-Deco.  The bathroom was swirling chrome and black marble reminiscent of both the Chrysler Building and classic 1950s Harley-Davidson.  The bedroom ran to burgundy-flocked walls with gilded sconces, an enormous bed canopied and braided in the same color scheme, a huge antique Bokhara rug, a halogenated crystal chandelier, Tiffany incidental lamps, and a ceiling whose fruit-salad moldings and central medallion had been carefully painted in full colors.  The salon mirrored this style in royal blue and gold, with antique eighteenth-century couches and tables choc-a-bloc with Bauhaus chairs and a desk-cum-media-console stunningly packaged in abstractly carved mahogany inlaid with silver Yemenite filigree.