French Family with Twins

Today we took the RER to a distant suburb of Paris (southeast), to visit our friends Marie-Madeleine and Sylvain (both professional musicians), with their children. The twins are three months old--Clothilde on the left and Flavian on the right, with their two-year old brother Grégoire. All as charming as can possibly be!

Marylee and I spent a lot of time holding the twins--wonderfully well-behaved--while the parents prepared our dinner of roast duck. It was a Barbary duck raised by Sylvain's parents, and it seemed the best duck I've ever eaten (a member of the Muscovy duck family). A long walk in the nearby woods finished off a wonderful afternoon.

Marylee met Marie-Madeleine's mother, who is French, when she was studying at Oxford in the late 1960s. Then when Marylee spent 19 months in Paris in 1990-91, Marie-Madeleine, then in her teens, stayed with Marylee when she came to Paris for her weekly classical guitar lessons. Contact lapsed after that, but we reconnected last year when we saw Marie-Madeleine's name listed for a guitar concert in Paris. More on our visit to her parents a year ago is here.

Edit: I just realized the year-earlier blip is a Mallard at the Louvre--a neat coincidence!