Francisco de Assis - a love story

I need to start with Cécile but I'm not sure how to.  
I told my Ma that I'd never put a foot on French soil again, but it was Cécile who pulled me back over the channel, where I honed my classroom french into something more adequate and learned how the other half live.
Swimming pools and marble bathrooms in Essonne, an art déco Haussemann apartment in the 14th arrondissement, a thick stoned house on the banks of the Dronne.  I spent a week in each every summer. 
Cécile couldn't understand why we left our house without locking the door (nothing worth nicking?), she refused to put boots on and cross Marsh Meadow to get down to the river,  she said we cut cheese wrong.  She wore men's aftershave and her grandfather Xavier's linen shirts, embroidered with an X, and came with beautiful gifts which I couldn't match.
She still does, shlepping down from Paris to the arse end of nowhere where we call a chocolatine a chocolatine, castrate the maize and never tell a soul where we find our mushrooms.
She met Assis, in the company of her chaperone grandmother, on a cruise in the fiords which her parent's had orchestrated  in order to do an undercover investigation into her dalliances with a black American heart surgeon who, as they found out,  actually only existed in terms of his blackness. 
Cécile was distraught by her parent's insidiousness but quickly got over it knowing that the Brazilian who'd waited at their table on the ship was in love with her.  
She rebelled against her parents in the sweetest, most subtle way.  It wasn't drugs and rock and roll, but sex with anyone who wasn't wealthy and French. 
She and Assis got married and she did her law stuff while he worked the night shift at the Hotel Lutaetia.
Assis escaped having his throat slit in the Serra Pelada gold mine, crossing the Amazonian forest to get back to his grandmother's house before leaving the favella for the sea.
An escaped gold miner doesn't always dig for gold and being a sincere lover and a loving father is the sweetest and most subtle way of pissing your father in law off.
He also grills a damn good cut of beef.