Le mariage

the long version

"In Le Mariage, Diane Johnson gives us a comedy of contemporary mores and manners that celebrates the paradoxes of marriage...as it is perceived on both sides of the Atlantic. Anne-Sophie is a proper young Frenchwoman engaged to Tim Nolinger, a struggling American journalist who is hot on the trail of a breaking story: the theft of a valuable illuminated manuscript from a private collection in New York. Rumor has it that the manuscript may be in the hands of Serge Cray, a reclusive film director living on the outskirts of Paris. As Tim, Anne-Sophie, a pair of American antique dealers, and one amorous member of the local gentry converge on the Cray home - a chateau rumored to have once belonged to Madame du Barry - Clara Holly, Cray's Oregon-born wife and a former actress, is propelled into a Kafkaesque nightmare: She stands accused of desecrating a national monument. Add to that a disappearing American; a hunting contretemps; a wrongful arrest; murder; and various suspicions, seductions, domestic crises, and declarations of love that send both hosts and houseguests into erotic tailspins."--BOOK JACKET.