When I wasn't at school, I was experimenting at home, and became a bit of a Mad Scientist. I did hours of research on mayonnaise, for instance, and t… - Julia Child

We hit it off immediately, especially Helene, who was a 'swallow-life-in-big-gulps' kind of person.

Come February, all of our off time was spent composing letters for the hundreds of valentines we sent out around the globe. Valentine cards had become a tradition of ours, born of the fact that we could never get ourselves organized in time to send out Christmas cards. With our ever-enlarging network of family, friends, and Foreign Service colleagues, we found that Paul’s hand-designed valentine cards — usually a woodcut or drawing, sometimes a photograph — were a nice way to keep in touch. But they could be labor-intensive. One year’s design was a faux stained-glass window, with five colors in it, each of which had to be hand-painted in watercolors — which took hours. For 1956, we decided to lighten up by doing something different: we posed ourselves for a self-timed valentine photo in the bathtub, wearing nothing but artfully placed soap bubbles.

In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport.