A highlight of any trip to Paris is an unhurried dinner party with friends and/or former colleagues.

This is a very European concept — or at least not an American one. The four- or five-hour meal.

In this case, we were invited to the home of a French couple who are particularly adept at parties of this sort.

I will take you through it, chronologically.

Dinner is at 7 p.m. We arrive at 7:10 and apologize for being early. To arrive on time for a French dinner party is a bit of a faux pas.

After bisous (first left, then right) at the door, we were shown into the living room, where another couple were already waiting. (Our hosts like parties of six, but we rarely know who the other two will be until we arrive.) One was a former colleague of Leah’s, and the other her French husband, who turned out to be a sort of merry provocateur.

We arrived just as the Champagne was being served, a felicitous moment, and after a toast we arranged ourselves around a table upon which were sitting bowls of chips, cashews and an oriental mix.

Then, it was conversation for 20-25 minutes, ranging from one side of the globe to the other, followed by the quiet departure of our hostess to the kitchen. She returned with a very interesting appetizer plate — strips of smoked salmon placed on dabs of herbed cream cheese on the thick end of stalks of endive.

Those were very good. I had a half-dozen, and that could have been dinner.

Around 8 or so, we were invited to the table, and our hostess politely directed where we would sit. This is also a very French thing (or perhaps just nicely old-fashioned): Spouses are not allowed to sit with each other, to encourage conversation with others, and it usually works quite well.

Meantime, our host was in the kitchen, finishing the main course: Coquille St. Jacques,  scallops sauteed and served with a wine-and-cream sauce seasoned with, perhaps, some onion. Our host apparently does most of the cooking at his home, and he served out the scallops, and our hostess served the accompanying Ebly — a white durum wheat rice that isn’t found often outside of France. (I had to look that up.)

It was very good, and not as rich, seemingly, as I normally expect scallops to be.

This was served with a Chardonnay (white) and Gigondas (red), and a second red, a Saint-Emilion.

Conversation continued apace, with two of us talking about Abu Dhabi and the UAE, and another of the guests telling us about the book she is about to have published, on her family’s converso heritage. We had many questions for her and we look forward to reading her book.

We veered into the recent France elections, which produced a new president, and someone remarked that Francois Hollande was as short as the previous president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and that generated discussion. “They are both short next to Obama.” … “Hollande was perhaps shorter.” … “But Sarkozy wears high heels, so one cannot be certain …”

Most of this was in English, the second language for three of the six people. Since my puny French would limit me to having a notion of the topic, but unable to follow much else, they shifted to my language; these are progressive French people.

One of the guests, the voluble Frenchman, was always pushing the conversation, and at some point we were talking about castrati, and he also did his impression of a Texan speaking English, which mostly involved pinching his nose to produce a nasal sound … that did rather sound like a Texan.

After a suitable interim, the cheese course arrived: a Tomme, a Beaufort and a soft cow’s milk cheese that we did not recognize, and a goat cheese covered with raisins. More baguette pieces were produced for that.

(The cheese course is tres francaise, though the Italians sometimes do it, and a wonderful idea. The French will tell you that they not only have a different cheese — more than 365 — for every day of the year, but many are available only “in season.”)

Dessert: Bowls of panna cotta upon which were ladled some of the excellent berries coming on to the market, here in May, including strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries. What a fine combination.

After, came the coffee or the tea, and by now it was 10, and a spring squall had parked itself over the building and it was raining cats and dogs (which led to a discussion of idioms in French — in this case, il pleut des cordes is the equivalent). Once it stopped, two of the guests, who live 40 minutes outside of Paris, in Auvers-sur-Oise (where Van Gogh once lived), left to make the train … and we remained for another hour to talk about … anything that came up.

These particular hosts are very good at this. We have been to their home perhaps four or five times now, and we are fairly sure they have never served the same main course twice. Do they keep a list? Are their diets that varied?

Finally, it was time to go; we needed to catch the Metro before it closed for the night. We made plans to meet later in the week, this time at a restaurant.