In memory of Eric Breindel, a true friend.

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My romance with Paris begins, as one says of earthquakes, at an epicenter—surrounded by tall, turn-of-the-century buildings, a small empty park, and silent avenues. This is how I always pictured Paris as an adolescent, before ever seeing it. A marchand de tabacs who would sell me cigarettes without asking questions; a pâpeterie where I could buy a longed-for Pelikan pen; the smile of girls outside a vaguely imagined lycée; a secret rendezvous at the cinema.

Before I had ever set foot there, France was already my homeland, the place to which I knew I would eventually return. But everything stood in my way, starting with the fact that in the early 1960’s, roughly the time of which I am speaking, my family was still living in Alexandria, Egypt, decades away from 1960’s Paris. There were other inconvenient circumstances as well: many adult members of my family, although educated as French-speakers in the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, had somehow managed to become not French but Italian citizens. Then, too, I myself had gone to English schools throughout my childhood and hence knew English better than French—despite the fact that my mother tongue was French, which I spoke with a strange accent. (This was part of my problem all around, seeing that I spoke several languages with a French accent, except French.)

Here I was, a Jewish boy landlocked in Nasser’s anti-Semitic Egypt, yearning to be back in a France I had never seen and did not even belong to. As we were losing our fortune, and the Egyptian police closed in on us with house inspections, harassing phone calls at night, anonymous letters, secret denunciations, what could be better than to sit at the window in my great-aunt’s bedroom at night and imagine myself staring at the Seine—which, she never tired of telling me when she joined me and glued her forehead to the window pane, flowed ever so close to her old apartment in Paris? “Can you actually see the Seine from your windows?,” I would ask. “No, but it’s scarcely seven minutes away.” And then she would recite the refrain of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem, le pont Mirabeau:

Let the night fall and the hours ring
The days go away, I remain.

(translation by Richard Wilbur)

It was of those “scarcely seven minutes away” that I kept thinking during my last months in Egypt as we sold what we could and packed the rest amid daily squabbles between my mother and her mother-in-law and an aunt who could not help taking sides and always picked the wrong one. I learned to understand in the course of those days that there are places on the planet we simply must accept we shall never see again. I thought that place was Egypt. Little did I know that, as happens to men who repeatedly lose women for the same reason, there are families who will lose their homes at least once every generation.

I remember exactly the French authors, old and new, I was reading back then: Molière, François Mauriac, Alain-Fournier, Jean Anouilh, Georges Duhamel, Albert Camus. Like the window in my aunt’s bedroom, they looked out onto what seemed the most distantly adjoining spot on earth. All I needed to do was read a sufficient number of pages and I could almost be there, in André Gide’s Paris or Marcel Pagnol’s Marseilles, the imagined sound of France blending with the perpetual yelling in Arabic that rose up to my room from the street below.

There was another book that appeared from nowhere one day, mixed in among the volumes my father had dumped in a pile in the packing room, a book I assumed he had no need of but later understood he must have left around in the manner of parents who want their sons to know certain things before they find out about them from more direct and less desirable sources. I devoured it, it devoured me. Each sentence opened up a world so vast and so thrilling that at the end of each night’s perusal I wished I could forget everything I had just read so as to discover it afresh the next morning.

“You will find,” I read on one of the pages, “that, when you’re about fourteen or older, should you happen to be walking about at night, certain overdressed women may come up to you and ask you to accompany them. It is better that you do not.”

I was fourteen. But who were these women, and why had none ever approached me? And why was I not already in France where overdressed women came up from under the cover of night and asked you to accompany them? I looked out the window at my imagined Seine with its imagined bridges and quais that stood seven minutes away from our new home. But this was not Paris; this was still Alexandria.

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During our last days in Egypt I learned to my shock that our destination was not to be my imagined Paris but some down-to-earth, working-class neighborhood in Rome. Thus we ended up—my mother, my brother, and I, for my father still remained behind in Egypt—in Italy. We knew no one, barely spoke the language, and did not know where to shop, or how. At night, feeling totally hemmed in by this country we could not love or fathom, we would close the shutters to stave it off. But Italy would not go away: from the buildings surrounding our courtyard there came each evening the echo of an entire society tuned to the same television channel. Sometimes the noise arose from a nearby movie theater, which, on warm summer nights, opened its roof to allow us to hear the roar of laughter or the dubbed voice of Sean Connery. When school started that fall, our twilit street turned sordid, with its grimy groceries, the coffee merchant whose dark quarters looked more like a cave than a shop, the corner bar filling up with workers stopping for wine on the way home from work. How could this be my homeland?

Then came a miracle. My father, who after leaving Egypt had found a temporary job in France, summoned us for a two-week visit during the winter holiday break, pour voir, just to see. He made our visit seem a mere stopover, Paris on consignment. More than three decades later, I can remember what we did on each and every one of those fifteen days.

I remember my first visit to the Latin Quarter, where I went with my older girl cousins and their fiancés, all undergraduates and all, apparently, Parisians. On a rainy weekday afternoon we whizzed through narrow streets crowded into two tiny Citroën “deux chevaux” to catch a Humphrey Bogart revival. One of us jumped out to purchase tickets, another to find snacks, while the rest looked for parking places. After the movie we stopped at a café where everyone ordered tea.

Another day, on our way to buy cigarettes for everyone, my cousin took me into a record shop. She was looking for Bach’s double-violin concerto. Sitting in a tiny booth, we stole a few minutes to listen to the recording with David Oistrakh as the principal soloist. She found it not to her liking. Did they have Menuhin? They did not. We went across the street, where they had neither Oistrakh nor Menuhin but they did have Heifetz—the best, according to the salesgirl. No, thanks. For the next two weeks, we listened to violinist after violinist. To this day the sound of the double concerto brings to mind those heady first encounters with Paris, when I watched for signs of snow that never came and fell in love with the cool grayness that settled over the city at teatime, presaging evenings when we would crowd into the car and tour Paris-by-night, invariably ending our adventure with crêpes, onion soup, and Vichy candies.

Was it Paris or just the stuffed car and the good fellowship of cousins I had not seen in at least a decade that made me feel I was here to stay? The streets bustling with people my age who spoke my language; the spirited jokes; the movie theaters filled to capacity—this was not just the center of the world, or even the center of my life, it was me. It was my voice, if not when I spoke then something clearer and deeper, as when I laughed. Perhaps it was not even a voice but a manner of being in the world that made me love that world and, come to think of it, myself as well.

When after about four days we finally visited my great-aunt in the 16th arrondissement, it was like walking into our old home in Alexandria—smaller, to be sure, but the exact same kind of home: the same feel, the same smell, the same familial injunctions to be quiet and mind our manners. But this apartment was like a finished version of the rough sketch that had been our home in Alexandria. If Egypt was the base melody, Paris was the full orchestral score, an entire city beaming with the glory of a redeemed déjà vu. Like Saint Augustine thinking back to the time when he had not yet known God, only to wonder why he could not have loved Him sooner, so I too asked: why wasn’t I born here, why can’t I live here, when will it happen?

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My father had said these two weeks were to be a tryout. But preliminaries were totally unnecessary. I was ready to settle in at a moment’s notice. One night, in a tiny park not far from my great-aunt’s, my father pointed out two girls in their mid-teens: “I’ll bet you anything they live in the neighborhood; they probably go to Lycée Janson de Sailly.” Immediately, I wanted to be in school.

I was too young to know how to seize any opportunities that might have come my way. But presentiments of romance were everywhere. From the way women looked at me, I could tell that this was a language whose syntax I already knew fluently; all I needed was the vocabulary. And then, of course, there were those overdressed women who under cover of night would surely come up and ask me to accompany them. They were the reason I could not wait for the chance to be on my own in Paris—no easy task, since so many relatives were hosting us. But my great-aunt finally gave me my opening. In her refrigerator, she liked to keep bottles of water taken from the Lamartine fountain down the block, an artesian well whose water Jacques Hillairet, in his Dictionnaire Historique des rues de Paris, had described as having an insipid taste (“un goût fade”). She assigned me the job of keeping them filled.

Never has anyone managed to turn so simple an errand into so time-consuming a task. There were always people at Square Lamartine, including others my age probably doing the same thing as I for their grandparents or parents. Wedged among them as I waited my turn at the fountain, I became not only a real Parisian but a young Jacob, waiting to meet his Rachel at the well of Beer-Sheba. Next time, I thought, as, day after day, I failed to muster the courage to speak. I came every day, sometimes twice, sitting on a bench and reading when the weather was not too cold, dawdling to watch the sun set and the last girls leave before dragging home the heavy bottles stuffed into two plastic net bags. Over tea one evening, my aunt said she was convinced I was smoking, while my grandmother opined that I was just slow and my mother that I must be losing my place to aggressive housewives. As for my father, he credited me with cunning schemes I let him think were successful.

When, by early January, it became clear that we had to return to Rome, I felt I would die before I could board the train. It was leaving on a Saturday evening, and would arrive in Rome on Sunday afternoon; on Monday we would be back in school. All I could think of on my last day at Lamartine was that Sunday evening in Rome—opening our suitcases, putting everything back in its dull place in an apartment from whose shuttered windows indelible sounds would make it impossible to imagine we were still in Paris, even though our suitcases would still smell of Paris, and the sound of Bach would remind me of Paris, as would the cheap pens with the sliding Eiffel Tower I was planning to buy before leaving or the punched métro ticket and the residual pack of Vichy candies stuffed inadvertently into my coat pocket and recovered weeks into our humdrum Roman lives. I thought of Square Lamartine and of the fountain that was right in front of me, but already no longer so. What in Egypt had seemed almost a dream had come to life, only to become a dream again.

Perhaps, I thought, in a few days, it would help to look back on this very moment and also on the weeks leading up to it, when I was still enjoying myself in Paris and was still unaware of the sorrow that inevitably comes from looking back. Perhaps, by rehearsing all this in advance, I might even, in some strange way, dull the pain. The fountain would stay, I would be gone. (“The days go away, I remain.”) But at least I had anticipated it; at least I knew.

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At the Gare de Lyon, my father boarded the train to say good-bye. He urged me not to be sad: there would be many more chances to visit. I looked out the window. I had no way of knowing that this was only the first time I would think I was seeing Paris for the last time.

For the next three years, following my Christmas, Easter, and summer vacations, I would find myself on the same exact platform on a Saturday evening, saying good-bye to Paris, worrying lest my father not get off the train in time, trying to convince myself this had indeed been our last visit so as to ward off the hope and the disappointment whenever I would catch myself, later in Rome, wanting to be in Paris with nothing to turn to for consolation but my French books. Each time, in the days leading up to that parting moment at the Gare de Lyon, I would ask for very little of Paris—just a replay of my original heady two weeks. Like Stendhal, who would drop a little twig in a spring in Salzburg and return months later to find it covered with speckling crystals, I too would return to Paris to find that the memory of my first visit had been thoroughly crystallized in Square Lamartine.

Not a day went by that I failed to log my impressions there, the better to remember them in Rome, knowing that, by cheating Paris of its magic, by numbing the pleasure of the moment with constant reminders of the unavoidable trip back, I was mitigating, if not averting, the shock of departure. It was my way of preempting tomorrow’s worries by making tomorrow seem yesterday, of warding off adversity by warding off happiness as well. In the end, I actually learned not to enjoy going to Paris, or even to enjoy being there—because I enjoyed it too much.

It drove my brother insane, this in-a-week-from-now-we’ll-be-in-Rome-remembering-everything-we-said-and-did-in-Paris routine of mine. I was like a dying man taking detailed mental notes of sunlight, faces, foods, places, emotions, not only to remember them better when he reaches the hereafter but to give himself the impression of being still rooted in the past and capable of leaving a patch, an afterimage, like one of the shadows imprinted on the bridges of Hiroshima. To this day my brother knows Paris better than I ever will, although I know one tiny corner better than many Parisians. The Paris I cultivated was a Paris one need not stay in too long. It was a Paris made to be yearned for and remembered, a Paris for the mind.

One evening, many years later, on the way to my Paris hotel, I heard a voice behind me and turned to see a girl no older than nineteen come out of the dark and ask the question I would once have given anything to hear a woman say. I shrank back, as one does with a beggar who has come too close and to whom one hands a coin without touching hands. I had long ago learned to prefer the imagined encounter, or the memory of the imagined encounter, to the encounter.

Now, whenever I say good-bye to Paris, I do so without making trouble. At the airport, I do not think this is the last time I’ll ever return. I am, I tell myself, happy to be going home. I open a book, talk to my fellow passengers, watch the news. I never, ever look back. Am I aware that the loves we decline to look back upon are those we are not certain we have overcome? In that sense, Lot was far guiltier than his wife: fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah, she just turned her head; he made a point not to.

The final irony is that I eventually learned to love Rome and, later, New York. Not just because they were homes of last resort—as with arranged marriages, these, I am told, make the best homes—but because in them, over the years, I have been able to find the shadow of an imagined and remembered Paris, one that never gels, and always hovers, forever transposed and forever unreal.

Thus, I look out from a friend’s window on Riverside Drive, catch sight of a Circle Line boat moving up the Hudson, and before I can express a thought, my friend does it for me. “Oh, yes, we know, it’s a bâteau-mouche on the Seine, and you’re in Paris thinking of being on Riverside Drive longing to be in Paris.”

Last Christmas, I called a close friend to let her know my wife and I would be away for a bit—we were going to Paris. In my usual manner I said I did not like traveling, I never found Paris relaxing, I would much rather stay in New York and imagine having wonderful dinners in Paris. “Yes, of course,” she agreed, already annoyed. “Since you’re going to Paris, you don’t want to go to Paris. But if you were staying in New York, you’d want to be in Paris. But since you’re not staying, but going, just do me a favor.” Exasperation bristled in her voice. “When you’re in Paris, think of yourself in New York longing for Paris, and everything will be fine.”

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And that is precisely what I did. We walked around, went to the stores, visited this or that place. But the one thing I wanted to do—namely, return to the Paris of my adolescence—I kept delaying because I could not rest until I had done it, but did not want to do it too soon. I knew that once I had revisited my sites, Paris would hold no further interest for me.

My wife was hardly unfamiliar with this Paris of mine. I had brought her there ten years earlier on our honeymoon, and again three years later with our then-ten-month-old son. I had wanted to show her the house where my great-aunt lived, and the walks we sometimes took together, and the fountain where I would go with empty bottles to watch the girls.

I still remember how, on the first day of our honeymoon in Paris, walking along the grand avenues of the 16th arrondissement, staring at the litup buildings with their promise of intimate gatherings, I had begun to tell my wife about my first sojourn in Paris and of my thwarted love for the city to which I would return so often during my years in Rome, each time summoning up the memory of my prior visit or anticipating my next, leaving almost no room for the visit itself. We walked to the Place de Barcelone, stood and faced Pont de Grenelle, not far from Pont Mirabeau, and I pointed out the small-scale Statue of Liberty that is a reverse imitation of the one in New York, thinking to myself how things get boxed into each other and how cities and bridges and parks, like far-flung cousins, become mirror images of their replicas.

When we reached La Muette, one of my favorite spots, I told my wife about the royal falcon house after which the neighborhood is named—from the verb muer, to molt—and of how, centuries ago, this was where the king’s birds were brought each year to shed their feathers. As we walked, I began to wonder what the opposite of molting was and why, unlike the body, which sheds everything, the soul cannot let go but compiles and accumulates, growing annual rings around the things it wants and dreams of and remembers. I already knew that in years to come I would turn back to this very evening at La Muette and remember how I had come there with my wife on our honeymoon and how, with her, I had remembered the young man who walked these same sidewalks trying to find a Paris he did not know he had invented.

And now, here we are on the same spot, no longer newlyweds, thinking to ourselves how much and how very little things have changed since our last visit. We are having a late lunch, in the exact same café on the Place du Trocadéro where we lunched a decade ago, and without thinking we have ended up ordering the same meal. I suspect my wife knows where we are headed, though I have not told her yet, nor have I told her that we are to visit not just the old building where my great-aunt lived but the tiny park as well.

The sky as always is a silver gray, and the city is in full ferment as we leave the café down the unavoidable route toward the old apartment. I recognize the silence that descends over that wonderful corner of the 16th arrondissement late on a weekday afternoon as children come home from school, bookbags and all, accompanied by a cluster of babysitters who trail behind as their charges scamper quietly ahead. And there—I do it each time—I look up to the fifth floor where my great-aunt and my grandmother used to live. I can still remember the last time I visited this building with my wife.

Of course, as my wife and I both know, I have already reported that self-same visit in my book, Out of Egypt. What makes the present situation all the more uncanny is that earlier today, wandering into one of my favorite foreign-language bookshops on the Rue de Rivoli, I had asked for the book—with studied nonchalance, as authors do. I wanted to find out whether they had the British paperback edition, which I had never seen. The salesclerk, who had no idea who I was, turned out to be familiar with the title but reported she could not locate the book on the shelves. I was browsing in another section entirely when suddenly she came rushing up. “Monsieur, I’ve found it!” Damn! Now I had to purchase my own book, or give away the fact that I had been “testing” the store.

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So here I am, two hours later, walking with my own book in my hand in front of a building described in that book, feeling like Don Quixote in the second part of his novel, or like Wordsworth on revisiting Tintern Abbey, or like Saint-Simon holding in his hand the vile character portrait he had penned of the person on whom he was now lavishing compliment after compliment. I feel nothing. My wife, who in my book asks, “Didn’t you ever want to go upstairs to visit?,” does not speak her lines, and I cannot remember mine and clearly do not want to be caught looking them up now. So we leave the scene quite unsatisfied, knowing we will probably never do this again.

I ask my wife if she minds taking a walk around the vest-pocket park stuck in between the grand turn-of-the-century buildings. I feel like a child asking his harried parents to stop at the window of yet another toy store. But I am taking too long, I do not know what I am looking for, we are both jet-lagged and tired, and any moment now it may start raining. And still no epiphany, nothing, just this rushed, desultory prowling around what seems to be a little fountain in a petit parc that long ago was named Place Victor-Hugo and then became Square Lamartine. What was I looking for, anyway? Crestfallen, I accompany my wife to the nearest métro station.

Four days after our perfunctory visit, on the eve of our departure, I decide to come back alone. I make my rounds again, scouring the scene, trying to squeeze out a droplet of sensation. Nothing. All I remember is coming here four days earlier. It is five o’clock. I could—and the thought races through my mind before I can check it in time—call ahead and then go upstairs for tea.

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Last summer I returned yet again to Square Lamartine, this time with my seven-year-old son. I showed him where I had lived when I was barely seven years older than he, took pictures of him in front of my great-aunt’s building just as I had done with my wife on our honeymoon, then walked around a bit, snapping the park, him playing in the tiny enclosure by the sandbox, the adjoining buildings, knowing that one day, his passage here, like my wife’s, my brother’s, my father’s, my great-aunt’s, and mine would find a place in this concentric planisphere named Square Lamartine.

My son is playing in the park. There is, of course, no way for him to know what I am thinking. But I am standing there the way my father did when he would take me as a child to his father’s grave in Alexandria because there was no one he would rather be with at that moment. Except that, in my case, I have accompanied my son not so much to a gravesite as to the resting place of a part of my life that was never even lived, a chapter written in invisible ink. In Lamartine’s garden I am still combing the scene, looking for ancient relics and clues, not just memories but generations of memories, deep, artesian memories, the way police inspectors in the movies pick up hair, nails, and lint and drop them with a tweezers into a handkerchief, the way people scour the beaches on summer evenings looking for jewelry that was lost not just that day but many summers before.

As I stare at this tiny park, I think to myself of all I have logged away and why I always feel as though nothing, even when written, remains fixed for too long before it starts to rise from the page, as if it had been but figuratively buried in paper and now aches for life again. I have never learned either to live things or else to let them go.

As if to rescue myself from so disturbing a thought I suddenly remember a literary character I have not brought to mind since leaving Italy three decades ago. It is a character named Astolph from Orlando Furioso, the 16th-century epic poem by Ariosto. This Astolph lands on the moon—in the poem, a giant lost-and-found, bric-a-brac landscape containing everything that was ever lost or ever wished for but never granted. Mankind’s unrealized artifacts litter the lunar surface, and you must thread your way cautiously through the rubble, for vials containing stolen goods and unhatched schemes crackle underfoot, and wasted years and abandoned hopes are strewn about everywhere.

Like Astolph wandering in search of the flask that contains the sanity misplaced by Ariosto’s hero Orlando, what I knew I would find here in this quiet landscape was my whole Paris: the crowded Citroën with my cousins—it was there—the hunt for Bach’s double-concerto—it, too, was there—my love for the métro, Apollinaire’s poem, the Bogart revival, the smell of cigarettes and damp wool coats, the girls whose gaze was unlike any I had met before, the woman who finally came out of the dark only to be shooed away, the plays, the brasseries, the books, down to the late afternoon tea I had conjured the day I came without my wife and thought I was a phone call away from people who had died so long ago, the light drizzle on silver gray days when Paris is awash in traffic lights, my first walk down by the royal falcon house, the day it finally dawned on me that my life had not even started, or that life, like Paris, was little else than a collection of close calls and near misses and that the objects I loved and would never outgrow and wished to take with me would always litter this landscape because they were lost or had never existed, because even the life I had yearned to live when looking out the window with my great-aunt in Alexandria and dreaming of a Seine scarcely seven minutes away was also cast upon this landscape, a past life, a pluperfect life, a conditional life, a life made, like Paris, for the mind. Or for paper.

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