If I’ve been absent from these pages for a few weeks, it’s because I’ve been away. Here. Chez moi.

Staying in a place like Paris can be a joy or a disaster. Over the years I’ve stayed in tiny garret rooms and comfortable hotels; I’ve stayed with friends and in the anonymity of a Méridien hotel. There have been quiet rooms and rooms across the street from all-night bars. I’ve stayed for free and I’ve paid the bill. The last few years I had stayed with a friend who lived around the corner from Place Bastille, but he has moved to Shanghai, so I had to choose where to stay this time. I had recommendations of hotels in the Latin Quarter, in the Marais. There was the cousin of my nieces and nephews, but I don’t know her very well. Dilemme.

The Internet, need one be reminded, is a marvel. On a French vacation site not unlike a Craigslist for holiday rentals, I found a studio flat on the Île Saint Louis. The rent for one week, given the location, was extraordinarily reasonable; I reasoned the 4^th floor sans ascenseur might have something to do with it. But I still didn’t know what to expect, despite the photographs depicting a light, airy room with a courtyard view.

This trip had a great symbolic significance to me: on the first day of summer I became a French citizen. So at the airport as I cheerfully, if groggily, headed for the first time to the line for E.U. citizens, I reminded myself that, administratively to start with, I was French, and this was “my country.” The young woman officer at passport control was laughing with her colleague, barely looked at my Burgundy booklet, waved me on. I would have liked a more official welcome, but her good humor would suffice.

I trundled my luggage from the Saint-Michel métro across the first bridge to Notre Dame; groups of tourists were gathering in the early morning chill, crowds of teenagers from Spain and Italy. Along the rue du Cloître Notre Dame, across a second bridge. My temporary landlady was waiting for me at the corner bistrot and recognized me from my luggage; I followed her halfway down the first pâté de maisons of the Quai d’Orléans, through a blue door into a gloomy, bare foyer that looked as if it had not been redecorated since 1830, through another door into a small garden courtyard, past the concierge’s loge (a real concierge! a dying breed…), into another gloomy foyer, up four flights of stairs where you could clearly see how many times the wooden steps had been partially replaced, once they were well worn to a slippery trough. It was a small adventure out of Alice in Wonderland; it was my homecoming.

The room was warm; the view, if not on the Seine, was quintessential Paris rooftops. Once I had worked out a few logistics with the landlady, met the concierge (a charming older man with a little white mustache), gone to the bank and the local crémerie and the boulangerie and the wine merchant’s, I attacked the four flights and the heavy door with its numerous locks, and walked into my little pied-à-terre with an almost portentous sense of something beginning.
It seemed a pity to watch television, but I was tired and happy to be in a place that was warm and cosy when the outside air was unseasonably, bitingly cold. So I spent the evening drinking wine and eating my cheese and watching a panel discussion about prostitution that was intelligent and enlightened, and not at all prurient or lubricious, merely touching and human—this too seemed somehow peculiarly French. And as the hours passed I began thinking about what it meant to be there for the first time as a citizen.

It’s a bit like getting married. You don’t look different or begin to talk in an odd way (other than to say we instead of I—in the case of marriage, that is) or adopt a silly walk or sprout a beret. You can look and sound French and not be French (a mistake people often made about me, before the first day of summer); you can be French yet not have a village or a terroir or memories of certain childhood songs or the nostalgia that goes with belonging to a country and a native tongue.

And yet as I write this I remember that the first foreign country I ever visited at the age of seven was France, and that I do have a whole collection of Proustian memories—the taste of butter and peach jam on baguette; the smell of the river in the small town in the Midi where my sister was living; my first spoonful of yogurt; the illustrated children’s Histoire de France that my sister had bought me to read: I could read the pictures (Jeanne d’Arc was the most fascinating), but the language would come only a few years later. A small collection of memories, perhaps, but more powerful than those of Hallowe’en or schoolyard bullies or piles of leaves to jump in, in New England.

Bref, I was drinking my Côtes du Ventoux and letting the fact of being there sink in; I was watching the news and feeling concerned, as I will vote for the first time on April 21; above all I was glad I had chosen to stay here, in this small, white studio almost within the shadow of Notre Dame. I felt fabulously wealthy, like the people living silently and invisibly around me; I felt privileged and lucky and welcome. I wondered who had lived in this room over the centuries. On the island, it seems, such famous people as Voltaire and Rousseau, Baudelaire and Zola had spent some time. The studio was almost eerily quiet: I heard only the pin-pon sound of sirens, the drone of barges on the Seine, the birds in the morning and again at nightfall, and, more faint and mysterious, the bells of Notre Dame.

In the morning when I opened the heavy door and stepped out on the Quai, there was the cathedral waiting, splendid and eternal. I have always preferred the “rear view”, and my landlady had been very careful to insist that her building faced the chevet de Notre Dame. Again I felt a wonderful rush of being wealthy and privileged and lucky and above all welcome. I knew it was a fleeting thing, that in only a week I would go on to other views and less fortunate situations, but for the moment I was displacing time, gathering my childhood memories, learning to be in my new country.

Chez moi, which means, as at home in those few days as one can ever be.