Paris, France is a complex and ever-changing city; yet, despite the vicissitudes of time and human agency it remains the same to me. The place resides in my core as a frame of mind, a feeling, regardless of its physical changes over the many years I have been visiting it. That city has an anima, a life force that transcends the rise and fall of its varying material presences, including people, palaces, monarchies, and the River Seine itself. Paris is a season in my mind, not April but a special sort of autumn, captured by the falling leaves, “Les feuilles mortes” as sung by Yves Montand in the 1946 French film, Gates of the Night. Johnny Mercer wrote the English version “Autumn Leaves,” in 1947, around the time my mother was calming my young self with French songs. I didn’t know she was singing in French, but I liked the soft curves of the words, the lilt with which they meshed to the tune of “Sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse tous en rond.” On the Avignon Bridge, we dance, we dance in a circle.

Those early cuddles wrapped in French melodies account in part for my enduring attraction to Paris. As a three- or four-year-old—perhaps earlier or later but who can remember—my mother also read stories to me in French and sang me to sleep with “Au Clair de la Lune.” She was not French, but had won the French Prize her senior year of classical high school, and I suppose she wanted me to associate the language with coziness and caring. Later, she counted on my ambition to earn a teaching degree in French language.  

But I did not. I loved studying and speaking French during my high school and college years, but circumstances changed my course. My B.A. was in Italian Language and Literature with a minor as we said then in French. That detour is another story for later.

Although equally engaged in Italian language and culture, I never lost my affection for French. In my late twenties my husband and I traveled in France. During that trip, the closest I came to living my Paris autumn was at a table on the terrasse of a café near Place St. Michele. Cigarette in my hand and terrible espresso by the ashtray, we sat and chatted about the meaning of life—in English. I tried to make a deeper connection, but failed to find the Paris I had been imagining. Paris’ weather was cold. A gray quilt of clouds hung over the city. Parisians rebuffed my attempts to speak in French and answered my questions in English.

In my forties, the children’s department of the National Museum of Modern Art, also known as the Beaubourg or Pompidou Center, offered me an internship in museum education programming. During that time, January – April, I lived in a fifth-floor walk-up in Paris’ Fifteenth Arrondissment. It was one of France’s coldest, wettest winters since the Second World War, and I had no heat. Although I had been studying French furiously before traveling to France, my language skills were still limited. Shivering as icicles were falling from parapets all over the city and occasionally killing pedestrians, I almost lost that dreamy frame of mind, the Paris of my imagination. How I yearned for September.

That time came. A year after my internship, one of my Beaubourg friends invited me to stay for a week in October. Her son had left his chambre de bonne, an attic single, for Tahiti and she suggested I stay there. The week was glorious. Although I visited favorite places and sat again in cafes, my happiest memories are of strolling for hours along the Seine in unusually warm and welcoming sunshine. At last I was immersed in the Paris autumn of my imagination and savoring a homeostatic response  a sense of equilibrium, where my idea of Paris matched lived experience.

I have returned often to Lutetia, first mentioned in Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars (58-50 BCE) The Celtic Parisii settled on an island in the middle of the Seine. Ancient Romans took and expanded it. Throughout its long history, with all that has been built, destroyed, rebuilt or created there, my Paris has remained the embodiment of a perfect autumn. Hoping to return, I’m not confident that I will ever again experience the autumn of that long-ago October, but it’s worth a try. In that season, I found comfort and assurance that, although time is like the Seine, I have been part of Paris’ story.