Afterward I said I would rather not go back for a while. I had lived in Paris for a year and become so enchanted by its pleasures and so despondent when I returned that I felt it would have been better not to go in the first place. I said it partly to appease Mummy, but I meant it too, for when I allowed myself to think of the city—its seasons and moods, the curved shadows cast by wrought-iron grillwork upon limestone walls, the reek of stale cigarettes in the métro, the drizzly rain that softened colors and angles into a Caillebotte painting—I desired it so intensely I felt sick at the thought of losing it again.

It is so different, the feeling you have for a place when you’re living there. My first visit to Paris, on the trip with Bow and the other girls from school, I thought the city was all glamour and glitter and rush. Yusha took us to a nightclub on the Champs-Élysées where we stared goggle-eyed at the revue with its full orchestra and satin-voiced siren belting torch songs, the gymnasts and puppeteers and flock of cabaret girls wearing rhinestones, ostrich feathers, and very little else. Miss Shearman, conscious of her duties as our chaperone, feigned shock at the latter, but my darling stepbrother gave her one of his gentle smiles and asked her to dance, leaving us girls to be dazzled in peace. I was eighteen years old and on my first trip to Europe, and I thought everything was marvelous.

When I went to the nightclub again, about a year later, to my surprise it seemed so garish. The orchestra sounded leaden, the torch songs overwrought, the cabaret girls’ smiles stretched to a snap, their flimsy costumes glittering like tinsel. By this time I had been studying in Paris for a few months, flying between the Comtesse’s apartment and my classes at the Sorbonne and Reid Hall in a lovely, tranquil, misty world. I really liked that quiet, contemplative side of Paris the best.