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By Root 1074 0

sacrifices half his intelligence in a foreign language, but he had plenty of intelligence to spare. (He moaned especially that his humor fell flat on the page, as indeed it did.) Even without a language barrier, I knew myself to be handicapped. At any moment I am likely to revert to my Anglo-Saxon habits, to forget not to lay a finger on the greengrocer’s tomatoes, not to reach for my boulangerie change before it is counted, not to order my sandwich before my café crème. (My husband falls in a different category. A Frenchman raised on foreign soil, he passes for a native until confronted with a cheese tray, at which juncture his passport is nearly revoked. He once left a Normandy innkeeper dumbstruck by asking, in unaccented French, what precisely un potage jardinier consisted of. Imagine a native New Englander inquiring after a definition of clam chowder.) There was one other deterrent, too, one that the biographer Richard Holmes has identified: “Writers of course are always slightly ashamed at not being at their desks, especially in Paris, where they might be out—having a good time, mon dieu.”

We figured that the one-year-old wouldn’t object to the plan but assumed that some finessing might be in order for the eight- and ten-year-olds. Which may explain why we broke the news at the Café de Flore a semester beforehand, over cafés liégeois and éclairs au chocolat, the blackmailing parent’s best friends. The eight-year-old was an immediate convert. The ten-year-old succumbed neither to the sugar rush nor to the pandering. He made it clear that he would not be decamping to Paris until France fielded a major-league baseball team. And it was he who—on the August day we headed off to JFK with our fifteen suitcases—planted himself on the steaming sidewalk and refused to budge. It was also he who planted himself on the sidewalk and refused to budge a year later, when we headed to Charles de Gaulle with more bags than any of us bothered to count. They were at least fewer than the 126 with which Franklin headed home, baggage that included three Angora cats, a printing press, a sampling of mineral waters, and a variety of saplings.

By a happy quirk, we found an apartment in Franklin’s old neighborhood, less hilly today than it was in the 1770s. There were other modern-day advantages as well. No fewer than six boulangeries stand along the mile that separated Franklin’s home from that of John Adams. Franklin had to make that walk on an empty stomach, something I never did. There was, after all, pressing pain au chocolat research to be done. We lived fifteen minutes from Versailles, an expedition that took Franklin two dusty hours by carriage. When we bicycled in the Bois de Boulogne, we crossed the lawn where Franklin followed the first manned balloon as it rose into the sky in 1783, something he did with considerable anxiety. We were two very different Americans in Paris, but I delighted in the overlay of our lives. It did what a foreign adventure is supposed to do—it made the mundane thrilling. Along the route Franklin traveled twice every week, to the home of the woman he hoped to seduce (as opposed to the one he wanted to marry), was the lovely Congolese tailor who lengthened our son’s pants before the start of the school year. Picking up the dry cleaning qualifies as less of a chore when you are doing so on ground you know Ben Franklin and John Adams have trodden before you. And I could always justify shopping at the pricey ice cream shop on the rue Bois-le-Vent. It seemed nearly obligatory to do so, given that the shop stands where the back door to Franklin’s home once had. Moreover, it seemed dangerous not to, as the shop hours were erratic, a universal signal of artistic integrity but a guarantee of greatness in France.

To France America sent as her first emissary a man who confessed he was wholly indifferent to food. (And one who was ignorant about it in the extreme: it was his conviction that there was no butter in French sauces.) Franklin ate well but pined for a good Indian pudding, a piece of salt pork, Newton Pippin