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That was good enough for me. In less than twenty minutes I blew almost half a week’s food budget on creams, balms, and restoratives. What better way to celebrate the New Me than by sprucing up the façade of the Old Me? Besides, I told myself, I’d make up for it by eating in cheaper places. Still, I worried a bit. Between the taxi from the airport and my foray into the world of French cosmetics, I’d already spent a lot more than I’d planned.

But what the heck, I thought, heading for the hotel and my first look at the room where I would spend at least the next month. I was excited, but also a little nervous about seeing it. Although I knew many travelers think of a hotel as “just a place to sleep,” it was important to me to feel at home in this room.

A young chambermaid proceeded me up the winding staircase, stopping in the middle of it. Pulling out a key, she opened a door I hadn’t noticed, one situated between the reception area and the second floor. It was the door to my room. I stepped inside. What I saw disappointed me.

After passing through a narrow entry hall, I entered a long narrow room. It seemed to tilt to one side, the side occupied by a huge, dark armoire. At the far end of the room was the bed; or, to be precise, two twin beds that had been pushed together. In the middle of the room was a round table covered with a fresh linen cloth and flanked by two straight-backed chairs; it served as both desk and dining space. Opposite the bed, near the small entry hall, was a slightly worn loveseat, its wine-velvet arms and back rising and falling in classic Art Deco fashion. All in all, it was not what I had hoped for.

But the room had two big, beautiful French windows that opened out over a small green courtyard. There was one in the large, well-appointed bathroom too, situated in such a way that it could be left open without any lack of privacy. Brushing my teeth in the morning while looking out over the courtyard became one of my real pleasures.

Still, at first glance, I couldn’t imagine living in this room for several weeks. Later, when the room became home to me—when I had learned to appreciate how comfortable the bed was and how elegant the linens that covered it, how spotlessly clean the room was kept and how well it actually functioned—I realized that first impressions about hotel rooms are like first loves: neither is based on the concept of how, over time, one can come to appreciate the pleasures of durability over infatuation.

At a little before five in the afternoon I left the hotel and headed for the Café de Flore. It was early, but I was quite hungry and, in fact, almost ready to retire. The Flore, which was only a short distance from my hotel, was a great place to sit and take in Paris while eating the perfect omelette.

It was a mild evening, so I chose a seat on the terrace and ordered wine. This was the best time to come to the Flore, I thought, looking around. Lunchtime here always seemed hectic, a time when people came to see and be seen, to make deals and use their cellular phones. Late afternoon at the Flore, on the other hand, had a relaxed ambience; people laughed a lot and gossiped and seemed not to be in a hurry to go somewhere else.

It was a lesson I hoped to learn in the months ahead: how to stop rushing from place to place, always looking ahead to the next thing while the moment in front of me slipped away unnoticed.

I knew it once, of course—the feeling of connection that comes from seizing the actual world. When I was a child, very little that happened in the real world escaped my attention. Not the brightly colored ice in small paper boats we bought at Mr. Dawson’s snowball stand; or the orange-and-white pattern that formed a map of Africa on my cat’s back; or the way Mother sat at her dressing table, powdering her beautiful face to a pale ivory color. It used to surprise me, the intensity with which I still remembered these distant memories. But when I entered my fifties—the Age of Enlightenment, as I came to call it—I understood their enduring clarity.