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pierce the fog of befuddlement, like the Eiffel Tower looming above the Champ-de-Mars on an overcast day.
    That includes befuddlement of a romantic nature, for the confusion that attends most affairs of the heart is generally, in Paris, taken to be as inexplicable and incontrovertible as the weather. Indeed, it has always surprised me that the American TV series
Sex and the City
should enjoy such popularity among
parisiennes
, who are not given to the kind of anguished relationship dissection in which the show’s lead female characters endlessly indulge. In real life, as in
Sex and the City
, a New Yorker asking “Why hasn’t he called me?” or “How could he leave me?” is entitled to at least a few solid hours of thoughtful analysis (of the relationship’s ups and downs), soothing compliments (for herself), and righteous indignation (against the man in question) from her girlfriend. In Paris, such a response is as hard to come by as, well, fat people or fake butter. There, a woman’s interlocutor will merely offer her a blasé “C’est comme ça” — accompanied by a slight shrug that says, “In the face of such existential absurdity,
chérie
, calm acceptance is the only way. Now let’s hit the
thalasso
spa and see what we can do about your cellulite.”
    But in Paris, whenever female confidences let you down, psychoanalysis can fortunately be counted upon to pick up the slack. The first time I moved there was in 1991, after graduating from Harvard with an undergraduate degree in French literature. Taken as I still was with the romance of that curriculum, I decided I could live nowhere but in Saint-Germain, among the ghosts (as I announced pretentiously to anyone who would listen) of Paris’s most celebrated writers. Accordingly, I found a tiny apartment right on the border between the sixth and the seventh, around the corner from the erstwhile home of the late Jacques Lacan, aka “the father of French psychoanalysis.” I stillremember announcing the news to my senior thesis adviser on tissue-thin blue paper, marked PAR AVION in big red letters: “Dear Professor J ——, Greetings from the Left Bank! Every morning I jog from my apartment on the rue des Saints-Pères (such a
formidable
location,
n’est-ce pas
?) to the Eiffel Tower and back … You’d be proud of me—my run takes me past Lacan’s old house in the seventh, and whenever I pass it, I think about your lectures on his ‘return to Freud’!” The earnest self-absorption of youth meets the brainy grandiosity of the Harvard kid, all for the price of an airmail postage stamp.
    Still, I was telling the truth. The father of French psychoanalysis
was
on my mind a lot during my first year in Paris, and that preoccupation
did
have everything to do with his oft-invoked “return to Freud.” This phrase, I had learned from Professor J ——, alluded to Lacan’s lifelong engagement with that most Freudian of concerns: the nature and workings of human desire. Which, when you’re a sheltered American woman who has just moved from prudish Boston to racy Paris, and who is equal parts thrilled and terrified to live on her own in a big city for the first time ever, seems like a damn fine thing to know about. So I dutifully plunged into his collected writings, looking for insight into the behavior of the various Michels and Xaviers and Jean-Pauls who—as soon as I prevailed upon France Télécom to grant me a telephone number—began calling night and day. Surely, I told myself, with a little help from the master, I would graduate from the JV playing fields of gauche, inconsequential college dating into the major leagues of a grown-up
grand amour
.
    The experiment met with mixed results. On the positive side, during that first year in Paris, I made more conqueststhan I ever, given the nunlike existence I had led in college, could have imagined. And despite my Parisian girlfriends’ repeated insistence that “French people don’t date,” their male