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sandbox and jungle gym were all but invisible to me. Now I stood near the playground trying to remember how Mark and I had traveled the meaningful distance from the
mairie
to Le Grand Véfour. Had a car taken us? How did my friends get there? I didn’t recall being a jittery bride, but I was surprised to have erased that detail as well.
    This time I took the metro to Bourse and walked over to the gardens, where I lingered over an alfresco breakfast of café crème and a brioche. It was an April day erupting with color and heat, and I tried to imagine how the courtyard must have appeared long ago at this time of year, from up above in Colette’s salon. “The Palais-Royal stirs at once under the influence of humidity, of light filtered through soft clouds, of warmth,” she wrote. “The green mist hanging over the elms is no longer a mist, it is tomorrow’s foliage.”
    After my coffee and stroll, I took the long ride back to my old neighborhood near Père Lachaise, where I was staying in a hotel. At the front desk I felt the ions shift in a blast of sensory memory; to my disbelief, standing beside me was one of my husband’s dear friends who had been a witness at our wedding. We were utterly stunned into silence and then, laughter. An Australian artist, he was living in Arles and had done the paintings in the hotel. I hadn’t seen him in eight years, and his wife had recently passed away. Mark and I weren’t able to attend her funeral service, and I still felt awful about it. We hugged, caught up on all our children, had a drink, and wondered where the time had gone.
    The following day, upstairs at Le Grand Véfour, I met Guy Martin and told him about the strange coincidence and how pleased I was that my friend would be joining me for lunch. He wasn’t surprised.
    â€œThis is a magical place in a magical setting,” Martin told me. “There’s nowhere else in the world like it. When you do an important celebration here—no matter what happens down the line—it will always lead to exceptional things.”
    When I walked into the restaurant, it enveloped me in the familiar. Twenty years seemed utterly insignificant—both the vestibule and dining room appeared untouched by the passing decades. But incredibly, nothing felt stale or neglected. It was there still, that gleaming lightness that made me feel like I was swimming in soda and that heady sensation of being instantly transformed into someone of consequence. As I stood on the carpet in a pool of sunlight, I nearly ached with life. The room was still shiny and alive and bursting with anticipation.
    Although at first it seemed unchanged, upon closer inspection I noticed subtle nods to the present day—hidden fixtures brightened the female forms painted on the wall, and the lace curtains that once ran along the perimeter had been replaced by etched glass.
    But the soul of Le Grand Véfour was still there, preserved not only in the décor but also in the traditional recipes, which Martin was constantly reinterpreting and updating. The point, he said, was to allow for the inevitability of change and to let history propel you forward rather than weigh you down. Nothing stays the same, he insisted, because nothing ever can.
    â€œI’m growing every day,” he said. “The same goes for my cooking. It’s not a static thing. It is always in perpetual motion.”
    I wondered out loud whether there was some wisdom to be gleaned here, and what I could extrapolate about life and marriage. Mark and I had survived, but I still sometimes wondered how I could wake up to the same man, every day, for the rest of my days here on earth. Martin said that in his case, the key was to remember the person he was back then and to trust the impressions that had brought him there in the first place.
    â€œWhen I came here from Savoie, the Palais Royal gardens smelled like home. I couldn’t believe I