The second question, or set of questions, was even worse than the first: what if it did work? What if I found myself, long-term, dealing with this foreign culture, a culture I found difficult at best, a culture in which I seemed always in the wrong, always less refined, and always spoke with an accent that rendered me dismissable? But this set of questions promised difficulties I could barely contemplate. With optimistic pessimism, I preferred to concentrate on the fact that it probably wouldn’t work and on the question of whether I should be changing my life for love. Honestly, what self-respecting woman changes her life for love?

So granted, sitting in graduate classes in America analyzing the silence in the language of Victor Hugo was an idiotic career that I had been hating passionately for some time. But hey, the university had paid me half what the Economic Policy Institute considers poverty level to do it, and at least working on a Ph.D. had some prestige. I’d even been able to turn on the heat once every year or two when I’d scraped enough money together to afford it. In Paris, I wouldn’t have heat, since Sébastien’s apartment didn’t have a radiator and we wouldn’t be able to afford more than the bare minimum of electricity. And I definitely wouldn’t have prestige; I was an American.

I don’t know. I just wasn’t sure it was entirely rational for a woman to be giving up the noncareer she hated to go live in Paris with a gorgeous, sweet, romantic Frenchman who could cook, albeit mostly with cream. At least analyzing Samuel Beckett or Céline was something, even if it was likely to require expensive meds. In Paris, I didn’t have anything but love. Well, okay, and great chocolate. But still, that’s a hell of a lot of pressure on love.

The next morning, I found an e-mail he had written long into the night. Pages and pages, all his hopes and fears for us, how his heart had leapt with joy and fear at the possibility I might come to Paris, how it broke his heart with hope that I might come and fear that I might be unhappy, how much he missed me. At the bottom of it, he drew a comic caricature of himself on one knee, his hands stretched out wide, clutching flowers, saying, “Je t’aime.”

I went to talk to my professors, to tell them I was leaving. They were remarkably sympathetic for some of the most successful academics in their field. “Why in the world,” said one, “would you choose a career in academia over a love affair with a handsome Frenchman in Paris?”

My jaw dropped. “Are you supposed to tell me that?”

“No, but how hard a choice can it be?”