Many of us have a fantasy place where the world is a cut above our everyday lives. Maybe we’ve only read about this place or seen it in movies. Maybe it doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s as if we need somewhere to dream about when life turns out not to be what we’d hoped. For a lot of people, that place is Paris.

My niece, who until recently had never been east of Billings, Montana, used to be obsessed with Paris. She’d even considered getting a tattoo of a bluebird pulling a banner reading “la vie est belle” around the Eiffel Tower.¹ In Paris — the dream Paris, that is — every café serves homemade cassoulet, women are chic (and thin) and buy their groceries at a farmers market, windows have pink geraniums and views of the Eiffel Tower (or of roofs and chimney pots), and romance lurks on every metro ride…

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Here is an assortment of smells, with a few other senses tossed in:

To me, the waft from a fromagerie is heaven, but some people might label its moist, pungent mold and aged milk smell as hell. Keeping cheese is an art the French call “affinage,” and a good cheese store has a basement with each cheese inspected regularly to see if it needs turned or painted or moved to a drier or wetter shelf. Fostering cheese is a real art, and a smelly one that no amount of Glade plug-ins could overcome. Not that you’d want them to.

Where I’m staying, church bells sound the quarter hour from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. with a brisk one-two clang for every fifteen minutes past the hour. I love these bells…

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Buildings have their own smell. Have you ever noticed it? With the change of weather, buildings exhale their age, materials, and history.

First, homes definitely hold their owners’ scents. You could lead me blindfolded into a home, and I’d tell you in a second if the occupant was a vegetarian or had pets. (Honestly, vegetarians smell a little mustier than meat eaters.) I have a housesitter, a terrific guy, and when I handed over my keys, I wondered if he’d feel comfortable in my home surrounded by my odor: two cats, flowers on the mantel, old furniture, a ripe cantaloupe in the refrigerator. I changed the sheets and gave the mattress a few spritzes of Santa Maria Novella cologne…

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To me, the French café used to feel impossibly exotic. The rich shots of coffee, flaky pastries, slices of baguette, and cultured butter were miles away from the Yuban and white bread of my childhood. I still love cafés, but these days I’m no stranger to good coffee — better than you get in a typical Parisian café, if you ask me — and bakeries turning out decent bread can be found in most big American cities. I regularly buy cultured butter at my neighborhood co-op.

Still, traditional French cafés fascinate me…

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It’s a cliche: smell evokes memory. As profoundly as I know this, it’s something I forget until confronted with a scent that brings back a past world. The smell of warm, dry pine needles reminds me of growing up in rural Northern California. On boarding an airplane, it only takes a whiff of its fetid warmth to call up the hum of jet engines to come. I forget all about the satisfaction of a bowl of spaghetti until I get a hit of oregano, tomatoes and steamy pasta water.

For the past four years, I’ve been lucky enough to housesit for a Parisian friend in August. Yesterday I stumbled, zombie-like, from a seemingly endless flight into the RER, and an inhale later, it was as if I’d never left Paris…

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