P A R I S

The answer to where would we live in Paris turns out not to be in Paris.

That sounds like a dodge, and it is not. It is what the question produces once you stop asking which arrondissement is the most Parisian and start asking where two months would actually go best.

Paris proper gives you more incidental Paris. You walk home past things. The city arrives unbidden, a street you did not mean to take, a façade at the end of it, and over two months that accumulates into something no suburb can manufacture.

The edge gives you a more complete ordinary town. Its own market three mornings a week, its own high street, its own basilica, its own quiet at ten at night.

Both are real. But a three-day visit is made of incidental Paris, and a two-month stay is made of Tuesdays.

On paper the answer was Vincennes.

Then we walked it, and it was every bit as good as the work had predicted. It has a coherence that very few communes have: you arrive, and you are somewhere, and when Paris ends for the day you have the distinct sense of having gone home.

Then we walked Boulogne, which produced the same thing and kept going.

This is the first Home Index volume in which the field changed the answer, and it did not change it by finding a mistake. Vincennes taught us what we were looking for. Boulogne turned out to be the fullest version of it.

Not Boulogne at large, which is the biggest commune of the inner ring and divides more sharply than most. The answer is the old north-western corner, Parchamp and Albert-Kahn, in the streets behind boulevard Jean Jaurès.

Bread at a minute. The covered market and the métro at two. The shape of it is the point: the entire recurring week collapses into a distance you would cover without deciding to.

And where Vincennes has one overwhelming forest, Boulogne has a portfolio. The nearest edge of the Bois de Boulogne is eight minutes from the door, and a nineteenth-century park that people who live nearby describe as a secret is a little further. There are others.

Line 10 is not line 1, and Vincennes is plainly better for structured track work. Neither fact disappeared when Boulogne moved ahead of it.

Which is why second place here is not a consolation. If the eastern side of Paris suits your life, or if the track is central to your week, Vincennes may well be the better answer. It remains a genuine alternate life.

Boulogne simply became the one that was ours.