I’m glad to be home, to fall asleep in my own bed and wake up in familiar surroundings. But I wasn’t away long enough for homesickness to set in. This wasn’t true for the 19th-century traveler to Paris. In those days it took long and often torturous weeks at sea to reach the continent, so trips were longer.

As we traveled in France this summer I was reading David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, which is not about the “Hemingway generation” of expats but about an earlier group of Americans bound for the City of Light, beginning in the 1830s. For them, this was the trip of a lifetime, and it was not just for pleasure but for study. Writer James Fenimore Cooper, painter (and later inventor) Samuel Morse, educator Emma Willard and poet and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes.

These and other Americans thrived abroad, but they did get homesick. In fact, it was an American in Paris, John Howard Payne, who wrote the song “Home, Sweet Home.”

“Be it ever so humble,” he wrote, “there’s no place like home.”

(My last glimpse of France as our flight departed from Orly early Tuesday morning)