The American who leaves for somewhere simpler is a figure as old as the Republic itself — the Parisian expatriates of the 1920s, the back-to-the-landers of the 1970s, the retirees in Costa Rica, and now this. The restlessness is not new. What it’s telling us might be.

The bread comes from a bakery four minutes away on foot.

This is the detail she mentions first, always. Not the light in the afternoons, not the silence at night, not the stone walls or the church bells or the wine that costs less than water did in San Francisco. The bread. She walks four minutes, and a man she knows by name hands her something that was made that morning, and she carries it home in paper, and this act — this ordinary, unremarkable, four-minute act — is still, after two years, a small daily astonishment to her.

Her name is Sarah. She is forty-seven. She left California for a village in the Dordogne with her husband and a single container of furniture, and what she left behind was, by her own description, a life that had become impossible to recognize as a life. The hours. The traffic. The cost of everything. The feeling, which she struggled to name and finally called the escalating insanity of it, that the basic requirements of a decent existence had moved beyond reach in a place that was supposed to be among the best on earth.

She is not alone in this. She is, in fact, a recognizable American type — one of the oldest ones.

Americans have been leaving for elsewhere since before there was an America to leave. The Puritans left England for a new world. The settlers left the coast for the interior. The pioneers left the interior for the frontier. When the frontier closed, they left the farms for the cities, and then left the cities for the suburbs, and then left the suburbs for the exurbs, and some of them — always some of them — left the country altogether.

The 1920s Paris expatriates are the most literary version of this impulse: Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Stein and dozens of others who found that the Europe rebuilt after one war offered something that postwar America, prosperous and anxious and not quite sure what it had won, could not provide. They went for the cheapness and stayed for the permission — the sense that an American abroad could become something other than what America expected of them.

The back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s was the same impulse turned inward — not Paris, but Vermont, not the Seine but the Dordogne of the American countryside, communes and farms and the conviction that the industrial life had taken something that the simple life could restore.

The retirees in Mexico and Costa Rica and Portugal now are its latest expression: Americans in their sixties who have done the math and found that a modest Social Security check buys a comfortable life in Oaxaca or the Algarve, and that comfort, it turns out, was what they had been working toward all along.

Sarah is younger than that and less motivated by arithmetic than by exhaustion. She left, she says, because she could not figure out how to stay.

She misses things. She is precise about this when asked, in a way that suggests she has thought about it carefully and decided that honesty costs less than nostalgia.

She misses the energy. The specific American energy — the sense that everything is possible and someone nearby is already doing it. France is beautiful and ancient and deeply itself, and it does not have that energy, and she did not know until it was gone how much she had been sustained by it.

She misses her friends, imperfectly — missing the idea of them as much as their actual company, which was by the end of her California years more scheduled than spontaneous, more text message than presence.

She misses the food variety, which surprises her to say in France, but it is true: the taqueria, the Korean barbecue, the particular multicultural abundance of a California city that a Dordogne village, for all its bread and its cheese and its wine, cannot replicate.

What she does not miss she is more careful about — as though the list carries a weight she is not sure she wants to pick up. She does not miss the commute. She does not miss the feeling of being one missed paycheck from a housing catastrophe. She does not miss checking her phone for the next emergency.

There is a question underneath all of this that Sarah has not yet answered, and she is honest about that too.

Every departure in the American tradition has carried the same question in its luggage: is the problem the place, or is the problem more portable than that? The Paris expatriates mostly came home. The back-to-the-land communes mostly dissolved. The retirees in Mexico sometimes find, after two or three years, that they have brought themselves along and that selves travel efficiently across borders.

What Sarah found in the Dordogne was quieter and more durable than she expected. The bread. The baker’s name. The four-minute walk. These are real and they are good and they cost her something to have, and she knows what she paid.

She does not know yet whether she made a good trade.

She is not sure she needs to know. The question she is actually living inside, she says, is not whether France is better than California. It is whether the life she is building here is genuinely hers, or whether she is still running from the one she left.

Most mornings, walking to the bakery, the answer feels like yes.

Some mornings it doesn’t.

She goes anyway.