Your own Paris apartment!

This has to rank high on any International Traveler fantasy list.

A Paris pied a terre! Visit when you want! Entertain in your own place! Or close the door and go out to the street to find your favorite bistro. Decorate the place. Rent it part of the year.

Sure. Not an uncommon dream. A heck of a nice one, too.

But brace yourself for some sticker shock.

Real estate may be soft, or still sliding in much of the western world. But not in Paris.

The rule of thumb is 10,000 euros per square meter — 12,000 in the really desirable neighborhoods. Or, translating into U.S. terms, $12,800 for every 11 square feet. When Leah’s one-bedroom apartment (in a really desirable neighborhood) went up for sale in 2005, it was going for around 6,000 euros per square meter. (We don’t talk about her not buying it).

The average McMansion built in the Inland Empire of Southern California during the boom times preceding 2008, was 2,000-plus square feet. A lot of people became conditioned to that much space –with three or four bedrooms, two or three bathrooms, a living room, a den, a huge kitchen. And a yard.

That much space in Paris? Impossible. Unless you are a robber baron or a petro sheikh.

What you would be looking at, realistically, is a deux piece (two-room) apartment. A main room, where you live and entertain (which probably incorporates a dining area); a smallish bedroom; a kitchen appended to the main room (or perhaps in a corner of it) and one of each: toilet, bath, sink.

The deux piece is the standard real estate unit in Paris.

You can go bigger, of course. Two bedrooms. A second bath. Maybe a library.

But you will pay at the same crushing rate of 10,000 euros per square meter.

Out wandering the neighborhood here in the 17th arrondisement last night, we looked in at for-sale prices whenever we came upon a real estate agency.

The 17th is fine. Some of it is nice. But it is not the glamorous part of Paris, and you can barely walk to the ritzy areas from here. But that 10,000-euros-per-square-meter thing is operating here, too.

OK, let’s say you can live on the smaller side of the deux piece apartment, and you study the listing for the 350,000 euro property. It almost certainly will be 35 square meters. Or to put it in U.S. terms: $442,000 for a place of 376 square feet.

If you live in a McMansion, your den is bigger than that.

Can you employ strategies to get the cost down?

1. Be willing to live in the upper floors of a building without an elevator. From the fourth floor up is considered a hardship, and you might be able to shave a bit off the asking price. (But remember, when you’re old, climbing five flights of stairs may not be practicable.)

2. Adjust your neighborhood. The 10K per 1 meter square is not universal. You can find places for less in the 19th arrondisement, and perhaps even moreso in the 20th. But be advised these are the two roughest neighborhoods inside the peripherique, the ring road that designates Paris from the suburbs.

Those neighborhoods seem to be gentrifying, but you may not live to see the time when it is considered preferable real estate. Also, tracts of those two arrondisements are not well-served by the Paris metro, and it will take you longer to get to someplace you want to go — that is, outside the 19th and 20th.

Interest rates are not high, and you may be able to get a mortgage. However, most banks here seem to like a 15-year mortgage, which means a significant bill every month. And they will not give a long loan to anyone over 40 years old. If you are 65, say, you perhaps can get a five-year loan, with even higher monthly rates.

Who, then, actually owns apartments, in the city? People with big incomes who plan to live here full time for decades. People whose parents or grandparents willed them a place.

People who rent.

Another potential real estate problem here is the new socialist government. No one is quite sure what legislation will be enacted, but the common assumption is that it will cost home owners more money.

The expense of living in Paris, as much as we love it, is crushing. Which is a major factor (along with the six months of short days) in prompting us to consider seriously the south of the country.

Where prices are a fraction of what they are in the City of Light.