In which Rebekah actually obtains her Titre de Séjour

From nearly the beginning of our stay in France, we've been in the process of obtaining our Cartes de Séjour. Many of you are somewhat aware of the frustration we've experienced in obtaining this critical piece of identification. (If you aren't, and you want to be, you can read here, here, here, here, and here.)

In any case, I received a letter from the sous-préfecture in Nogent-sur-Marne the day that Blaise left for Spain, telling me that my Titre de Séjour was waiting there, and requesting that I bring an assortment of paperwork with me to come and pick it up. Since one of the things that I needed to bring was 300€ to pay for the card (sort of, more on that later), and Blaise had brought our bank card with him to Spain, I couldn't get in until he got back, but it was a relief to know that it was, at last, there.

Blaise came home on a Wednesday evening, and I decided that I had too much to get done on Thursday to take the time out to go to the sous-préfecture that day, but that I would go on Friday afternoon and take Cherry with me. We could ride the bus, so I wouldn't have to worry about her legs wearing out and it would be sort of an adventure. So, Friday after lunch, I sat down and gathered the paperwork that I needed. Passport? Check. Receipt from applying for the carte de séjour? Check. Letter from the sous-préfecture, telling me that my card was ready? Check. Letter from OFII (the immigration people) telling me exactly what stamps† I needed to purchase with my 300€ in order to pay for my card? Not check. It wasn't in the backpack where I thought I had left it. It wasn't in any of the piles of papers lying around the house. It hadn't somehow been filed where it should have been filed in the first place. Perhaps it wasn't that important, or I could use a copy of Blaise's? (He'd gotten his letter via e-mail, and we'd printed it out, so it was on the computer.) He looked at his letter. It was important, and it had his dossier number on it. I wouldn't be able to use his letter.

Finally, I called the sous-préfecture, and explained that I couldn't find the letter about the stamps. (At least, I think I told them that I'd lost the letter. I'm not always entirely sure that I say what I intend to say in French.) The woman on the phone told me to come in between 9 and 11 on Monday morning. (By this time it was 4:00, and they were going to be closing in half an hour.) So, for the rest of the weekend I got to imagine what was going to happen because I had lost this paper. Would they make me wait until the OFII mailed me another copy? Require me to go through the entire application process again? Deport me?

Monday morning I dropped Cherry off at school, and headed straight for the sous-préfecture (on foot, since the bus takes just as long). I got there around 9:30 and stood in a line to explain what had happened. When I got to the front and explained what had happened, the woman took my paper away and brought it into the back room. She returned a few minutes later, told me it wasn't a big deal, and wrote "300€" on the letter, then told me to go upstairs to buy the stamps. When I got down afterwards, she waved me to the front of the line, and handed me a place ticket. Twenty minutes later, I was out the door, fees paid, card in hand (well, in moneybelt).

†When you pay the fees for your titre de séjour, you don't actually give the money to the people working at the department for foreigners. Instead, you have to buy special stamps from the cash desk and provide those at the department. My understanding is that this is because the money is divided between two different pieces of the bureaucracy, but I could be wrong about that.

†