The moment of recognition came via a Letter from Paris by Lara Marlowe in The Irish Times's foreign pages last February: "Breton town proud of Kerry's French connection". Senator John Kerry, it seemed, had family links with the pretty coastal town of Saint-Briac. Brice Lalonde, his cousin, was even its mayor, writes Caroline Walsh.
Their grandparents, Margaret and James Grant Forbes, had acquired an estate overlooking the sea and throughout a cosmopolitan family life that spanned the US, France and Britain, their 11 children and numerous grandchildren had spent wondrous summers there .
Could it be Les Essarts? It took only a few seconds searching Google to find out that it was.
I was last in Les Essarts 30 years ago, aged 21. During a holiday with my mother in Brittany she suddenly said: "Let's drive to Les Essarts and see are the Forbes still there."
She knew the Forbes through the Birds, the wealthy American family her father, Tom Lavin, worked for when he emigrated to America. Born in East Walpole, Massachusetts, she grew up wandering the woods of their estate there, Endean, and later the woods and fields of their demesne at Bective House in Co Meath. The Birds were seriously horsey people and, egged on by Tom, decided to buy an Irish place in the 1920s. Tom became estate manager and was so until his death. She met the Forbes when they came to stay in Bective.
Writing about Kerry in an essay in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, the British novelist Andrew O'Hagan astutely observes that part of the world the Democratic presidential candidate springs from is Brahmin Boston with its old churches and graveyards - "the universe conjured in the work of Robert Lowell". The patrician side came mainly through Kerry's grandmother's people, the Winthrops, one of whom was the first governor of Massachusetts. He and the other Puritan colonists who came from England to plant the Bay Colony in 1630 were the most influential single group of Europeans ever to arrive in North America - that, at any rate, is the modest way the Winthrop Society, which delves into all the family's genealogy, puts it .
Margaret Winthrop - Mrs Forbes by the time we knew her - was the one who introduced her daughter, Rosemary, to Kerry's father, Richard. She heard there was a young American spending the summer in Saint-Briac and invited him to Les Essarts for lunch. Next thing Rosemary was addressing him as "Cheri", adding "Je t'embrasse de tout mon coeur"; nuptials duly followed.
Being hospitable was obviously Mrs Forbes's way. They were a great family for games and my sister Elizabeth remembers an elaborate treasure hunt they had at Bective where the last buried treasure was a fox's brush. After their stay in Bective they invited my parents on holiday to Saint Briac and off we went.
It was a holiday with many resonances because, within months, when I was one-and-a-half, my father died and Mother was back in Meath rearing three little girls on her own. "Our father, while he lived, had cast a magic over everything, for us as well as for her. He held his love up over us like an umbrella and kept off the troubles that afterwards came down on us, pouring cats and dogs!" she wrote in one of her short stories, Happiness. I've always felt grateful to the Forbes for the fact that in the 17 months between my birth and my father's death, even if I was a bawling nuisance, at least I played with him, however briefly, on the beaches of Brittany.
Keeping track of it all after my father's death, Mrs Forbes suggested we go back to France - which we did: my mother, my eldest sister Valdi, and Liz and I. It was a very different holiday for my mother - grappling with what she called "the crater of loneliness at our centre" - and it is also portrayed in Happiness, though she set the story further up the coast in Fécamp.
She retained great affection for Mrs Forbes and was delighted when we revisited Les Essarts that day 30 years ago and found the family were still coming and going there as they always had done.
Les Essarts has had its moments. During the second World War it was occupied by the Nazis and used as a look-out against possible British invasion. Then, before D-day, they turned their tanks on the house and destroyed it.
It's all in John F. Kerry - The Complete Biography by The Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best, by Michael Kranish, Brian C.Mooney and Nina J. Easton (Public Affairs, New York, 2004 ). When John Kerry went there with his family, aged four, there was virtually nothing left but the chimney and a stairway - and a mine planted in the grounds.
Seeing the ruined Les Essarts is cited by John Kerry as one of his earliest memories. "I remember. . .the staircase in the sky, the glass under my feet and my Mom was crying." The rebuilt Les Essarts was the one we visited.
Kerry's brother Cameron talks of how, in Europe with his parents as a child, America was still known as the liberator. People were grateful for the rebuilding made possible by the Marshall Plan; they remembered the sense of redemption when the GIs marched into their villages and towns.
Reading about it all as US election day looms on November 2nd, it seems a pity that, instead of being afraid his French connection - his family's own brush with war and their great love of European values and culture - might tell against him, Kerry didn't choose to illuminate it and show it as the asset it surely is, or should be. Had he done so he might seem less the flip-flopper he is accused of being today.
Anyway, here's hoping that on election day he is shown to be what his campaign team insist he is: "a good closer".