Madame au quatrième étage

So there's this elderly woman, I think I've mentioned, who lives on the quatrième étage. Because the ground floor is floor zero, that means she climbs four flights of stairs to get up to her apartment, and she lives on what we would call the fifth floor. I have wondered why she lives so far off the ground at her age. I don't know how she manages to negotiate the stairs without falling. The risers are wooden, and slippery, and pretty seriously worn; someone's patched some of them by putting in new slats of wood on the edges, but even those are starting to wear down. I've fallen twice myself. But she doesn't seem to fall (knock on a wooden riser...).

Lately I have been passing Madame in the stairs or in the foyer a lot, for some reason. Occasionally I am in time to help her hold the heavy front door to get in or out, and once I carried her bag up the four flights for her (interestingly, in a Buddhist kind of way, being helpful like that made the stairs feel like nothing; I was up at the sixth étage before I knew it!).

She's talked to me on these occasions, but I've never understood everything she says. Nodding and smiling is my general strategy. She speaks very "correctly" but reasonably quickly. Our first real conversation, i.e., not about the weather or the door or the stairs, was recently when she asked me if I was American, because she had heard that I was American, but my accent didn't seem American to her. I told her that I was pleased to hear that, and yes, I was American, and why didn't my accent sound that way? She said it was my r's. I explained that in my line of work you learn the sounds, even if I can't really say everything right (I explained a bit what I do), and she seemed very satisfied with that explanation.

Another time recently I saw her on her floor, and we talked again. This time I learned that her late husband had been born in that apartment, and her father had died there. That goes some way toward explaining why at her age she lives so far off the ground.