HIer gibt es eine längere Ausführung dazu (Ausschnitte) :
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play...
A Tale of Two 'Repairs'
... The French verb repairer is rarely used today, and only in a narrow context: it is used of animals that burrow or have dens, meaning “to return to one’s home or shelter.” This led to the more common noun repaire, usually translated as “den” or “lair,” and extended to be used for people in addition to animals just as we do in English: “a den of thieves,” “criminals in their lair.”
Repairer comes from the Latin verb repatriare and ultimately from patria meaning “native country,” so the word’s literal meaning is “to go back to one’s own country.” Once borrowed into English, it came to mean “to go to (a place),” a meaning that today has an archaic and formal tone:
After dinner, the guests repaired to the drawing room for brandy.
…many Americans and English repair every year to France…
—Amy Lowell, Six French Poets, 1915
... Perhaps one reason we no longer use repair to mean “to return” is that repatriare was itself subsequently brought directly to English in the early 1600s (as opposed to being filtered through French) to give us repatriate. ...
