Five minutes’ walk to the west of our offices was the Luxembourg Garden, by which all of us passed every day as we came out of our subway stop and headed to work. Filled with statues and fountains and grass you couldn’t touch, the Luxembourg Garden had a strict, classical beauty. I loved to stroll through it and watch the people: a woman in a baggy red coat, alone, pushing herself across in her wheelchair; a couple in their thirties, him crouching and angling to try to get just the right picture of her with the fountain; teenage girls carrying tennis rackets, one with a wrap around her knee. My first week in Paris, I tried to read there in the afternoon after work, feeling elegant and intellectual and strongly Audrey Hepburnish. But then dust off the gravel walkways blew up under my contacts, making me cry, and a man tried to sit in the same tiny chair I was in, promising to make it better. This city was out to get me.

Eight minutes’ walk to the east of our offices, on the cobblestoned medieval rue Mouffetard, an Italian-trained gelato maker sold ice creams shaped like flowers. I had discovered him soon after my move to Paris by going upstream against blissful faces until I found their source. His sorbets induced pure rapture. But just before I started thinking Paris wasn’t so bad after all, the temperature dropped, the rains set in, and I discovered a sign on his shop that said, “Closed until March.”

“Valérie,” I tried again to get the attention of my colleague, who was scowling at a student photo. Her vivid hair straggled around her face as if she had recently dragged her hands through it. Rounded, in direct rebellion against Parisian toothpick norms, high-energy Valérie was almost always in a good mood, except when dealing with rudeness or incompetence.

“They’re des têtes à claques,” she growled. This had come to be a reassuring expression, as it indicated that, at heart, our cultures might have a point in common. Not every English speaker could have found an equivalent in his language to des têtes à claques; but coming from the South, I knew it simply meant they had “heads to be smacked upside of.” Valérie used the phrase about five times a day in reference to the bane and joy of her life, American study abroad students. “The list is very clear. I need four photos, a copy of the passport, and this form. So they send one photo, or no photo, or no passport, or sometimes even no form. And then you can be sure if they don’t get their student visas or if their student IDs aren’t ready fast enough, they’ll complain to their parents, and their parents will call and yell at us. Des têtes à claques.”