Most of the people in the Louvre gathered in the other wing around the Mona Lisa. I went there, too, sometimes. Although I am a Philistine when it comes to the Mona Lisa and wish she would get that damn smirk off her face, I can’t walk through her room without having all the hairs on my arm stand on end. There’s just something about her. More importantly, on the same side of the museum, the Victory of Samothrace soars up above the stairs in winged, headless, armless victory, her whole body one dramatic lift, erasing my depression every time I see her.

As a foreigner trying to find a job and a work visa in Paris, I needed Victory of Samothrace therapy frequently. I’m not saying it wasn’t a beneficial lesson in humility, seeing my credentials dismissed with raised, contemptuous eyebrows and being turned down with hauteur for jobs far beneath the qualifications I had established on the other side of the Atlantic. I’m sure it was good for me. But I wouldn’t wish it on anyone except French civil servants.

The worst part was staring at the walls in that apartment, wishing I had something useful to accomplish. Maybe I should have been happier with nothing to do in Paris for months, with endless time to linger in cafés, the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, go to concerts, the theater, explore. But I shouldn’t have endless time to linger and explore; I needed a job. It sounded so easy to friends who didn’t do it, to give up a boring graduate program for true love in Paris; but unemployed and often afraid, there were days I hated Paris more than any other place on the planet.

“So guess what happened to me today?” I asked Sébastien, sitting on the bed while he washed the dishes. I’d made dinner, timing it for just when he got home. What a good little woman I was, to be sure. But what the hell else did I have to do?