“Well, I know it’s July and I shouldn’t properly expect anything even to be looked at until mid-October, since no one will be in the office until then, but couldn’t you make an exception? I need to work.”

“I can’t promise anything. And you can’t take a translator position. This visa is for an English-language teacher.”

“What about the changing jobs clause?”

If nature had ever produced anyone stupider than an American, she clearly didn’t know who it was. She stared at me and spoke very slowly. “You can change jobs. You can’t change type of employment.”

“I hate your country,” I told Sébastien when I got home.

He looked at me warily. “You aren’t going to start about gun laws again, are you?”

Once, after explaining a postal-worker joke in an American movie to Sébastien, I had indulged in a long and articulate fantasy about how many French civil service workers, particularly in visa offices, could be eliminated if it wasn’t so hard for people to get hold of a lethal weapon here when they needed one.

“No,” I said. “But I’ve received an offer of a good job teaching back at my old university in North Carolina.”

Sébastien stilled, half an avocado in one hand. He’d been making dinner.

“I’d really like to take it. It would triple our joint income, which would save me from total bankruptcy, and it might also let us afford wedding rings. It might also save me from jumping off a bridge in loss of self-worth. The job situation as a foreigner in Paris is really hard to take. Have I mentioned it?”

“At length,” Sébastien said. “Your comparison between yourself and edible larvae, in terms of the Parisian hierarchy, was particularly illuminating. But I love my job. What do you want us to do? Live apart for the next nine months? That was awful the last time. Go ahead and get married now, which would solve most of the visa problems? Or do you want me to leave my job?”

We discussed this over and over, long evenings in late July and early August walking along the Canal St. Martin or sitting by the Seine playing Abalone, a strategy game for those capable of thinking in two dimensions (Sébastien) or just really fond of pushing around marbles (me). Not far from us, a group of drummers boomed rhythm into the night, and passersby collected to dance around them.

A man wandered up and, before we realized he wasn’t just peddling drugs or mooching a cigarette, grabbed a handful of marbles in drunken delight. The rest went flying and hit the brown Seine with a plop.