I stalked back to my office cum reception desk and stared out the window. My side of our offices looked down on a tiny place, or plaza, in the roughly triangular junction of three streets. The place made a charming refuge of trees and a fountain, lined with classic green Parisian benches. About halfway through my year there, I had noticed in our library an enormous yellow book on the history of Parisian streets and looked up our area. The same little place where people sat reading at lunch during nice weather was named after a method of torture. On this very site, deserters and thieves used to have their hands tied behind their backs and weights attached to their feet before being lifted high and dropped repeatedly to just above the ground, until their bodies were just an unholy mess. In 1687, Louis XIV’s government moved the site for this estrapade punishment elsewhere, and for the next century deserters got shot to death on this place instead.

When you thought about it, the view from my office was a message. Things of beauty could have a lot of complications behind them, not all of them pleasant. I went to explain this message to Valérie and Giulia, and they rolled their eyes at me and went back to work.

“So,” Adela said when I got home from work that day. I had followed the dancing promise of the Eiffel Tower down to the Métro, into whose depths I had descended for a packed and smelly ride home with some man standing behind me singing odes to my butt. “It’s a good thing you know this cute guy.”