Still, I braved it, waltzing past security guards with increasingly aloof confidence and grinning giddily every time it worked. Emboldened, and showing great discipline in my determination to enjoy Paris, I set out to explore every chocolate shop in the city.

“Wow,” my sister said, “you’re so gutsy.”

“Well, I am. Do you know how many chocolate shops there are in this city? It’s the chocolate capital of the world!”

“Just shut up already. Although I did figure out what’s wrong with that city. It’s the Eiffel Tower. I was reading a feng shui book.”

“Bless you.”

“No, it’s—don’t you keep up with U.S. fads? It’s about the way the space you’re living in is arranged and how that affects you. The author said having that great rusty arrow pointing up above the city bleeds all its hope out of it.”

“It’s got a great big lighthouse beacon beaming from the top of it, too,” I said. “It circles over the whole city. The government said the beacon was to symbolize how Paris was the center of the world and everyone should come to it, or something like that. But lighthouses really are supposed to warn people away from dangerous rocks.” How like the Parisian government to warn people away with their attempts at hospitality.

She was growing on me, though, the Eiffel Tower. I didn’t want to admit it, but at night when the lights came on, that daytime rusty metal look changed to a warm copper glow. There was something so glamorous and romantic about her, there above the city.

Sensing weakness, my colleague and only Parisian friend Valérie convinced me to give Ladurée a try. This took some doing because every time she mentioned Ladurée’s legendary macaroons, I got unpleasant visions of coconut. When I finally ducked through the velvet curtains on rue Royale into this nineteenth-century salon de thé, I discovered instead macarons, concoctions made of lightly crusty air and luscious ganache. As I sat on a park bench eating a chocolate one that could have been served in heaven, a couple passed by, and the older man grinned at me, the first unsalacious grin I had ever received from a strange Parisian: “They’re the best in the world, aren’t they?”

I hated to confirm a Parisian in any conviction of superiority, but I had to give him that one. Okay, I said to myself. A city that can produce macarons like that has to be survivable. Keep at it, girl.