Then another restaurant offers him a job. Mauro goes to meet the chef, who is also the owner. What’s available is not a few extra hours but a full-time position. But while the rhythm of work at Les Voltigeurs stole whole days from him, as well as two-thirds of his nights, the hours here seem likely to produce a different outcome. In the fall of 2006, Mauro signs the contract—another minimum-wage CDI—and life speeds up again.

Le Villon is a small but sophisticated bistro on Rue des Petits-Champs. The three-course prix fixe is thirty-five euros, the dishes fairly basic but well prepared. Twenty customers at lunch, forty in the evening, but only one shift and a small team to keep things ticking over: two cooks, including Mauro, and an overworked dishwasher. The chef is a calm guy with bushy long black hair, a face like a knife blade, and sea-blue eyes sunk deep under the prominent arch of his brows. Mauro is immediately drawn to his modesty and intensity; enthusiastic, Mauro thinks that he will finally be able to experience, close up, the workings of a restaurant on a human scale. In the first days, after the physical exertions of the brasserie in Montreuil, he finds the workload here pretty light. Only in the first days, though. Because, from October, when the master’s program starts to fill up his schedule, his days become crazily stretched out and segmented. He urgently needs to change his bike, to try something light—a quick, airy machine that will weave more easily through town. Mauro gets hold of a fixed-gear bike, pumps the tires to the limit, and speeds off every morning down Rue de la Roquette in the direction of Père Lachaise. From Tuesday to Saturday, his days are organized as follows: 8:00 a.m.–10:00 a.m.: master’s, lecture hall, Rue de Bagnolet; 10:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.: Le Villon; 3:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m.: master’s, tutorial in Nogent-sur-Marne; 7:00 p.m.–11:30 p.m.: Le Villon.

So he has to keep going—maintain this pace, get through the day, not let things slip out of control. Doing that means accepting a life without any downtime, with no space to breathe except in the 5:00–7:00 p.m. slot, that two-hour late-afternoon break when he sits at a table with his Perrier with a slice of lemon to read in the silent back room of a café on Rue du Château-d’Eau.