CHAPTER 8The early-morning sky was a lovely translucent blue without a single cloud. But the sun was still low and the courtyard outside my apartment was still in shadow, preserving the night’s cold like a sealed refrigerator. I walked the half block to breakfast wearing a cloth cap, a turtleneck sweater under my jacket, and a wool scarf over it. “Dress like an onion,” French mothers teach their kids: with layers that can be peeled off and put back on, to outwit the vagaries of any day’s temperature shifts. Most of the year it is excellent advice.
By night half of Paris seems to converge on the inexpensive restaurants around Place Contrescarpe. But by day it returns to being the heart of the Mouff, a neighborhood in the old meaning of the word, home to a manageable number of people of div
