On my tour of errands in the center of town, I walked under a medieval passageway (between the post office and the delicatessen)–and came upon a woman about sixty, who was dressed in well-worn traditional Bavarian dress, with the long skirt, apron and bodice–and a crown of flowers. A luxuriant crown of flowers, all around her head. The original Queen of the May. She was seated, singing, and playing an instrument I had never seen before, a very large lute with double strings.

It was almost scary.

I wanted to go back and look, but I’m too polite, and besides, one shouldn’t stare at fairies.

The play is “The Birthday,” by Harold Pinter. It is Samuel Beckett light. There is too much human interest and entertainment for a Beckett play. No matter how badly it’s played, I’ve never heard anyone laugh at “Waiting for Godot.”

Nothing much happens in this play, either. It’s someone’s birthday, or it isn’t; two strangers arrive; the birthday boy leaves the next morning as a zombie. I wonder if I am suffering James Joycean déja-vu, or if I really recognize a boarding house, a mother, an eligible daughter figure, a stage Irishman and a Jew. Maybe it’s like sensory deprivation: you start to project.

And I’m Marie Antoinette.

“It’s the Pont Alexandre III,” I said, losing all hope. We walk right past the Champs Elysées, our alleged destination.

“My friend Sarah’s apartment is around this corner,” I mention to my husband. He thinks this can’t be true.

A few blocks later, I point out the apartment of someone I worked for.

“It’s the place François I,” chides my husband.

“Well, it has to be somewhere,“ I say.

Perhaps I am deluded, I think. Perhaps they really know Paris much better than I do.

My colleague stumbled and fell flat, fell face down into the downward incline. She saved her face but maybe not her head, as I could not understand why she refused to admit why she was hurt. She turned to the railing, toward the Eiffel tower, turned her face away so that we could not see her face.

“We’ll take a taxi,” volunteered my husband. “We could take a taxi.”That had been the original plan and I am not sure how we wound up on this stupid freezing walk in the dark.

“The only choice left,” I said, “is whether we take the taxi to the hospital or to the theatre.”

But the Canadian woman was already walking down the incline, determined to continue along the very bank of the Seine.

I look out the window. It’s the exact grey I expected.

I saw a woman with what I thought was nappy black hair, but it was the intricate pattern of a knitted cap.