The 10th arrondissement of Paris is the setting for the Massé family’s home and the everyday networks surrounding it. In this closely inhabited cityscape, domestic routines unfold behind apartment doors while neighbors, nannies, and police form overlapping circles of observation, work, and information.

The Massé Apartment

The Massé family lives on the fifth floor of a handsome building on Rue d’Hauteville. Their apartment is the building’s smallest: after their second child was born, Paul and Myriam divided the living room with a partition. They sleep in a cramped room between the kitchen and a window overlooking the street. Myriam’s collected furniture, Berber rugs, and Japanese prints give the restricted interior a distinct domestic character.

The home’s small scale makes its repeated tasks especially visible. Louise records school and dance schedules, pediatric appointments, medicines, and even the price of a fairground ice cream in a flower-covered notebook. She rearranges cupboards, hangs lavender sachets among the coats, and turns the apartment into a space where little appears to accumulate or spoil. Cleaning is not merely background labor: it helps make the family’s daily life seem orderly and effortless.

Domestic Space and Dependence

That order is tested when Myriam returns late and finds the children out of the bath. As they run naked into their mother’s arms, Louise continues scrubbing the tub, folding towels, emptying the washing machine, and preparing the children’s beds. When Myriam tries to take a saucepan from her, Louise keeps hold of its handle and gently sends her back to her children, promising to prepare dinner. Care fills the rooms so thoroughly that the person providing it seems almost to disappear into the work.

The apartment’s dependence on that labor becomes unmistakable during the family’s absence. After Paul and Myriam leave, Louise returns to Rue d’Hauteville, opens the shutters they had closed, changes the sheets, empties cupboards, cleans shelves, shakes out the old Berber rug, and vacuums. She then spends the week in the apartment, sleeping on the sofa rather than in the couple’s bed and eating from the refrigerator and pantry to avoid spending money. The home is both workplace and temporary refuge, though not a place she can occupy on equal terms.

The Square and Neighborhood Networks

Outside the apartment, the square serves as a meeting place for Louise, Mila, and other caregivers. Louise visits daily, where Mila plays with Alphonse, the young son of Wafa. The square is also an informal employment exchange and grievance forum: offers circulate, disputes between employers and workers are discussed, and the women bring complaints to Lydie, their self-appointed chairwoman. Domestic labor, often confined to private homes, acquires a public network there.

The square’s social world has boundaries and pressures of its own. At six in the evening, groups of young men arrive from Rue de Dunkerque and the Gare du Nord; the nannies gather up coats and toys and leave. Louise and Lydie walk away together toward the Grands Boulevards, Louise leading Mila and Adam by the hand while Lydie pushes a sleeping infant. Their repeated route links care in the park to the streets and households beyond it.

Neighbors, Money, and the Aftermath

The apartment building is also a community of people who may not know one another well but exchange warm greetings. Rose Grinberg lives within this neighborhood network. A month before the tragedy, Louise tells her about harassment from her landlord, accumulated debts, and an overdrawn bank account; she offers to work early or late, cleaning or ironing, when the children are asleep. Rose declines, and later believes that accepting the offer might have changed what followed. The conversation makes financial distress part of the neighborhood’s ordinary life, while showing how a request for work can carry desperation as well as practical need.

After the crime, the building and its surroundings become spaces of rumor, memory, and investigation. Neighbors gather below as an ambulance leaves, trying to see past the police cordon; the rumor spreads that something terrible has happened to the children. Rose remains in the building, where the remembered cry and the emptying of the Massé apartment haunt the residents. Investigators later question people around the neighborhood, including at the square and nearby café, as they reconstruct Louise’s movements. The arrondissement thus holds two sharply contrasting versions of domestic life: the daily networks that sustain a household, and the streets and stairwells through which its catastrophe becomes visible.