Paris is the novel’s urban stage, but never merely a backdrop: its squares and streets sustain networks of childcare and work, while its courts and police headquarters bring private violence into public view. The city’s familiar routes become precarious terrain when Louise leads Mila through unfamiliar streets, and a later glimpse of Louise in traffic leaves her suspended between the world of the Massé family and whatever lies beyond it.

Work, Recommendation, and Precarity

Louise enters the Massé family’s life through a hiring process that depends on trust and personal recommendation. After meeting her, Paul and Myriam telephone her former employers, the Rouvier family, in Paris. The woman who answers changes her tone at Louise’s name and praises her as a second mother to her two sons; separating from her had been a heartbreak, and she had even considered having a third child so she could keep Louise. The recommendation helps establish Louise’s reassuring public image, while its intensity also anticipates the emotional attachments that gather around her work.

Paris is also where that apparent security coexists with financial distress. A month before the crime, Louise meets Rose Grinberg in the street and speaks rapidly about her debts, an overdrawn bank account, and a landlord who harasses her. She offers to clean or iron for Rose in the evenings or early mornings, when the children are asleep. Rose declines, saying that times are hard for everyone. The encounter shows both the reach and the limits of informal urban support: Louise can ask a neighbor for work, but the request does not become a lifeline.

Squares as Informal Networks

The square where Louise takes the children is a daily meeting place for nannies and families. Mila plays with Alphonse, while his mother, Wafa, chats with Louise and offers pastries that Louise refuses for herself and forbids Mila to eat. The women’s companionship is practical as well as social: across the city’s childcare routines, information and personal stories travel between people who might otherwise remain isolated.

In another square, the nannies have made their gathering into a makeshift employment office, complaints desk, and union. They exchange job offers and discuss disputes between employers and workers, bringing their grievances to Lydie, their self-appointed president. The setting is temporary and vulnerable. At six in the evening, groups of young men arrive from the direction of Rue de Dunkerque and Gare du Nord; the nannies gather the children’s toys and belongings and leave. Their procession through the gates disperses toward different neighborhoods, with Louise walking beside Lydie while holding Mila and Adam by the hand.

Streets of Exposure and Disorientation

When Louise takes Mila out at night, Paris changes from a recognizable setting into a maze. They walk for a long time along the Grands Boulevards, past theaters and crowded cafés, then turn into increasingly dark, narrow streets. Mila does not recognize the route. The yellow-lit pavements and unfamiliar houses seem far from home, and she looks to Louise for reassurance. Louise answers only with a quiet prompt to keep walking. On Rue Montmartre, Mila notices women smoking outside bars and hears a proprietor scold them for disturbing the neighbors. The child’s fear grows from not knowing where she is, whether her parents know her location, or how far she has been taken from the familiar city of home.

Paris also appears in a fleeting street scene witnessed from a car. In a traffic jam, Myriam recognizes Louise across an intersection by her blond hair, the bun at her neck, and her distinctive, agile but trembling walk. The crowd briefly hides Louise, then carries her into view again beneath the darkened city’s lights. Paul drives away before Myriam can call to her. The sight makes Louise seem out of place, as if she belonged to a different story, and the city’s busy streets turn that separation into an image of imminent disappearance.

Courts, Police, and Public Record

Paris’s institutions give the city another role: it is where violence is prosecuted and investigated. Myriam, who had long been drawn to criminal trials, arrives early at the Palais de justice for a case she has prepared with Pascal for more than a month. The defendant is accused of joining three others in a punitive attack on two Sri Lankan cooks; one man was killed, and surveillance footage helped identify the attackers. Myriam works to maintain the professional distance Pascal calls the proper distance, sorting truth from the defendant’s lies and advising him to abandon a bravado that will undermine his defense.

After the Massé children are killed, the investigation likewise moves through Paris’s streets and institutions. Captain Dorval brings Wafa to the police headquarters at 36 and questions her about Louise’s movements on the day of the crime. Wafa says she visited the apartment that morning, but Louise did not let her in; Alphonse had slipped past Louise to join the children, and Wafa and the boy eventually left. Rose Grinberg places Louise in the building later, an hour before the murder. The police search the neighborhood, speaking with people at the square and Café Le Paradis and questioning shopkeepers in the passages of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. They also review the supermarket surveillance recording, making the city’s ordinary commercial spaces part of the reconstruction of the crime.

The City as a Connected but Unequal World

These scenes link Paris’s domestic and public worlds without making them equivalent. Parks carry the everyday work of childcare and the informal exchange of jobs; streets expose Louise’s economic vulnerability and Mila’s dependence; courts and police turn actions concealed within private homes into matters of evidence. The city supplies routes, contacts, and institutions, but access to their support is uneven: Rose hears Louise’s plea yet does not take her on, while the nannies’ mutual aid remains exposed to the pressures of employers, insecurity, and public space. Paris holds these connections together, even as Louise’s solitary walks and disappearance reveal how easily a person can move through a crowded city without belonging securely to any of its circles.