A Night of Rest at the Waystation and Quiet Change (Part 1)

France, Paris.

How many people, upon hearing that name, first thought of the City of Romance?

The capital and largest city of the French Republic, France's political, economic, cultural, and commercial center, one of the world's five major international metropolises, and so on.

It had countless crowns to its name. Its rich cultural legacy immediately brought to mind the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, and Notre-Dame de Paris,

or, for women, the Champs-Élysées and Galeries Lafayette.

And that was indeed true. As the largest city on the European continent, it welcomed tens of millions of tourists every year, ranking among the best in the world,

proving that its beauty truly was astonishing.

But as mentioned before, just as no gold was without flaws, just as everything had two sides,

every city had its glamorous side, but also, to some extent, a hidden darkness unknown to others.

Especially once you no longer experienced only the beautiful things as a tourist, you would find that Paris seemed particularly so.

Paris, Seine-Saint-Denis,

or Département 93, as it was better known.

Unless you were not traveling with a tour group and some unscrupulous agency that cut costs at every turn had booked your hotel in Saint-Denis, or you absolutely wanted to see the burial grounds of the French royal family at the Basilica Cathedral and visit a certain artist in Montreuil,

you basically had neither the chance nor the need to come here as a tourist.

Built as a refugee settlement during the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s, policy mistakes at the time had led to generally high unemployment, high crime rates, and low education levels among second-generation immigrants in the northern areas.

So aside from convenient transport, cheap rents, and the mixed crowd in the vast government low-rent