Some of the city’s greatest contributors to culture lived through wars and uprisings. It’s still too early to know whether confinement will catalyze substantive creativity. What is Paris, after all, sans movable feast? Top restaurants are surviving on takeout orders, flaneurs are restricted to a one-kilometer stroll, and being out at midnight could result in a hefty fine. With rare exceptions Americans aren’t allowed into Paris. At least temporarily, the frustrating, flattening, and frivolous clichés of Emily in Paris exist only onscreen.

Along the quai facing the Musée d’Orsay, I can see into the galleries easier than I can when walking past the Louvre. Just three weeks ago, I was in one of them with Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag discussing their installation of The New Alphabet. Now, I felt the exact sensation of museum-going described by Adam Gopnik in a New Yorker piece about the Louvre. “The work is there, actually there as a physical fact, which you could touch, if you were allowed to,” he wrote. Put another way, confinement not only means being inside as much as possible, but also being perpetually outside of the places we enter to satisfy our souls and sybaritic whims: the museums, the bookstores, the restaurants, the boutiques, the apartments where mythic dinner party memories are made.

Perhaps that’s why having the parks open—at least for now—makes an enormous difference, assuming people have one within the permitted distance (which, sadly, is not always the case). Walking through the Tuileries, I can smell the decomposing leaves and the cut grass—which feels exceedingly reassuring given that my friends who have endured the virus all lost their sense of taste and smell with or without more serious symptoms. One of the guardians tells me that the garden thrived during the first confinement without all of us there to disturb it (they believe the absence of runners pounding the ground allowed the tree roots to relax).

As I write this, the Santé Publique (the French health authority) has posted the latest numbers, which are grim from all directions: upwards of 52,500 new cases and 418 deaths within the past 24 hours and a positivity rate of 20.6% (meaning, in the most reductive terms, one in every five people getting tested has the virus). Ask anyone here and most will say they knew a reconfinement was coming, which might be why people maxed out the moments of relative freedom. Authorities here are often reminding us that we have a certain responsibility to protect our fellow citizens. Their health—this is obvious—but also their livelihood. Île-de-France (which includes Paris and the surrounding departments) recorded 750,000 people applying for unemployment in September—a number exceeding any statistics on file. Since the murder of teacher Samuel Paty last month, there are now 7,000 military personnel deployed throughout the country (usually, there are around 3,000) to protect schools and places of worship. There is, quite simply, no precedent for a situation that feels so simultaneously devastating yet, in certain instances, unimaginably serene.