La valeur d'intensité lumineuse de gris, Part I

At the corner of a wedge-shaped building where two roads connect in the 18th arrondissement of Paris sits a public trash can.  It's a hideous green, bolted to the ground, and a popular subject of photo albums American tourists compile after their brief whirlwind tours of Europe ("Europe in 7 days!").

In this particular one, near the Guy Moquet metro stop, lies a small, nondescript paper bag.  That bag envelopes an object that most people would not believe belongs in a trash can.  Well, that's true; but it's equally true that no person seeing the object is likely to know what it is.  By appearances, it's the approximate size and shape of a Guy Moquet 0,54 Euro stamp.  Small, squarish, thin.  But if a curious person were to handle it, she would discover that it's hard and, if curious enough, that it's in fact virtually unbreakable.


Let's not muse so much on what such a curious person would do, but instead introduce such a curious person to the scene and see exactly what she would do.  Let's call her a good French name--perhaps Anne or Brigitte--no, let's call her Sylvie.  Sylvie is, say, 10 years old, precocious, somewhat small for her age (but not overly), with short, brown, straight hair, wearing jeans and a black pea coat, etc, etc.  She walks past the trash can chewing on the last bits of a pain au chocolat, and tosses a little pastry paper toward the mouth of the can, which serendipitously flutters and lands on the sidewalk.  She picks it up, drops it more carefully in the trash, when she sees the bag just described, reaches in, and removes it.  Let's paint a curious expression on her face as she opens it and pulls out our small object.


And thus is set the scene of our tale.  Because she is reluctant to throw out such a dense (for dense it is), clean, evidently purposeful object, she stashes it in her pocket, when she starts noticing a change in the world around her.  Being a human and therefore subject to logical fallacies, including but not limited to post hoc ergo propter hoc, she hastily (and accurately) concludes that the small object caused the change in the world around her.

This is the story detailing some of those changes.