chaque matin, pour gagner mon pain

Paris is Paris, business is business; I've spent the last week and a half tying bundles of nine napkins up with a tenth. I work at a cozy cafe with a bibliophilic bent and an archetypal staff. To give only one example, the soi-disant Madame Martine celebrated her last day before (forced?) retirement by making off with a client's sparkly shoes and belting out, hands in air, head thrown back, "C'est la luuuuut-te finale!" To give another, the Marseillais chef with the mane and snarl of a wild horse of Camargue sings slightly vulgar folk ballads and speaks only in improvised aphorisms. Everyone treats me like a strange animal whose genetic proximity to humans is unclear, handling me very gently and with only an optimistic expectation of sentience. At the same time I have the sense that someone has paid them to entertain me, with the predictable effect of skewing my perception of subject/object relations. We can see the Eiffel Tower from our window. At night it blinks wildly or turns blue...why?