I have never been brilliant at reading maps, and this became embarrassingly clear the moment I stepped off the RER at Saint-Michel-Notre-Dame. I had spent the entire train journey from Gare du Nord smugly studying a printout of directions to our holiday flat in the Latin Quarter, convinced I had it sussed. Ten minutes later, I found myself standing in front of a pharmacy on Rue Mouffetard, holding the wrong end of my phone charger instead of my reading glasses, wondering why nothing looked familiar. My partner, who had wisely remained silent during my confident march in the wrong direction, finally piped up that we had walked in a complete circle. Twice.

The flat itself, when we eventually located it down a narrow cobblestoned passage near Place de la Contrescarpe, was worth every mortifying minute. A proper Parisian affair with creaking floorboards, shutters that actually shut, and a view of neighbouring rooftops that made me feel immediately and absurdly literary. I stood at the window with my coffee the next morning, pretending to be Hemingway, until a pigeon deposited something unfortunate on the sill and broke the spell.

Determined to redeem myself after my navigational disaster, I announced we would spend our first full day simply wandering without purpose. No maps, no plans, no phones except for emergencies. My partner raised an eyebrow but humoured me. We set off in what I believed was the general direction of the Seine, took the first left that looked interesting, and promptly vanished into a Paris that guidebooks never seem to mention.

The first accidental discovery came within twenty minutes. A tiny square called Place de l'Estrapade, tucked behind what I later learned was the Pantheon, where an elderly gentleman sat on a bench feeding sparrows from his palm like some minor character in a French film. We bought croissants from a boulangerie that had no English signage and no queue, which in central Paris felt almost suspicious. The woman behind the counter chatted to us about the weather as if we were regulars, and I understood perhaps every third word, which somehow made the pastry taste better.

Getting properly lost took longer than expected. The Latin Quarter's medieval street pattern seems designed to confuse, or perhaps protect, its secrets. We found ourselves in a passage called Rue du Chat-qui-Peche, barely wide enough for two people to pass, which apparently translates to Street of the Fishing Cat. No fishing cats were in evidence, but a small gallery displayed peculiar ceramic fish that someone had clearly spent decades perfecting. The artist himself emerged from a back room, explained his techniques in rapid French I mostly missed, and insisted we take a brochure we could not read.

By mid-afternoon, hunger and mild panic had set in. We had crossed Boulevard Saint-Germain somehow, into streets I did not recognise at all. A handwritten menu outside a restaurant on Rue de l'Echaude caught my eye purely because it looked so unassuming. Inside, twelve tables, no tourists, a waiter who seemed genuinely surprised to see us. I ordered steak frites because it was the only thing I could pronounce with confidence, and it arrived perfectly cooked with a sauce the colour of autumn. The house wine cost less than bottled water at home.

The walk back took us through Rue de Buci market, which I suppose counts as discovered rather than properly hidden, though the stall selling nothing but varieties of dried mushroom felt like our own private find. I bought a bag of something called trompettes de la mort, which translates absurdly to trumpets of death, purely for the name. They sit still in our kitchen cupboard, intimidating and wonderful.

That evening, back on our rooftop view, I reflected on my complete failure to navigate and my unexpected success at finding things worth finding. There is something humbling about being lost in a city that assumes you know what you are doing. Paris does not coddle the confused. But it rewards the wandering, the slightly foolish, the people willing to turn down passages that lead nowhere obvious. I thought about my smug train journey, my misplaced confidence, my circular wandering. Perhaps being occasionally and thoroughly lost is not a failing but a necessary precondition for finding anything genuine at all.

The pigeon returned the next morning, and I did not mind one bit.