I was staying at the Hôtel Jardin de Cluny, tucked into Paris’s Latin Quarter, a short walk from the Panthéon. Every morning, breakfast was overseen by a young woman who was warm, quietly attentive, always making sure everything was in order before the guests came down. My French began and ended with what Google Translate could offer me, and hers, I imagine, wasn’t much further along in English. Most of what passed between us those first few days was translated through a phone screen.

It was in Paris that I fell in love with croissants, properly for the first time. One morning I picked up a chocolate croissant that had gone slightly cold, and typed out a request: could I have it warm, and a little crisp. She read it, smiled, and within minutes brought it back exactly as I’d asked.

The next morning, before I’d said a word, it arrived that way again. And the morning after that. Every day for the rest of my stay, without me asking twice, my croissant came warm and crisp, because she had simply remembered.

On my last morning, I told her I was flying home, and thanked her for the warmth and taking such good care of us during the stay. Something shifted in her expression, a glimmer that held both happiness and a quiet sadness at once. All she said was: “Can I pack you something?”

That was it. No grand gesture, no elaborate goodbye. Just a small, instinctive act of care, offered without needing a shared language to carry it. We said our goodbyes there, and I left with one of my fondest memories of the entire trip. Not a monument, not a meal, but a stranger who noticed, and remembered, and chose to be kind about it, every single day.

Kindness, I’ve learned, doesn’t need translating. It was never a language to begin with.