“I was angry after Charlie Hebdo,” one Parisian said. “Now I am désespéré.” Illustration by Christoph Niemann

At half past nine in the evening, on Friday, November 13th, Matthieu, a thirty-three-year-old resident of Paris, was eating dinner outside with friends at Le Petit Cambodge, a restaurant in the Tenth Arrondissement, near the Canal Saint-Martin. The Canal is a cosmopolitan neighborhood, and a favorite destination for the city’s twenty- and thirty-somethings. The restaurant serves Cambodian food in an atmosphere of industrial chic, with long tables, lots of brushed steel, and naked light bulbs. The evening was mild. Across the street, at a comfortably dingy bar called Le Carillon, patrons were mingling on the sidewalk with their drinks.

A car screeched to a stop a few feet from where Matthieu was sitting and a man jumped out, firing a Kalashnikov. For a moment, Matthieu thought he was watching a private settling of scores. Then the man fired a second burst; there was a tremendous shattering of windows and bottles. Matthieu leapt over the table and started running. At the top of the street, he stopped and listened. It was only then that he realized that a bullet had lodged in his left hand. His pinkie and ring fingers hung at a crooked angle.

“The terrible thing is that I saw I was out of danger, and so I had two options,” he told me. “I could either leave or go back to see my friends, at the risk of being shot again.”

We were sitting in Matthieu’s apartment, close to Père Lachaise Cemetery. I’d met him four years earlier through mutual friends, but, aside from running into each other at their wedding, we hadn’t been in touch since. He spoke wearily, pausing frequently to take long, shaking breaths. His left hand was bandaged, the two damaged fingers trussed together, a hospital bracelet still around his wrist. In his good hand he held a cigarette, which trembled as he moved it to his lips. Two days had passed since the attacks, which were organized by an ISIS terrorist cell with roots near Brussels and carried out simultaneously at six locations around Paris. Three suicide bombers had blown themselves up outside the Stade de France during a France-Germany soccer match, killing one civilian. At the Bataclan, a concert venue on the Boulevard Voltaire, three gunmen fired into the trapped crowd. The official death toll of a hundred and twenty-nine was sure to rise.

Once he heard the gunfire stop, Matthieu made his way back to the restaurant. “I saw a lot of women dead on the ground,” he said, his voice catching on the “f” of “femmes.” “It was mostly women that I saw.” He found one of his friends, a Brazilian studying in Paris, lying in the middle of the street. She had been seated across from him, and was shot in the chest. Matthieu sat on the ground and held her legs, feeling her shallow breathing. She would survive.

People were running through the streets in an eruption of panic, shouting as the police arrived and tried to establish order. The scene couldn’t be secured; Matthieu worried that the shooters might return. Next to him, a man without injuries held his girlfriend’s lifeless body in his arms. Then, without warning, he ran off. The woman was about twenty-five and very beautiful. Matthieu searched for words to describe her perfect, uncanny stillness.

A few medical workers came to the scene almost immediately. Le Petit Cambodge and Le Carillon, which also came under fire, are down the street from l’Hôpital Saint-Louis, one of Paris’s largest hospitals. But because of the number and severity of the attacks, and a confusion about whether the killers might still be at large, it took nearly two hours for ambulances to begin evacuating people.

As Matthieu was loaded into an ambulance, medics told him that he had been shot in the small of the back; adrenaline had masked the pain. The bullet had stopped just short of his spine. Surgeons at the hospital where he was taken told him it was riskier to remove it than not. He asked them to try anyway. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life with this tool of Daesh”—the Arabic acronym for ISIS widely used in France—“in my body?” He rolled an imaginary pellet in his fingers, then released it with a shudder. The bullet was extracted.

All last week in Paris, survivors of the attacks recounted their experiences on television, intercut with smiling Facebook profile pictures of the murdered as well as head shots of the terrorists. “LE VISAGE DE LA TERREUR” read the headline on the Thursday cover of Libération, next to a picture of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the young Belgian jihadist who had directed the attacks, grinning warmly, like a man in a vacation photo. He had been killed the day before, with at least two others, during a raid by French special forces on a house in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. A number of accomplices had been arrested. Saleh Abdeslam, who with his brother had taken part in the attacks, was still on the run.

Apprehension took hold of the city. Two weeks earlier, ISIS had claimed responsibility for blowing up a Russian commercial jet leaving the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing its two hundred and twenty-four passengers. On the day before the attacks in Paris, two ISIS suicide bombers murdered forty-three people in a suburb of Beirut. Last Friday, news came that gunmen had stormed a Radisson hotel in Mali and taken some hundred and seventy hostages, separating out Muslims from non-Muslims; supporters of ISIS celebrated on Twitter.

The day after seeing Matthieu, I visited Patrick Aeberhard, a cardiologist and a co-founder of Médecins sans Frontières, at his apartment overlooking the Canal Saint-Martin, across the street from a café called La Bonne Bière. We watched François Hollande on television addressing a joint session of the French Parliament at Versailles. Hollande strode through a corridor lined with guards in red-plumed hats, sheathed sabres at their sides, and into the assembly hall. “France is at war,” he said. A bombing campaign on Raqqa, an ISIS stronghold in Syria, had begun the night before. Hollande invoked a clause of a European Union treaty which calls for other member states to come to the aid of a country under attack, and proposed changes to France’s constitution to facilitate the prosecution of terrorists.

After Hollande finished speaking, the Parliament rose to sing the “Marseillaise.” At the lines “Against us, tyranny! The bloody standard is raised!” Aeberhard muted the television. On the evening of the attacks, he had been returning home from the funeral of his friend the philosopher André Glucksmann when he heard gunfire. “Since I’m sort of used to countries in the midst of war, I recognized the sound of Kalashnikovs right away,” he said.

On the sidewalk in front of La Bonne Bière, a young woman had been shot in the thigh; her companion had a bullet in his shoulder. He went to help them, thinking, as Matthieu had, that he was witness to some private act of revenge. Then he saw people inside the restaurant administering chest compressions to others lying on the ground. Four other people lay nearby, clearly dead. He treated the woman, using tourniquets made from strips of napkins and tablecloths that waiters brought to him, and went inside to help. A few first-aid responders arrived. “They began to organize a hospital in the restaurant,” he told me. With Médecins sans Frontières, and later with the group Médecins du Monde, Aeberhard had seen conflicts in Lebanon, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Ethiopia, and Rwanda, among many other countries. The situation reminded him of what he had seen in Beirut: “Blood absolutely everywhere—it was a war scene.”