But what had happened exactly

Half an hour later, virtually the same experience happened to fellow Variety reporter Elsa Keslassy, who’d taken her son to see the mourners gathered at Place de la Republique and stopped to order a hot chocolate at a nearby cafe: Without warning, screaming civilians ran past the restaurant yelling that there was another shooter nearby. She and her son jumped from their chairs with the rest of the diners and rushed inside to hide in the bathroom, while the cafe’s managers blocked the doors with chairs and turned off the lights.

In the bathroom, the panic-stricken diners looked at each others in silence, a group of young Parisians quite similar to those who had been targeted two nights earlier. (It’s worth noting that the Bataclan — located in the 11th arrondissement, halfway between Charlie Hebdo’s headquarters and Place de la Republique — and the nearby cafes also hit on Friday weren’t chosen at random: They are all gathering places for young people, intellectuals, journalists, film professionals and the like. The neighborhood also harbors a significant Jewish community.)

But what had happened exactly?

As we warily exited the devastated restaurant, someone claimed that two shooters had been spotted a few blocks away, near Les Halles — not true, but enough to turn a feeling of solidarity into self-preservation. At Place de la Republique, a similar flash-panic sent thousands of Parisians running from the meeting square. At first, they were told there had been an attack in Rue des Rosiers, in the Jewish quarter, followed by news of danger in Rue des Archives — misinformation all, yet compelling enough to create a fresh threat as people practically stampeded for cover.

Had the false alarms that we experienced tonight been an actual attack, how could we have gotten information? Independently, we had all come out to show that we were not afraid, only to be proven wrong in an instant when the threat of danger still percolating beneath the surface erupted. What were we thinking?