Rue Jankowski is a dead end. Walk to the corner and the end of it opens into a lit tunnel with a child and a white rabbit already halfway down.

Anamorphic painting is an old trick with a hard constraint: the image is drawn distorted across surfaces at different angles and distances, and it only assembles into one coherent picture from a single viewing position. Step two metres left and the tunnel shears apart into unrelated stripes on three separate buildings. That constraint is why most anamorphic street art is small — a stairwell, a single wall, a corner. Rabbit Hole is six storeys tall and spans three buildings, which means the geometry had to survive across windows, drainpipes, roof lines and a change of render.

Seth — the Parisian artist Julien Malland, who works mostly with children as his subject and mostly in places where a wall is the only available surface — painted it in May and June 2022 as guest of honour at Le Mans’ urban art festival, Plein Champ. He worked with six assistants, the first time he had done so, which is the sort of detail that tells you what scale actually costs. The city and a local comic-book shop, Bulle, put it there.

It was not a local secret for long. Later that year Street Art Cities, the app and community that catalogues murals worldwide, ran its public vote on the hundred best frescoes of 2022. Rabbit Hole finished fifth, the only French entry in the global top ten, which is why a dead end in the Saint-Nicolas district is now one of the most photographed spots in the city.

The honest limitation is the same thing that makes it good. There is exactly one place to stand, and no plaque tells you where it is — you find it by walking towards the wall and watching the picture come together and then start to fall apart again. That is a genuinely lovely thirty seconds and a mildly ridiculous one, and it means every photograph you have seen of this mural was taken from within about a metre of every other. Go anyway, and go when the light is on the wall: the whole effect depends on the painted tunnel reading as brighter than the street it is cut into. The rest of Le Mans’ commissioned murals are a short walk in every direction, and none of them ask anything of you.