Café de la Paix is a recurring Paris setting in which private relationships, public celebration, and postwar political calculation meet. Across three visits, it shifts from the scene of Eveline Hutchins’s growing attachment to J. Ward Moorehouse, to a crowded Armistice gathering, and finally to a late-night discussion of oil, mandates, and competing national interests.

A Dinner and a Change in Feeling

In July, after J. Ward Moorehouse returned from the United States, he invited Eveline Hutchins to dine at Café de la Paix. She accepted by breaking a date with Jerry Burnham, who had recently returned from the Near East and the Balkans with stories of disease and hardship. Moorehouse explained that Eleanor Stoddard had asked him to see whether Eveline needed cheering, then spoke about the expansion he expected for America after the war and its imagined role in healing Europe. His presentation sounded rehearsed, but he ended by acknowledging that its promise was true. Eveline laughed and found that she liked him very much. The dinner thus marks a personal turn within a conversation framed by national ambition.

The Armistice Crowd

On the day the Armistice was announced, Eveline, Eleanor, Moorehouse, and Major Wood set out by taxi for the café. The journey repeatedly broke apart as they left one cab for another and crowds stopped the vehicles or drew the drivers away. At Café de la Paix, every table was occupied, while people singing and dancing streamed through the doors. Greeks, Polish legionaries, Russians, Serbs, Albanians, a Highlander with bagpipes, and girls in Alsatian costume crowded the scene. The café’s ordinary function as a place to sit and eat had been overtaken by the celebration around it.

The group went upstairs, where Eveline and Major Wood joined two Anzacs at a billiard table and drank champagne. Food remained unavailable, and Eleanor said she was hungry. Moorehouse tried to reach a telephone but found the booth occupied; he wanted to send cables and proposed stopping at the Bourse. The celebration therefore does not simply suspend ordinary concerns: amid the crowd and champagne, Moorehouse remains intent on communicating with his business contacts.

Champagne and the Postwar Contest

After an opera, Eveline and Eleanor returned to Café de la Paix with Moorehouse and Mr. Rasmussen, an engineer with Standard Oil. Rasmussen dominated the conversation, drinking champagne between accounts of Baku, Mosul, and the rivalry among American, British, and Dutch interests in the Near East. He argued that Britain was gaining ground and might present the peace conference with a fait accompli over Baku; Moorehouse worried that American primacy in world oil production was at stake and suggested that public opinion might still be stirred.

Eveline asked how the claims of Russia fit with national self-determination. Rasmussen answered that the population of Baku was mainly Turkish and Armenian, and said he would prefer Russian Bolshevik control to British control, though he doubted the Bolsheviks would last. He then predicted that Lenin and Trotsky had split and that the Russian monarchy would return within three months. As the café’s bottles emptied and the evening wore on, the setting brought champagne sociability into contact with the uncertain political bargaining of the postwar moment. Café de la Paix connects the characters’ personal and social lives to a wider struggle over influence, resources, and the shape of peace.