Gare Saint-Lazare anchors a brief but revealing Parisian night scene: Richard Ellsworth Savage’s hotel stands opposite the station, placing his private room beside a city that seems both busy and isolating. The station’s significance lies less in any action within it than in the streets and nocturnal life gathered around it.

Setting and Position

After leaving the Place St. Michel, Richard walks a long way back to his hotel opposite Gare Saint-Lazare. His route crosses broad, deserted streets lit by pink arc lamps and passes market carts rumbling along the Rue de Rivoli. The station thus serves as a fixed point at the end of a walk through central Paris, while the hotel across from it becomes the threshold between the public night and Richard’s solitary room.

The Night Around the Station

By the time Richard reaches the hotel, rain has made the streets shine like canals beneath the lamps. People still move along the pavements; a newspaper seller calls out, and taxicabs honk through the wet night. Across the street, café waiters turn chairs upside down and set them on tables before iron shutters clank down. These details make the neighborhood neither fully asleep nor welcoming: its businesses close as its street life changes over to women walking back and forth and young toughs lingering outside.

Narrative Significance

The hotel’s position opposite Gare Saint-Lazare sharpens the contrast between proximity and separation. Paris remains audible and visible from Richard’s room, but its movement does not relieve his sense of being alone. Thinking of Anne Elizabeth traveling home in a taxi, he imagines having many lives so he could have spent one with her; the nearby streets become part of the scene’s larger image of missed companionship. The landmark gives that loneliness a precise urban setting, at the edge of transit and movement, while Richard lies shivering in a room across from the station.