Montmartre is a recurring Paris setting where private relationships and public crises meet. Its restaurants, dance halls, and informal gatherings draw Red Cross workers, American officials, soldiers, and local performers away from their offices and formal duties. The district’s significance lies in this double life: it offers diversion and company, but the war and the unsettled peace remain present in its streets and conversations.

Wartime Paris and Eveline’s evenings

During a chilly, lonely winter, Eveline Hutchins tries to keep her Red Cross work going while living with Yvonne. Raoul Lemonnier sometimes takes her out in the evenings, including to a small restaurant on Montmartre. The outings provide a change from work, but they do not remove the pressures of wartime Paris. One January night, Eveline and Raoul stand outside Sacré Coeur as an air raid passes overhead. The city is under attack; shrapnel, searchlights, and incendiary flares are visible above the rooftops, and the raid makes the danger surrounding their ordinary evening unmistakable.

That night also shifts the intimacy between Eveline and Raoul. His attentiveness and their conversation leave Eveline thinking that she loves him. Their walk home is interrupted when a gendarme stops Raoul and examines his papers. Eveline waits anxiously while the officer checks them, then sees him return the documents and apologize. The encounter briefly places official scrutiny inside a private outing. Once it is over, neither speaks about it, and they continue through the streets together. Montmartre thus belongs both to romance and to a city governed by wartime checks and restrictions.

Informal rooms and competing judgments

Montmartre also provides a setting for Eveline’s contact with Edgar Robbins, who appears to assist J.W. Moorehouse. When J.W. is occupied, Robbins takes Eveline and others to Freddy Seargeant’s gathering place, a small, crowded venue where music, drink, and performance shape the evening. Freddy plays guitar and sings; patrons recite poems or perform old French songs, and the room responds together when a performance succeeds. The place has its own shared customs, distinct from the official circles in which Robbins and J.W. move.

Robbins’s attitude toward the venue is deliberately divided. He mocks its drink, its proprietor, and its atmosphere, yet repeatedly returns. His cynicism also extends to the peace being negotiated: he expects it to be worse than the war and suggests that speaking his real opinions could land him in jail. The gathering lets that disillusionment surface amid songs and communal entertainment, rather than in a conference room.

J.W. Moorehouse visits the venue as well, sometimes with conference delegates. He enjoys the old songs, though the place makes him uncomfortable, and Eveline watches him listening. She believes Robbins dismisses qualities in J.W. that she values, and she resents Eleanor Stoddard’s laughter at their exchanges. In this informal room, Eveline’s attention to J.W. and Eleanor’s presence become part of the evening’s social tension. Montmartre brings professional associates into a setting where their private loyalties and judgments are harder to keep separate.

Dancing amid the peace negotiations

A separate night at L’Abbaye places Montmartre’s dancing alongside arguments about the future being decided in Paris. After a café conversation with Mr. Rasmussen about oil, British influence, and political power, the group takes a taxi to the venue, where dancing, singing, and Allied flags fill the room. J.W. asks Eveline to dance first; Eleanor dances with Rasmussen. The arrangement exposes a small tension between the women while keeping the larger political discussion close at hand.

Eveline and J.W. talk about music and the court at Versailles, then return to the spectacle of living in Paris while Europe’s map is being remade. When Eveline dances with Rasmussen, he describes his years prospecting for gold and testing shale, and his anger at the prospect of British control over oil. Eveline urges him to make his views public. He replies that Moorehouse is the person positioned to influence the men who matter, then wonders who can influence Moorehouse. Eveline’s brief, tight-lipped response closes off the possibility that she holds that influence. The dance floor becomes an extension of the peace conference’s political concerns, but it also shows how access and persuasion depend on personal relationships.

Money, family, and the district’s recurring uses

Montmartre is also where Richard Ellsworth Savage and Henry Savage meet Olga, who works as a hatcheck girl. Henry has become involved with her, and she is expecting a child. Richard tries to persuade her that Henry cannot marry her, citing family objections, his brother’s lack of a secure position, and the low pay of a draftsman’s job. Olga wants marriage and children and rejects the alternative Richard proposes. When she refuses an initial offer of money, Richard raises it; she becomes more receptive, and he leaves the two to arrange a later meeting. The scene gives Montmartre another function: it is a place where private obligations are negotiated under pressure from family expectations and money.

Later, Anne Elizabeth Sistair’s evening in Paris also leads through Montmartre. On the night before she is due to sail home, she goes out with Mr. Barrow; their party’s destination is the Hermitage, where they meet a correspondent and Eveline Hutchins. The conversation turns to Don Stevens, who has been arrested by the Army of Occupation over suspected Bolshevik propaganda, and to the effort to prevent his execution. The juxtaposition of an evening out with the urgent appeal for Stevens shows how readily political consequences enter the district’s social gatherings.

Across these episodes, Montmartre is neither merely a refuge from work nor a single, unified community. Its rooms host music and companionship, flirtation and disagreement, money negotiations, and talk about the peace and political repression. The district repeatedly draws people into contact outside their official roles, while the war’s dangers and the conference’s decisions follow them there.