Paris

Paris is at once a place of sensory discovery, danger, work, and political theater in Richard Ellsworth Savage’s story. Its streets first confront him with a world he had imagined only from afar; later, the same city becomes the center of ambulance work, air raids, social entanglements, and the Peace Conference. For Richard, its changing face registers a larger disillusionment: the city’s pleasures and pageantry persist, but no longer seem to promise that life will resolve into the ideals with which he arrived.

Arrival and First Impressions

Richard reaches France by ship, leaving behind his unfinished poetry, his friends, and the life he had imagined continuing at home. The voyage on the Chicago feels like being forced to put down a book before reaching its end. Stories told by Red Cross workers about atrocities in Belgium and France intensify his apprehension about what awaits him, while seasickness and the noisy crowd on board leave him inwardly tense. The passage to Paris is therefore both a geographical crossing and a suspension of his former life.

His first impressions of France have the vividness of a poem. Bordeaux and the red Garonne, the colored streets, station names, bookstalls, and wine bars give way, on the train north, to fields spattered with poppies. The train seems to move in poetic rhythm, and everything appears to fall into rhyme. Paris, however, first greets him after that heightened journey with a quieter, less romantic scene: the party arrives too late to report to the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service and takes rooms at the Hotel Mont Thabor. Richard walks the boulevards in the June dusk, where strollers fill the streets and women call to passing men from behind the trees. The young volunteers remain aloof and uneasy, freshly warned about sexually transmitted infections by a medical officer on the ship.

Ambulance Service and Wartime Streets

The business of joining the ambulance service turns Richard’s first days in Paris into a sequence of waits and errands. He and his companions report to the office on the rue François Premier, receive instructions about uniforms, and are told to return for their identity cards; the cards require another day. In the intervals they ride through the Bois in horse cabs and visit Notre-Dame de Paris, the Conciergerie, Sainte-Chapelle, Malmaison, and the Tuileries Gardens. Richard practices his French while reading in the gardens, setting the calm of books and monuments against the uncertainty of his coming service.

The streets also bring the volunteers into contact with a commercial sexual life that Richard regards with distaste. His companions respond differently: Fred Summers prepares for a final night out before the front, while Richard enjoys talking to the women but finds the transaction repellent. On the group’s last night in Paris, a moonlit air raid interrupts dinner in Montmartre. The restaurant’s staff send customers into the cellar at the sirens; when the all-clear sounds, the volunteers follow three women to a shuttered house. Richard is paired with an older woman, dislikes the encounter, gives her money, and leaves. Outside, Australian officers draw him into another disorderly episode, from which he slips away before police arrive.

A second alert drives Richard into a subway with a crowd of Belgians. He attempts to persuade a young woman to go to a hotel with him, only to be confronted by the Spahi colonel accompanying her. Richard explains the misunderstanding, and the men exchange apologies before looking together for somewhere to drink. The encounter ends amicably, but back at the hotel his companions criticize him for leaving the older woman. Paris makes even this comic account of sexual bravado unstable: the city’s wartime danger, commercial nightlife, and competing ideas of conduct occupy the same night.

Political Tension and the Peace Conference

In a later Paris, the public atmosphere is tense beneath the appearance of an ordinary Sunday. Richard and Eveline Hutchins walk past partly shuttered shops and well-dressed strollers, at first without recognizing the strain around them. The clatter of the Republican Guard, followed by groups of gendarmes across the Seine River, makes the tension visible. At a street crossing, old working men carry a red flag and a sign calling for workers’ unity and world peace. Republican guards charge them with drawn sabres; the men scatter or press themselves into doorways. The city’s ceremonial force thus appears not merely in processions but in direct confrontation with workers’ protest.

When Richard returns to Paris in uniform, the city has become the operating center of the Peace Conference. The Hôtel de Crillon stands at its hub, while the rue Royale carries a procession of dignitaries, including Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and the Belgian king and queen, escorted by the plumed Republican Guard. Richard’s life around this center includes night trains to Brussels, elaborate meals, champagne, and political talk. The luxury recalls the earlier political convention he had known, but now strikes him as absurd; he watches its spectacle with a detachment that marks a change in his own expectations.

That world also draws Richard into the professional orbit of J. Ward Moorehouse and Eleanor Stoddard. During one press gathering at the Crillon, reporters ask about the Peace Conference, Colonel House, oil, and the proposed League of Nations. Moorehouse presents an agreement among American oil producers and Royal Dutch-Shell as evidence of international cooperation for peace and democracy. The confident language of a new era contrasts with the city’s visible unrest and the material interests being discussed behind its official pageantry. Paris gathers diplomacy, publicity, capital, and protest into the same urban frame without reconciling them.

Private Rooms and Changing Attachments

Away from the Crillon, Richard’s Paris is made up of familiar streets, apartments, and routines. Walking along the left bank of the Seine, past the booksellers closing their stalls in the twilight, he climbs the stone stairs to Eleanor Stoddard’s apartment. She pours tea and recounts gossip about the hotel and the Peace Conference. The domestic intimacy of these visits offers relief from military duties and office life; when Eleanor says she will go to Rome for Red Cross work, Richard regrets that they will not be there at the same time.

Paris also becomes the setting for Richard’s loneliness. During a bleak March, he has few friends in the dispatch service, finds his hotel room too cold for reading, and misses his afternoons with Eleanor. His letters from Anne Elizabeth leave him uncertain about what has happened between them, while lending money to Henry adds to his financial strain. At night, the city’s cafés close, iron shutters descend, and women walk the streets. Richard imagines several lives he might have lived, including one spent with Anne Elizabeth or as a café waiter putting chairs on tables. The images do not release him from solitude; in bed, he lies shivering beneath clammy sheets, his eyes held open by sleeplessness.

In a later scene, Eleanor’s apartment again brings together private feeling and public work. Richard visits while Eleanor prepares for Eveline Hutchins and Paul Johnson, then leaves for the Crillon, where Moorehouse is to meet the press. He has an impulse to go anywhere else, but puts on his professional composure and carries out his duties. Afterward, at Eleanor’s gathering, he encounters the newly married couple and Don Stevens, whose account of needing help in Germany prompts Eleanor to insist on the extent of Eveline’s assistance. The evening grows uncomfortable; after an argument, Stevens insults Richard, and the Johnsons remove him. Richard stays until late, in a room where even the death of one of Eleanor’s blue parakeets becomes a small, stark interruption. Paris continues to supply receptions and taxis, but neither social access nor the city’s abundance can make its human ties secure.