Quai de la Tournelle is the Paris address of the apartment where Eveline Hutchins lives with Eleanor Stoddard. Set above the Seine in an old riverside house, it joins a private domestic refuge to a view of the city’s monumental landscape; the apartment’s window and parlor become distinct settings for daily work, companionship, and social discomfort.

The House and Its View

Eleanor has somehow secured a fine apartment on the mansard floor of a grey, peeling-faced house built in Richelieu’s time and renovated under Louis Quinze. Eveline never tires of looking through the delicate tracery of the wrought-iron balcony. Below, toy steamers buck the current, towing varnished barges whose deckhouses have lace curtains and geraniums; across the river, the flying buttresses of Notre-Dame de Paris lift its apse above the trees of a small park. The apartment’s elevated outlook makes the river and its traffic part of the women’s ordinary interior life.

A Shared Domestic Routine

After their office work pasting pictures of ruined French farms and orphaned and starving children into scrapbooks for Red Cross drives, Eveline and Eleanor return to the apartment and take tea at a small Buhl table by the window. The view is not an escape from wartime labor so much as its daily counterpoint: images of devastation are assembled for circulation while, outside, barges and steamers continue along the Seine.

The kitchen has its own practical economy. Eveline watches Yvonne cook with groceries and sugar drawn from the Red Cross commissary. Yvonne barters so effectively that their food costs almost nothing. Eveline initially tries to stop her, but Yvonne argues that officials and generals do not go without their brioches while ordinary people suffer. Her bitter criticism of profiteers and ministers turns the kitchen into a place where wartime scarcity is debated as well as managed; Eleanor attributes Yvonne’s anger to her suffering, while Jerry Burnham suggests that the wider world, rather than Yvonne, is what has gone wrong.

The Parlor and Its Social Tensions

The apartment also receives visitors. After dinner at the Café de la Paix, Eveline and J. Ward Moorehouse find Maxim’s crowded with drunken, brawling aviators, so she suggests going to her place for wine. As they arrive at Quai de la Tournelle, Eveline sees Don Stevens walking down the street with a young private named Johnson. Don turns back, and the four go up to the parlor. Eveline and Moorehouse can find little to say except about Eleanor, while Don and Johnson sit awkwardly; Moorehouse eventually returns to his staff car. Once he has left, Don angrily objects to a Red Cross major.

That awkward visit sits within a wider strain in the women’s Paris social life. At another dinner, Don’s attack on staff officers and patriotism provokes Eleanor’s anger, and after the guests leave she and Eveline quarrel. The next morning Eleanor will not speak to her, and Eveline goes out to look for another apartment. The evidence does not establish that she leaves Quai de la Tournelle, but it shows how a home that had held their shared routines could also become the ground on which their disagreement became difficult to avoid.

Narrative Significance

Quai de la Tournelle is rendered through contrasts of scale and use: the old house’s mansard rooms overlook the Seine and the buttresses of Notre-Dame de Paris, while the window table, kitchen, and parlor hold the repetitive labor and unsettled relationships of the women’s daily lives. The address gives Eveline a place to watch the city and return to after work, but it is not sealed off from the pressures around her. Wartime relief work enters through the scrapbooks and commissary; political and personal conflict arrives with visitors at the parlor door.