Raoul Lemonnier

Raoul Lemonnier is a young French writer and former Chasseurs Alpins soldier whose brief courtship of Eveline Hutchins brings together wartime danger, Parisian sociability, and competing ideas of intimacy. He moves easily between English and French, sport and flirtation, but his approach to Eveline ends at a sharp divide: he imagines marriage as something his family could arrange, while she refuses that version of their relationship.

Identity and Background

Raoul enters Eveline’s circle with Maurice Millet, who brings him to meet her and Eleanor Stoddard during a visit to Paris. He is a tall young Frenchman with pink cheeks, described as resembling an English public-school boy. Although he works as a writer at the Quai d’Orsay, he seems more comfortable speaking English than French. His manner and preferences distinguish him from Maurice, whose conversation with Eleanor turns to religious experience and sacrifice: Raoul talks about tennis, cocktails, and women’s interest in sport.

His past at the front is substantial but briefly related. He served for two years with the Chasseurs Alpins before being reformé, or released from service, for reasons he cannot settle: his lungs, or the influence of an uncle who is a minister. He presents the uncertainty almost casually, then calls the experience boring. The account leaves his military history unresolved rather than turning it into a story of heroism or trauma. That lightness sits uneasily beside the fact that he has spent two years at the front, and beside the dangers that soon fill the Paris night around him.

Parisian Acquaintance and Courtship

When Maurice brings Raoul to the apartment, Raoul’s preference for English and his enthusiasm for tennis give Eleanor something she has been missing: a conversation about sport, and the prospect of playing. He says he likes English and American women because they like sport, contrasting them with French women, whom he assumes will interpret a man’s interest as an immediate sexual advance. He also speaks dismissively of love. His easy generalizations make him appear worldly, but they anticipate the gap between his casual manner and the more consequential possibility of intimacy with Eveline.

Raoul and Eveline connect while talking about cocktails and looking out over Notre-Dame de Paris and the Seine at dusk. Later, during the lonely winter after Eleanor leaves Paris for Rome, he continues to seek Eveline’s company. He takes her to small places he himself calls boring, including the Noctambules, where drinks could sometimes be obtained after the legal hour. His repeated use of that word becomes a small, telling refrain: he dismisses the places he chooses, even as those outings provide Eveline with companionship during an isolating period.

One January night, he takes her to a restaurant on Montmartre. From the porch of Sacré-Coeur, they see Zeppelins pass above Paris. The city lies beneath them in a cold darkness, while shrapnel sparkles overhead, searchlights sweep the sky, and incendiary bombs flare red. In this scene, the war does not remain distant background: it occupies the same outing as flirtation and the ordinary pleasures of a night together. Raoul has his arm around Eveline’s waist; as they watch, his hand moves over her breast. He repeats a phrase in French, apparently having forgotten his English. Eveline thinks she loves him intensely. The scene makes the force of her response inseparable from the unsettled, dangerous atmosphere around them.

The Night at Eveline’s Apartment

After the air-raid alarm has passed, Raoul and Eveline walk through the quiet streets toward her apartment. At a corner, a gendarme asks Raoul for his papers and studies them under the faint blue light. Eveline waits breathlessly while the papers are examined; the gendarme returns them, salutes, apologizes, and leaves. Neither Eveline nor Raoul discusses the encounter afterward. Its brief interruption puts the official scrutiny of wartime Paris directly into their private walk, without clarifying whether Raoul had any reason to fear it.

Raoul appears to take for granted that he will sleep with Eveline. They climb the cold stairs quietly because her maid is in the house, and he whispers that he hopes she will not find the situation boring. At her dressing table, he combs his hair, smells her perfume bottles, and admires himself in the mirror. Then he asks whether she would like to be his wife, explaining that the arrangement could be made through his uncle, the head of the family, who is fond of Americans. He treats the contract and its formalities as another tiresome inconvenience. Eveline, giggling and shivering in bed, tells him that marriage is not what she wants. Raoul looks furious and offended, says good night formally, and leaves.

Departure and Narrative Significance

The proposal does not lead to reconciliation or a second attempt. When spring arrives, Raoul has not come to see Eveline again. The narrator gives no explanation for his absence, and the episode closes without establishing what he thinks after leaving or whether he intends to return. His disappearance is part of the account’s consequence, not a resolved romance: Eveline is left in Paris through a lonely winter, and the prospect of intimacy that seemed vivid beneath the Zeppelins contracts into a single rejected offer.

Raoul’s episode turns on the contrast between what he calls boring and what proves consequential. Sport and cocktails first make him a welcome presence; his casual ideas about love shape a night that Eveline experiences with unexpected intensity; and his proposed family-arranged marriage reveals a more conventional boundary than his flirtation suggested. The war gives their brief relationship its setting and pressure, but does not supply it with a lasting outcome. Raoul remains a sharply drawn figure whose arrival and departure mark the limits of Eveline’s winter attachment rather than the beginning of a shared future.