Paris is the setting of a formative childhood memory the Dowager shares with Aomamé: a city she calls breathtakingly beautiful, yet recalls through the wounded soldiers, mourning women, and coffins that filled its streets as the First World War drew to a close. The contrast makes Paris not merely a place of beauty, but the landscape through which a child first encounters war’s human cost.

The Dowager’s Childhood in Paris

When she was ten, the Dowager accompanied her father, a diplomat, to Paris. They stayed for about a year in an old apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens. The remembered setting is precise, but the memory that endures is not a catalogue of sights: it is the city as a child experienced it amid the war’s aftermath.

A City Seen Through Its Wounds

The Dowager says Paris is breathtaking in every season, but that beauty survives in her memory only alongside bloodshed. Soldiers returning from the trenches crowded the stations; some seemed scarcely older than children, while others were old. Men missing arms, legs, or eyes wandered the streets like abandoned spectres. The whiteness of their bandages and the black mourning crape women wore on their arms remain especially vivid to her.

Horse-drawn vehicles carried heaps of new coffins toward the cemeteries. People turned their eyes away and fell silent as the coffins passed. The recollection moves from injured bodies to public mourning and finally to the dead, giving the city’s ordinary streets the weight of a landscape marked by loss.

Memory and Consolation

The Dowager tells Aomamé this story after the two recall childhood hand-holding. As she stretches her arm across the table, the girl places her hand in hers, and the Dowager squeezes it. She imagines that her own parents must have held her hand with similar strength when she was ten and saw the coffins in Paris, reassuring her that she was safe and that nothing would happen to her. The remembered city thus connects public catastrophe to the private gestures by which adults try to shelter children from it.

Narrative Significance

Paris appears through retrospective testimony rather than as a scene unfolding in the present. Its beauty and its devastation remain inseparable in the Dowager’s account: the city is remembered not by denying its loveliness, but by showing how wartime suffering has become the lasting measure of what she saw there. Her recollection also gives the present exchange with Aomamé a history of care, linking the child she once was, comforted amid the passage of coffins, to the older woman offering a steady hand now.