France

France in these episodes is not a single scenic backdrop but a working geography: Paris is navigated on foot, measured against money and the demands of writing, while the Riviera offers a temporary promise of warmth and renewal. Its streets and riverbanks shape the narrator’s attention; its cafés and rented rooms expose the material limits within which that attention must operate.

Paris: Weather, Work, and Poverty

The city’s first winter rains change the narrator’s view of Paris. The high white houses disappear into wet black streets, and the small shops close their doors. From a top-floor room in the hotel where Verlaine had died, the narrator faces the cost and uncertainty of heating: kindling, thin pieces of split pine, and heavier wood must be bought in the right order, yet a cold chimney might fail to draw and fill the room with smoke. Rather than risk wasting the fuel and money, the narrator walks on through the rain. Poverty here is not abstract hardship but a calculation made at the street level, where even a fire depends on uncertain conditions.

That walk passes the Lycée Henri Quatre, the old church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, and the windswept Place du Panthéon before shelter is found near the Boulevard St-Michel. The route ends at a familiar café. Elsewhere in this Paris, the Café des Amateurs is described as a neglected, foul-smelling haunt on a crowded market street; its public-drunkenness notice is as disregarded as its regular clientele. The contrast between the known café that offers shelter and the Café des Amateurs, marked by disrepair and habitual drunkenness, gives the city both refuge and exposure.

The Seine as Working Landscape

The river offers a different kind of urban scene. After work, or when trying to think something through, the narrator walks the quays. At the head of the Île de la Cité, below the Pont Neuf and near the statue of Henri Quatre, the island narrows like a ship’s bow; a small waterside park and spreading chestnut trees overlook currents and backwaters where fishermen work. Their fishing is precise rather than haphazard: they adjust their spots to the river’s height, use long jointed cane poles, fine leaders, light tackle, quill floats, and carefully baited water.

These men catch dace-like fish called goujon, sometimes in excellent numbers. The narrator describes the fish as sweet-fleshed and lean, eaten whole, bones and all. When money allows a trip away from the neighborhood, the fish can be eaten at La Pêche Miraculeuse, an open-air restaurant built over the river at Bas Meudon; a good friture is also available on the Île Saint-Louis. The river therefore belongs at once to labor, food, and leisure, but leisure remains conditional on having money to travel or eat out.

The narrator knows several fishermen between the Île Saint-Louis and the Place du Verte Galante and sometimes buys wine, bread, and sausage, then sits in the sun with a book and watches them. The fishing is serious and productive, contrary to travel writers’ dismissive accounts. Many fishermen are pensioners or workers fishing on their days off; some catch a few fritures to take home to their families. The narrator does not fish, lacking the tackle and preferring to save money for Spain, and avoids becoming bound to an activity with busy and slack periods when work and travel remain uncertain. Watching is itself a way of knowing the city: the fishermen’s practical skill and domestic purpose make the riverbank an alternative to the fashionable account of Paris.

Walking as a Route into Writing

Walking also connects the city’s geography to the narrator’s literary work. After paying a café check, the narrator deliberately turns away from the Deux-Magots and takes the shortest route home. The question of what to write is worked out through streets rather than in a detached moment of reflection: the route proceeds along Rue Bonaparte, Rue Guynemer, Rue d’Assas, and Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs toward the Closerie des Lilas.

At the Closerie des Lilas, the narrator sits in a corner with afternoon light over one shoulder and writes in a notebook. A café crème cools on the table while the work takes shape: a story about returning from war, with no mention of the war itself. The river seen in the story is not simply available to be copied; it must be made, along with the country and everything that happens there. The narrator leaves with the next morning’s work already in view. In this episode, Paris’s cafés and routes are not ornamental scenery but part of a writing practice, joining movement, observation, time, and the discipline of returning to work.

The Riviera: Promise and Unease

The French coast appears as a proposed cure for the strains of Parisian life. While the narrator is living in the Vorarlberg and rewriting a novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, and their child have left Paris for a resort in the lower Pyrenees. Scott invites the narrator’s party to Juan-les-Pins, promising an inexpensive villa, swimming, health, and a restrained routine. Zelda is said to have recovered from an illness attributed at the time to excessive champagne; Scott is not drinking and has begun to work, and his novel seems to be going well. His income from a successful dramatization of The Great Gatsby and the prospect of a film sale reinforce the expectation that everything can be made orderly.

The arrival does not wholly match that prospect. The narrator comes by third-class train from Bayonne after working alone in Madrid, hungry because money had run out and the last meal had been at Hendaye on the French-Spanish frontier. The villa is well managed, the reunion with Hadley and friends is happy, and the first apéritif before lunch is followed by several more. A small welcoming party at the Casino is gay, with no one drinking anything stronger than champagne. The setting seems splendid for writing, yet the narrator identifies the missing condition: solitude.

Zelda appears beautiful, tanned, friendly, and calm-eyed. In a private confidence, she asks whether Al Jolson is greater than Jesus. No one present thinks anything of it at the time; the narrator later frames the remark as a secret shared with the quality of something a hawk might give away, while observing that hawks do not share. In retrospect, this Riviera scene sits beside the narrator’s judgment that Scott wrote nothing good again until he knew Zelda was insane. The passage does not make the resort itself the cause of what follows; instead, it sets the scene’s surface calm against the significance the narrator assigns it later.

France Between Departure and Return

France also marks a threshold in the family’s movement. When Paris becomes too cold for the baby, Bumby, the family goes to Schruns in Austria. The journey runs through Switzerland to the Austrian frontier at Feldkirch, then through Liechtenstein and onward by a branch line from Bludenz. The contrast makes France’s Paris winters part of a practical decision about family life, not merely a seasonal image.

From that new base in the Vorarlberg, France reappears as a place the narrator can return to for a visit, as at Juan-les-Pins, but not as a simple restoration of earlier Paris life. Across these episodes, the country’s significance rests in that tension: it is a landscape of work and walking, of food and observation, of cold rooms and coastal promises, where the freedom to look and write is repeatedly shaped by money, family, companionship, and the need to be alone.