Autumn

Autumn is the season in which Paris’s beauty turns temporarily severe: rain and cold wind strip the trees, and their bare branches make loss visible. In the narrator’s account, that sadness is expected, unlike the more unsettling possibility that spring might never arrive; autumn’s meaning depends on the knowledge that the cycle will begin again.

Weather and the City

When fall has ended, bad weather arrives, driving rain against the green bus at the Place de la Contrescarpe and forcing windows shut at night. Wind tears leaves from the trees; they lie sodden in the rain. The Café des Amateurs grows crowded, its windows clouded by heat and smoke. The narrator avoids it, repelled by the smells of dirty bodies and drunkenness. Its regulars drink wine by the half-liter or liter, with inexpensive apéritifs serving as a foundation for heavier drinking. The weather does not simply darken the city outdoors: it presses people together inside a café the narrator describes as the rue Mouffetard’s cesspool.

The Expected Sadness of Falling Leaves

The narrator treats autumn’s melancholy as natural. A part of a person seems to die each year as the leaves fall, leaving branches bare against wind and cold, wintry light. That seasonal loss is painful but familiar; one expects sadness in fall. The contrast gives the season its particular emotional weight: its desolation is not yet despair, because the annual return of spring remains imaginable.

Spring’s Return and the River

Along the Seine, fishermen, working barges, and tugs towing barges under the bridges keep the narrator from feeling lonely. The river and its trees also make the changing seasons perceptible: spring can seem to arrive day by day, then appear suddenly after a night of warm wind. Cold rains may push it back, making it seem that a season of life is being lost. But when the river freezes, the narrator knows it will flow again, just as spring will come after autumn. By contrast, rain that keeps falling and kills the spring feels like the senseless death of a young person. Spring eventually arrives in those remembered years, yet its near failure is frightening. Autumn therefore belongs to a seasonal rhythm whose consolation is real but not automatic: the return of spring is trusted, while its delay makes that trust newly vulnerable.

The seasonal contrast also appears in the cafés. The Closerie des Lilas, near the narrator’s former flat, is described as fine outdoors in spring and fall, with tables beneath trees and under the boulevard’s awnings. Against the constricted, rain-bound scene at the Café des Amateurs, this remembered café suggests another way the city inhabits autumn: not only as exposure and loss, but as a season in which outdoor life can still be enjoyed.