Jules Pascin’s Suicide

Jules Pascin’s suicide enters the narrative through retrospective contrast: the painter is remembered not at the moment of his death, but grinning at Le Dôme, an image whose brightness is shadowed by the later knowledge that he hanged himself.

The Recalled Night

At Le Dôme, Pascin wore his hat on the back of his head and grinned. The narrator saw him as looking more like a Broadway character of the Nineties than the lovely painter he was. This is a sharply particular social image, grounded in gesture and appearance rather than in any account of the death itself.

Death in Retrospect

The narrator identifies the later outcome plainly: Pascin hanged himself. The recollection of the night at Le Dôme is explicitly shaped by what happened afterward; the remembered grin belongs to a living scene, but the act of remembering cannot separate it from the death. The passage supplies no circumstances, date, or further account of the suicide.

Humor and Memory

The narrator says he liked to remember Pascin as he had been that night, then reflects that the seeds of what people will do are present in them, while joking people seem to have those seeds covered by better soil and a higher grade of manure. The joke does not explain or predict Pascin’s death. Instead, its comic, earthy image sits beside the fact of his suicide, preserving the distance between a person’s lively public manner and what later becomes known about him.