Lausanne matters in the memoir less as a described city than as the destination attached to a decisive loss: Hadley Richardson was bringing Ernest Hemingway his manuscripts as a surprise so he could work on them during their mountain holidays, but the suitcase was stolen at the Gare de Lyon. The manuscripts never reached him; the loss became part of the story of how he began writing again.

Destination of the Manuscript Journey

Hadley was traveling down to Lausanne with Hemingway’s work for their holidays in the mountains. The suitcase held the originals, typescripts, and carbons, arranged in manila folders. Lausanne therefore enters the account through an anticipated arrival: the manuscripts were meant to meet Hemingway there, where he could return to them, but the theft intervened before that reunion.

The narrative is precise about the distinction between destination and site of loss. The manuscripts were stolen at the Gare de Lyon, not in Lausanne. The city is the intended endpoint of Hadley’s journey and the setting of the planned work; the station is where that plan was broken.

What the Loss Left Behind

Almost everything Hemingway had written was gone, but two stories survived. One was “My Old Man,” which had been sent out by Lincoln Steffens and was in the mail when the rest disappeared. The other, “Up in Michigan,” had never been copied: Hemingway had left it in a drawer after Gertrude Stein called it inaccrochable. The different circumstances of survival make the loss concrete: one story escaped through the post, the other through having remained at home.

Later, after Hemingway and Hadley had left Lausanne and gone to Italy, he showed a surviving racing story to Edward O’Brien, who was then boarding in a monastery above Rapallo. Hemingway presented it as a curiosity, likening the loss to showing someone the binnacle of a ship that had vanished. O’Brien was more visibly hurt by the story of the theft than Hemingway expected. Recalling Hadley’s distress, Hemingway remembered reassuring her before he knew the full extent of what had happened; once she told him, he went to Paris and confirmed that the manuscripts were gone.

Place in Hemingway’s Writing Life

Lausanne marks a hinge between lost work and renewed work, not because the surviving account describes Hemingway writing there, but because the stolen suitcase had been intended for him there. Afterward, he recalled beginning to write stories again in Cortina d’Ampezzo. In “Out of Season,” he omitted the real ending—the old man’s suicide—on the theory that a knowingly withheld element could strengthen a story and make readers feel more than they understood.

The place-name thus carries a double implication: a planned period of work among the mountains, and the absence that forced Hemingway to begin again without his earlier manuscripts. In the memoir’s geography, Lausanne is less a scenic portrait than a destination shadowed by what was lost on the way.