Jacques S

Jacques S is a humanities student and the son of a factory manager. In two encounters with the narrator, he first comes close to learning why she is seeking medical care, then becomes the listener to her indirect disclosure of an abortion. His brief role connects the practical secrecy of her appointment to the class tension and gendered spectatorship surrounding what she has endured.

Background and First Encounter

On November 8, as the narrator walked toward the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville to catch a bus to Rue Lafayette for an appointment with Doctor N, she ran into Jacques S. He asked why she was going to the Left Bank. She said she had a stomach ache and was seeing a stomatologist; he corrected her, explaining that a stomatologist treats mouth disorders rather than stomach complaints.

The correction made the encounter more precarious. The narrator feared that her slip might prompt Jacques S to suspect the real purpose of the appointment, or to offer to accompany her to the doctor’s office. When the bus arrived, she hurriedly took leave of him. The scene shows how an ordinary conversation could threaten to expose care she was trying to keep private.

The Later Disclosure

A few months later, in March, the narrator encountered Jacques S again at the library. He asked about her thesis, and they went out into the lobby. As he spoke, he kept swirling around her. He was preparing to hand in a paper on Chrétien de Troyes in May and was surprised that she had only just begun her work.

The narrator indirectly intimated that she had had an abortion. She recalls doing so out of pride, or perhaps social vindictiveness: she wanted to challenge the factory manager’s son, who spoke of workers as though they came from another planet. When he understood what she was telling him, he froze, staring with bulging eyes as if absorbed by an imagined scene. He repeatedly said, “Well done, old girl! Well done!” with a dazed expression.

Class and Narrative Function

Jacques S’s two appearances are linked by what the narrator withholds and later chooses to disclose. In the first, she fears that a mistake in her explanation could reveal the appointment’s purpose; in the second, she makes the abortion known indirectly, turning disclosure into a challenge to his class assumptions. The contrast places her concealment and her later speech within the same relationship, without suggesting that Jacques S knows the truth during their first meeting.

His astonishment also makes him part of the narrator’s account of how men responded to the abortion. She remembers his fascinated, almost arrested attention alongside what she recalls as a broader male fascination with an imagined scene. His brief reaction does not resolve the social distance between them; instead, it brings that distance into view at the moment she speaks across it.