Paris’s 17th arrondissement is where the narrator goes to arrange an abortion with Madame P-R in January 1964, and where she later revisits the route and building. The movement from an address first encountered through LB’s practical account to the locked doorway found years afterward gives the district a double meaning: it is both the site of a clandestine procedure and a landscape the narrator can no longer fully recover from memory.

Setting and Address

The address reaches the narrator through LB, who comes to her door shortly before Christmas after Jean T has told her that the narrator needs help. LB identifies Madame P-R as a middle-aged paramedic working at a clinic and gives the address as Impasse Cardinet, in the 17th arrondissement. The word impasse initially evokes the sordid backstreet abortionist of popular literature. LB counters that the passage opens onto Rue Cardinet, a main street, though the place-name itself means little to the narrator, who associates Cardinet instead with a jewelry store advertised on the radio.

The district is initially less a familiar part of Paris than a destination attached to a dangerous necessity. The narrator has little knowledge of the city, and the address and the money LB offers to lend are the practical means by which the distant arrondissement becomes reachable. Although the narrator recognizes that a journey to the Massif Central and a meeting with P will consume money needed for the abortion, she also needs a few weeks before facing the address in the 17th arrondissement.

The January Visit

On January 8, the narrator travels to Paris to meet Madame P-R and settle the date and fee. To avoid buying a train ticket, she hitches a lift at the bottom of the Côte Sainte-Catherine; sleet is falling, but in her state the added risk seems unimportant. The driver says the car is a Jaguar, drives in silence, and leaves her at Neuilly, from which she takes the Métro. By the time she emerges in the 17th arrondissement, it is dark.

The street sign reads Passage Cardinet rather than Impasse Cardinet, a discrepancy the narrator takes as encouraging. She reaches an old, dilapidated building, where Madame P-R lives on the third floor. The entrance marks the threshold between the public city and the private arrangement on which the narrator’s hope depends: she is about to entrust her body to a woman who is, at this point, a complete stranger. Inside, Madame P-R quickly leads her through a dark, narrow kitchen into a slightly larger room furnished in an old-fashioned style. She asks when the narrator last menstruated and examines her stomach over her skirt, treating the pregnancy as a physical condition that can be assessed and acted upon.

Return and the Changed Street

In a later visit, the narrator consults a map of Paris to retrace the route to Passage Cardinet. She hopes to find both the café where she waited before seeing Madame P-R and the church where she sat for a long time. The church she remembers as Saint-Charles Borromée does not appear under that name on the map; the only church shown is Saint-Charles-de-Monceau Church. She considers whether it may be the same church under a new name, leaving the identification uncertain.

The return takes place on a cold, sunlit afternoon. At the entrance to Passage Cardinet, a new street plaque stands above the former plaque, now blackened and illegible. The street is empty. A large sign on a nearby ground-floor building identifies an association of Nazi camp survivors and deportees in the Seine-et-Oise Département, a detail the narrator does not remember seeing before. These visible changes make the remembered route both locatable and strange: the present street supplies landmarks, but not a reliable restoration of what the narrator once saw.

Memory and Significance

At Madame P-R’s building, the narrator finds a locked door with a digital entry system. She does not enter. Instead, she continues down the middle of the street, staring toward the crack of light at the end of the alley; no pedestrians or cars pass. The return culminates not in recognition or renewed access, but in the image of a puppet reenacting a scene without emotion.

The arrondissement therefore holds two sharply different encounters with the same place. In 1964, the Passage Cardinet address is a route toward a feared but urgently sought intervention; in the later visit, the locked entrance and altered street signs expose the distance between physical return and recovered experience. The narrator can trace the route, identify the building, and register changes in the streetscape, yet the place remains inseparable from a past that cannot simply be re-entered.