Saint-Charles-de-Monceau Church is the church the narrator identifies when she returns to Passage Cardinet to retrace the route she took before seeing Madame P-R. In her earlier memory, the church is a place of waiting and prayer; on the return visit, identifying it exposes the distance between a remembered scene and the material place where it occurred.

The Church During the Earlier Wait

On a wet, mild Wednesday afternoon, January 15, the narrator reached Paris’s 17th arrondissement more than an hour before her appointment with Madame P-R. While waiting, she entered a church and sat there for a long time, praying that she would not suffer. The appointment had not yet arrived, and the church offered a place to remain with the fear of what lay ahead.

Before going to Madame P-R’s apartment, she also waited in a nearby café, repeatedly checking her watch and going downstairs to the restroom as she habitually did before important events. The church was therefore part of a sequence of pauses on the way to the appointment: first prayer, then tea and waiting, then the final walk to the apartment.

Identification on the Return Visit

When the narrator later went back to Passage Cardinet, she consulted a map of Paris to find both the café and the church where she had waited. The church she remembered as Saint-Charles-Borromée did not appear under that name; the map showed only Saint-Charles-de-Monceau Church. She wondered whether it was the same church under a changed name, then walked from the end of Passage Cardinet in search of it. She found Saint-Charles-de-Monceau Church and understood it to be the place from her earlier visit.

Inside, she saw a statue of St Rita. She guessed that she might have lit a candle in St Rita’s honor on the earlier day, because the saint was believed to champion lost causes. The memory remains tentative: the return visit supplies a plausible detail, not certainty about what the narrator did during the original wait.

Place, Memory, and Return

The later visit does not simply recover the earlier scene. The narrator walks back toward Rue de Tocqueville and tries to identify the café as well as the church, but the search depends on uncertain recollection and details she may not have noticed at the time. The church’s name is itself part of that problem: the remembered Saint-Charles-Borromée and the identified Saint-Charles-de-Monceau Church mark the gap between the name retained in memory and the place found on the ground.

The church’s significance lies in its position within this attempted return. It was once a shelter for prayer before a feared appointment; decades later, finding it helps the narrator retrace the route but does not make the past happen again. The building anchors the remembered episode in a specific Paris location while also showing how incomplete and provisional that memory remains.