New York enters the narrative not through a visit but through Lola’s recollections, filtered by Ferdinand’s distrust. In the Bois de Boulogne, her stories of the city mingle with engagements, divorces, dresses, jewelry, and girlfriends, making it a glamorous yet uncertain backdrop to her past and to the couple’s uneasy intimacy.

New York in Lola’s Recollections

During their long afternoon walks in the Bois de Boulogne, Lola tells Ferdinand about her life in New York and the young women she knew there. The damp, fenced-in, trampled park makes city dwellers anxious and confiding, and Lola is no exception: its melancholy atmosphere draws out a cascade of personal memories. New York appears through this remembered social world rather than as a described physical setting.

Ferdinand cannot tell how much of Lola’s account is true. He hears a “potpourri” of dollars, engagements, divorces, dresses, and jewelry, but does not know what deserves belief. Her New York is therefore both a source of intimacy—something she shares while they walk—and an unreliable portrait whose details remain beyond his confidence.

The Races and the City’s Imagined Past

On another day, the pair head toward the race track. The Bois around them is neglected and crowded with horse-drawn carriages, children on donkeys, dusty paths, and soldiers on furlough hurrying between trains and encounters with women. Against this unsettled present, Lola imagines the place as it must have been before the war: chic, fashionable, and comparable to the races in New York.

Ferdinand has never attended the races before the war, but he invents an elaborate account to entertain her. He describes fashionable women, gleaming carriages, the start, horns, a water jump, the President of the Republic, and the fever of betting, borrowing from stories he has heard elsewhere. His fiction turns a French racecourse into a scene that can answer Lola’s New York comparison, even though it rests on no firsthand knowledge.

Memory, Performance, and Intimacy

Ferdinand’s invented reminiscence brings the couple closer. Lola responds as if they share a taste for social functions, and kisses him in a spontaneous burst—an unusual gesture in their relationship. The episode links New York to the performance of familiarity: Lola’s uncertain memories and Ferdinand’s openly fabricated Parisian past briefly create common ground.

The exchange also reveals how the past matters to Lola less as a verifiable record than as an object of feeling. She mourns vanished fashions and asks whether the races will ever return. Where she perceives the passage of years through dead styles, Ferdinand supplies a vivid spectacle he never witnessed. New York thus serves as the remembered measure against which Lola imagines prewar elegance, while the neglected Bois and the soldiers’ hurried present make that elegance feel irretrievable.