Saint-Cloud is a parkland setting where the traces of vanished crowds and a derelict shooting gallery make Ferdinand Bardamu’s fear of war newly immediate. During an autumn walk with Lola, its empty carnival grounds become more than scenery: the tin targets seem to connect the harmless repetitions of a fairground game to the real bullets aimed at him.

Setting and Atmosphere

Bardamu and Lola approach Saint-Cloud along the riverbank through autumn mist. Barges loaded with coal pass beneath the bridge arches, while the park’s greenery appears expansive and dreamlike. Yet for Bardamu, trees are not reassuring: since an ambush, he associates each one with a dead man. The beautiful landscape is therefore already shadowed by his experience of the front.

The park’s carnival booths preserve the outline of a public life that has disappeared. Canvas structures flap in the wind, and the soda-water seller says that the visitors have been gone for a year; she still comes out of habit, though she may see no one all day. Her limited recollection leaves the absence itself as the scene’s most evident fact. Lola, moved by a mixture of curiosity and sadness, wants to inspect the deserted tents.

The Abandoned Fairground

The pair count about twenty tents, including mirrors, candy stands, lotteries, and a small theater exposed to drafts. One booth has lost its flaps, while the lowest tent pitches on its poles in the rising wind, its canvas snapping like a ship’s sails. Its painted sign identifies it as the Gallery of the Nations, a shooting gallery with no one left to tend it. Bardamu speculates that its owner may have gone to shoot alongside the customers who once played there.

The gallery’s targets make the scene’s wartime meaning concrete. They include a tin wedding party—bride, cousin, soldier, red-faced groom, and guests—riddled with bullets, as well as a town hall with a flag and a regiment marching nearby. The targets had served as objects of amusement, repeatedly shot at by fairgoers. Bardamu now reads their perforated figures against the actual regiment and battlefield: the little tin soldiers recall his own unit, and the shooting seems to continue beyond the fairground into his present and future.

The Walk with Lola

At the gallery, Bardamu cries out that they are shooting at him too. Lola answers that he is talking nonsense and urges him to leave before they catch cold. She takes his hand as they descend the Avenue Royale toward Saint-Cloud, steering around the mud. Her ordinary, practical concern contrasts with the violent association that has seized him; even the closeness of her hand cannot dislodge his fixation on the tin wedding party.

By the time they reach the Pont de Saint-Cloud, it is dark. Lola considers how to comfort him, suggesting dinner at Duval’s or a meal in her room. They choose the restaurant, but the crowd there strikes Bardamu as another scene of exposure: he imagines the diners waiting to be shot at from every side. The walk thus carries the threat from the park’s targets into an ordinary public gathering, linking Saint-Cloud to the panic that follows him beyond its grounds.

Narrative Significance

Saint-Cloud’s deserted attractions set civilian leisure beside mass violence without making the two equivalent: the tin figures are games, but their repeated perforation gives Bardamu an image through which his own danger becomes visible. The seller’s habitual return, the tents’ physical decay, and the gallery’s absent keeper all mark a social world interrupted by war. In Bardamu’s perception, the targets’ past and present converge: what once entertained a crowd becomes an emblem of the firing that may await him.