Ask Lola for help and force her to hand over one hundred dollars

Ferdinand Bardamu’s confrontation with Lola in New York transforms a plea for help into an ugly contest over money, illness, and humiliation. Bardamu arrives hoping for employment and financial support; Lola offers neither, but her distress over her mother’s cancer gives him leverage. He turns that vulnerability into a hundred-dollar payment, then pushes the encounter past the point of safety: Lola draws a revolver, and he escapes down the stairs. The episode exposes the precarious bargain between need and cruelty that governs their renewed contact, while sending Bardamu on toward Detroit with his spirits unexpectedly restored.

The Visit and the Old Relationship

Bardamu finds Lola on the twenty-third floor of a building on 77th Street. Her home is posh, as he had expected, and the setting sharpens the gulf between her comfortable surroundings and his need. He has been depressed since arriving in New York, but says that large doses of cinema have left him mentally steadier; the first encounter is therefore less unpleasant than he had anticipated. Lola is not greatly surprised to see him, though recognition visibly displeases her.

Bardamu tries to ease into the visit by referring discreetly to their shared past and mentioning the war only in passing. Lola refuses to hear about it, saying that it makes her feel old. She retaliates by describing Bardamu as so wrinkled and bloated that she would not recognize him in the street. He does not react openly to the insult. His restraint is practical as well as emotional: he is abominably hungry and decides not to provoke her before he has had a chance to eat.

The conversation also makes clear that neither can treat the encounter as simple reconciliation. Lola talks at length about the trivialities of her daily life, while Bardamu describes himself as weakened and frightened by America, above all by what he sees as the country’s enormous indifference toward him. The exchange is a moral and physical appraisal as much as a reunion: each tests the other, and their old familiarity supplies the means for both insult and manipulation.

The Request for Work

Bardamu tells Lola that he must earn a living and needs to overcome his excessive sensitivity. He asks, with deliberate modesty, whether she can recommend him to an employer among her acquaintances, adding that he would be satisfied with a modest salary and needs help soon. Lola takes the suggestion badly. She says she can think of nobody who might employ or assist him, closing off the practical route by which he has tried to appeal to her.

Their conversation shifts back to life in general and Lola’s own circumstances. When four elaborately dressed, middle-aged women arrive, Lola introduces them briefly and appears embarrassed, trying to lead them away. They instead compete for Bardamu’s attention and lecture him about Europe, which they imagine as an old-fashioned, erotic world. Bardamu answers with an outburst of automatic patriotism and tells them that their city gives him the creeps. The visit thus moves between requests for material help and public performances of opinion, without producing any ordinary solidarity.

Lola’s Mother and Bardamu’s Leverage

Lola’s mother is in Chicago with cancer of the liver. Lola says that she has placed her in the hands of the finest specialists in town; they are costing her a fortune, but, she insists, they have promised to save her. As she gives Bardamu more details about her mother’s condition, her attachment to her mother makes her appeal to him for reassurance. Bardamu recognizes that the plea has shifted the balance between them.

Asked whether he believes the doctors can cure her, Bardamu answers firmly that liver cancer is absolutely incurable. Lola turns pale, and Bardamu notes that this is the first time he has seen anything disconcert her. She protests that the specialists guaranteed recovery and even gave that guarantee in writing. Bardamu replies that for cash there will always be doctors willing to make such promises, and says that he would do the same in their place—and so would Lola. The argument leaves her unable to fight back: the assurances she has purchased are recast as a transaction, not reliable grounds for hope.

The scene reverses the direction of dependence. Bardamu initially came asking Lola for a job connection, but her distress gives him the advantage he could not obtain through that request. He does not offer comfort or practical assistance; instead, he uses his certainty about the illness, and his knowledge of how deeply the subject unsettles her, to press for money. The episode presents their familiarity not as a source of care but as access to the other person’s vulnerabilities.

The Hundred Dollars and the Escape

Lola’s anger does not frighten Bardamu as much as the officers aboard the Admiral Bragueton, who had wanted to annihilate him to entertain bored women. As she insults him, he watches her closely and feels his own indifference—and then his joy—increase. He calculates that she will have to give him at least twenty dollars to get rid of him, perhaps more. The thought makes the encounter a deliberate bargain: he is no longer asking for a favor in the ordinary sense but deciding how much pressure he can apply.

Bardamu threatens to sleep at Lola’s home unless she lends him the promised money. He says he will keep repeating what he knows about cancer and its complications and hereditary character. As he elaborates on her mother’s case, he sees Lola blanch, weaken, and crumple. She finally screams for him to take a hundred dollars and leave, ordering him never to return. Her payment exceeds the minimum he had anticipated, but it is extracted through fear and sustained harassment rather than goodwill.

Even after Lola has given him the money, Bardamu asks whether she will kiss him all the same and whether they are still friends, explicitly testing how far he can go in disgusting her. Lola takes a revolver from a drawer, and Bardamu understands that she is not joking. He does not call for the elevator; the stairs are enough, and he leaves that way. The weapon abruptly ends his advantage. The hundred dollars is real, but so is the danger of continuing to treat Lola’s distress as an instrument.

Aftermath and Significance

Bardamu says that the solid fight restores his taste for work and lifts his morale. The consequence is immediate: the next day he takes the train to Detroit, where he has been told that hiring is easy and small jobs are plentiful and well paid without being too exhausting. The confrontation does not secure him a job through Lola, but it gives him money and a fresh impulse to move on.

The episode’s reversal is characteristic of Bardamu’s precarious survival. He arrives as a hungry, depressed petitioner and leaves with a hundred dollars, having converted a private fear into bargaining power. Yet the outcome is not a clean victory: Lola’s revolver establishes the limit of his coercion, and his rapid departure turns the stairs into the final measure of the encounter. Their shared past enables access, but it does not produce trust; in this scene, intimacy becomes leverage, and help is replaced by a transaction neither participant can mistake for affection.