Pomone

Pomone is the discreet proprietor of an erotic-placement agency in Batignolles, a broker whose business organizes private desires into offers, correspondence, and categories. Ferdinand briefly works with him, yet never gets a clear view of the man; later, Pomone’s appearance outside his usual premises leads Ferdinand to a client whose pursuit has ended in financial ruin and suicide. Through this figure, intimate longing becomes both a commercial service and one more burden in the bleak urban landscape.

Identity and Establishment

Pomone’s agency operates from cramped premises at the back of a courtyard in Batignolles. Its books contain offers at different prices, and its services extend to a range of erotic arrangements. The setting is deliberately obscure: several curtains separate visitors from Pomone, who sits in dim light. Clients wait in a subdued, formal manner, as if attending an appointment with a reserved professional rather than gathering socially.

The narrator’s account makes Pomone a strangely indistinct presence. Although Ferdinand spends time talking with him and works alongside him for a while, he says he could not recognize Pomone later if they met again. This uncertainty is more than a missing physical description: Pomone is known chiefly through the business he conducts, the stories he hears, and the transactions that pass across his desk.

Work and Correspondence

Ferdinand first encounters Pomone while seeking an inexpensive sexual arrangement with two other men from the hotel. Pomone’s connections make the search straightforward. His role is that of an intermediary, maintaining a catalogue of offers and linking customers to prospective partners without drawing attention to himself.

Pomone also confides that he is distressed by a compulsive private habit, which he associates with listening to customers’ accounts. Ferdinand reports this disclosure as part of his portrait of a man whose work brings him into continual contact with other people’s desires. The account does not present Pomone as a detached observer: the business affects him personally, and he explains his difficulty as a consequence of the material brought to him by clients.

The agency receives a large volume of letters from customers seeking partners who will consent to and admire their particular preferences. Pomone describes the mail as a flood of unsatisfied affection, but Ferdinand’s narration stresses the gulf between the grand language of longing and the limited transactions it serves. For a time, Ferdinand helps Pomone sort the correspondence, arranging its writers into types, much as one might classify neckties or diseases. The work turns private declarations into administrative material, while the letters’ emotional excess overwhelms the desk on which they accumulate.

Customers and Consequences

Among the clients is a post-office worker who refers to himself in his correspondence as “the Cid.” Ferdinand recognizes him later when he sees Pomone following a small man along the street. By then, the client’s search has continued for months and consumed his savings; his transactions with Pomone have left him without money and without hope. Ferdinand subsequently hears that the man died by suicide in a vacant lot that same afternoon.

The sequence gives Pomone’s commercial role a consequence beyond the agency’s enclosed rooms. He is following a client at the moment Ferdinand notices him, but the available account does not establish why he followed him or what he intended to do. Ferdinand senses that something is amiss and trails the pair through a neighborhood that grows increasingly shabby as its shops and color recede. He eventually loses sight of Pomone and the client near the Rue des Vinaigriers, before reaching the fortifications by La Garenne-Rancy.

Narrative Role and Significance

Pomone’s later appearance interrupts Ferdinand’s anxious journey toward Rancy, turning an ordinary street encounter into a glimpse of the cost hidden behind the agency’s business. The client’s ruin does not prove that Pomone caused his death; the narrative establishes the client’s financial exhaustion, his loss of hope, and his suicide, while leaving Pomone’s purpose in following him unexplained. That distinction preserves the episode’s uncertainty even as it sharpens its bleakness.

The agency’s letters make a recurring contrast between abundance and deprivation: expressions of desire arrive in overwhelming quantities, yet the people who send them remain dissatisfied, and one client spends all he has pursuing his search. In the streets outside, Ferdinand encounters a parallel desolation, where poverty and indifference seem to drain the neighborhood of color. Pomone stands at the threshold between these worlds, converting longing into a service while remaining himself difficult to see and finally disappearing from Ferdinand’s view.