Café des Deux Garçons serves both as a writing place and as the small social stage on which the narrator first experiences something like success. Beneath the plane trees of Cours Mirabeau, he works on a novel; among the café’s friends, a rejected manuscript and an extravagant psychoanalytic report briefly give him a reputation that the book itself has not yet earned.

Setting and Use

During his first year as a law student in Aix, the narrator spends his free time at Café des Deux Garçons. The café is part of a student’s daily life, but also a working setting: he writes a novel beneath the plane trees of Cours Mirabeau. The account places literary labor outdoors and in public, amid the routines and encounters of the town rather than in a secluded study.

A Literary Reputation Takes Shape

The café’s importance changes when the narrator’s novel, Fin des Morts, is rejected by its publisher. The publisher nevertheless sends him a lengthy psychoanalytic report, written after the manuscript was shown to Princesse Marie Bonaparte. The narrator brings the document to his friends at the café, who are impressed by its account of his supposed aberrations. Although the book has been turned down, the report makes him feel that he is becoming somebody and beginning to fulfill his mother’s hopes.

Social Comedy and Significance

At Café des Deux Garçons, the report’s diagnosis becomes a performance and a source of local notoriety. The narrator adopts the air of an homme fatal, carries small scissors, and cultivates the impression of a disciple of Freud, even though he never speaks about Freud. He types and distributes copies of the report, and the document circulates among the young women at the university as well as among his café friends. The café thus marks an ironic first success: recognition arrives not for the rejected novel, but for the sensational interpretation attached to its author.