Vilna is the setting of the narrator’s family business and the crisis that ends his childhood life there. The narrator’s illness deepens the family’s existing financial troubles; after Maison Nouvelle fails, he and his mother leave the city for Warsaw, carrying only a few saved belongings and a plan to continue west.

Family Life and Maison Nouvelle

The family’s life in Vilna revolves around Maison Nouvelle, a fashion house whose public reputation disguises a precarious financial position. Although it is considered the leading salon in town, its prestige exceeds its resources: the household’s standard of living is beyond its means, and successive loans are used to meet earlier debts. The mother sustains the appearance of prosperity because customers might withdraw their business or demand lower prices if they suspected the salon was struggling. She also preserves her authority over the clientele, making customers feel that her personal attention is a privilege even as their orders become essential to the firm’s survival.

The salon’s daily work and its financial danger coexist. The mother designs new fashions, manages fittings, and maintains an air of ease while creditors press on her through accumulating promissory notes. When a fitting becomes especially difficult, the narrator sometimes sees her step into his room, sit quietly, and regain her composure before returning to work. Vilna is therefore both the site of her professional command and the place where the cost of maintaining that command becomes increasingly apparent.

Illness and the Collapse of the Business

The narrator’s grave illness turns the family’s vulnerability into a decisive crisis. Doctors fear he will die, and his mother summons specialists to his bedside. She refuses the proposed operation on his right kidney despite the insistence of a German specialist brought from Berlin. The narrator later understands her refusal through her belief that the operation might compromise his future sexual capacity; he survives without the operation, but his prolonged illness has already taken his mother away from the business for months.

After a period of recovery, mother and son return to Vilna and find that Maison Nouvelle can no longer be sustained. The illness has ruined them: the mother neglected the firm while caring for him, and the expense of the specialists has added heavily to their debt. The salon’s earlier financial weakness, which had been concealed behind its reputation, leaves it unable to recover. A few weeks after their return, the business is declared bankrupt, to the satisfaction of its competitors.

The failure becomes tangible when the furniture is seized. A bailiff and two companions move through the premises, inspecting dresses, armchairs, sewing machines, and the dressmakers’ mannequins. The mother has kept one asset out of their reach: the Imperial Russian silver service she brought from Russia. She refuses to sell it, reserving its value for the family’s future in France and for the narrator’s education and prospects.

Departure for Warsaw

With too little money left to settle in Nice, the mother chooses Warsaw as the next step. The family has only a few hundred zlotys saved from the collapse, but she sees a French lycée in Warsaw as a compelling reason to go there. Their larger destination remains France; moving west is presented as progress toward it, even though the family must leave Vilna with their belongings reduced to a bundle.

The silver is hidden in a secure place rather than carried openly. The bundle contains the narrator’s books, including fables by La Fontaine, a volume about Arsène Lupin, and his Lives of Illustrious Frenchmen. It also holds a Tcherkesse uniform that Aniela had salvaged from the family’s losses, although it is already too small for him. These objects preserve fragments of reading, ambition, and an earlier childhood even as the family leaves behind the business and home that had supported them.

Aniela does not accompany them. She leaves to join her fiancé, who lives in a discarded railway carriage, and the family’s parting is marked by repeated embraces and grief. The narrator later cannot find a reliable way to contact her. Their departure from Vilna is consequently not just a change of address: it separates the family from its employee and companion, ends the mother’s fashion-house enterprise, and begins another stage of their westward displacement.

Narrative Significance

Vilna’s role is defined by the contrast between appearance and reality. Maison Nouvelle looks prosperous and commands the town’s fashion clientele, while its finances depend on borrowing and the mother’s strenuous management of appearances. The narrator’s illness exposes how fragile that arrangement is: her devotion to his care saves no part of the business, and the costs of that care help precipitate its failure.

The city’s ending in the narrative is measured through what can and cannot be taken away. The furniture and machinery are seized, the mother’s business is lost, and the family travels with little more than a bundle; the hidden silver remains as a guarded promise of a future elsewhere. Vilna thus becomes the point where the narrator’s childhood ambitions, his mother’s enterprise, and the family’s material security are abruptly redirected toward Warsaw and, beyond it, France.