France

France is the setting in which the narrator’s relationship with A unfolds and the country he leaves to return to his own country. His departure makes France a place of absence; his brief return during the Gulf War brings the two together again without restoring the relationship the narrator remembers. The country’s significance lies in that contrast between a lived affair and a last encounter that feels almost outside their story.

Setting and the Affair

A’s foreignness complicates the narrator’s efforts to understand him. Although he speaks fairly good French, she cannot express herself in his language, and his French sometimes differs from standard usage. Their conversations therefore remain approximate rather than confirming an imagined, perfect understanding. The narrator comes to see this linguistic distance as a kind of protection: it reminds her that the man she loves remains a stranger, even during their affair.

France also shapes the practical limits of their relationship. Because A is married, the narrator cannot phone him or send him letters, and she depends on his timetable. She gives him letters as he leaves, avoids places where his wife might be present, and takes care not to leave traces that could expose their connection. These constraints do not end the affair, but they make its continuation contingent on secrecy and on A’s availability.

Departure and Absence

A leaves France and returns to his own country. Six months later, the narrator describes waking in the night in despair and struggling to keep herself occupied during the day. Ordinary public images of women waiting for men intensify her sense of loss, while the possibility that A might never return makes even seeking a fortune-teller seem momentarily decisive. His departure thus turns France from the setting of their meetings into the place from which she waits for news that may never come.

Return During the War

On the first Sunday evening of the war, A calls and asks to see the narrator immediately. He takes a taxi to her, and she prepares for his arrival in the half-hour available. He enters as he once did, but the reunion does not restore their former intimacy. He is now living in the East, where he has the same job as he had in France; he has not kept in touch, and he has not received the postcard she sent to his former workplace in Paris. After they meet, the narrator drives him back to his hotel near the Etoile.

A leaves France again three days later without another meeting. Before he goes, he says he will call, but the narrator cannot tell whether he means from his own country or on a future visit to Paris. She does not ask. The uncertain promise leaves France suspended between a possible return and an ending that she already understands as final.

The Meaning of the Last Visit

The narrator resists incorporating A’s return into the story she has been carrying within herself. She regards the encounter as a date, 20 January, rather than a continuation of their affair: the man who came back was not the man she had held in memory while he was in France. She believes she will never see that remembered man again. Paradoxically, the visit’s near-erasure gives the passion its meaning for her: it had been an intense reality for two years, yet offered no lasting promise or intelligible purpose. France is therefore not simply the place of reunion, but the setting in which the limits of reunion become unmistakable.