Passage Cardinet

Passage Cardinet is the place in Paris where the narrator had a clandestine abortion twenty years earlier. She returns there during her affair with A, hoping that revisiting this painful past will cancel her present grief; instead, the visit changes nothing, while allowing her to recognize and record the distance between lived experience and its later retelling.

The return

The narrator feels an urgent need to see the street and building again and to go up to the flat where the earlier events took place. She frames the trip as an attempt to set one pain against another: she vaguely hopes that the old trauma might cancel the grief she now feels over A. The return is therefore not simply a search for a remembered address, but a deliberate approach to a past she wants to place beside her present.

She gets off at Malesherbes Metro station and asks a grocer for directions. The plaque bearing the name Passage Cardinet is partly erased, and the façades have been restored and painted white. At the remembered street number, she pushes open one of the few doors without a digital code and reads the names on the tenants’ list. These ordinary changes establish that the place still exists, but its present-day appearance and residents no longer match the scene preserved in her memory.

The place and its remembered people

The former occupant she recalls was an old woman and auxiliary nurse. By the time of the return, the narrator understands that the woman has either died or moved to a care home in the suburbs; the current residents, she observes, belong to a high-income bracket. The contrast between the remembered intermediary and the changed building makes the old episode feel at once attached to a specific address and separated from the lives now occupying it.

As she heads towards Pont-Cardinet, the narrator pictures herself walking beside the woman, who had insisted on accompanying her to the nearest station. She interprets the woman’s insistence as a precaution against her collapsing near the woman’s doorstep. The memory thus restores a concrete human presence to a place that has since been renovated and socially transformed, while leaving the woman’s fate uncertain.

Memory, reality, and writing

At the site, the narrator thinks, “I was here one day.” The wording registers a peculiar disbelief: she knows that the event happened, yet its having belonged to her life feels difficult to grasp. She asks what separates that past reality from literature and suggests that the difference may lie in the disbelief felt when remembering something actually lived—an uncertainty she would not experience in the same way with a fictional character.

The visit does not alter her present grief. Nevertheless, she is glad she took the initiative to return and to revive an experience she describes as an act of despoilment, also caused by a man. Her account does not supply the circumstances needed to generalize about the legal or medical setting of the abortion; it keeps attention on the remembered place, the woman who accompanied her, and the narrator’s own later act of return.

She then turns the memory outward, wondering whether she is the only woman to revisit the scene of an abortion. She connects that question to the purpose of writing: finding out whether others have felt or done the same things, and making such experiences seem normal to those who have not. Passage Cardinet consequently becomes more than a location recalled in private. It is the point from which an intimate, difficult memory is addressed to possible readers, without the visit itself providing relief or closure.