Paris

Paris is the central European setting of Robert Cohn’s expatriate existence: a city where his literary hopes, romantic dependence, and desire for a different life become entangled. He arrives there after divorce and after the collapse of his earlier life in California, and remains for the last two years of a three-year European stay. In Paris, he is simultaneously a writer, an editor remembered for authority he once possessed, a tennis companion, and a man increasingly governed by Frances’s demands.

Arrival and Expatriate Context

Paris enters Cohn’s life after his divorce has been arranged and after he has gone to the Coast, where he became involved with literary people and backed a review of the Arts. The magazine began publication in Carmel, California, and ended in Provincetown, Massachusetts; by then Cohn had become its sole editor and had discovered that he liked the authority of editing. When the review became too expensive and he had to abandon it, Frances urged him to go to Europe so that he could write. They came to Europe because she had been educated there and stayed three years, spending the first year traveling and the final two in Paris.

The move gives Paris a double significance. It is not simply a destination chosen for artistic freedom, because Frances’s influence helps determine the relocation, and Cohn’s remaining money and his mother’s allowance make the arrangement possible. His mother has settled an allowance of about three hundred dollars a month on him. Paris therefore shelters a precarious form of privilege: Cohn can live as an expatriate and pursue literature, but his independence is compromised by money, romantic obligation, and the expectations attached to both.

Daily Life and Literary Work

During his Paris years, Cohn is described as fairly happy, although he would rather have been in America, a contradiction that makes the city both home and displacement. He has discovered writing and produces a novel. The novel is not as worthless as later critics call it, though it is still characterized as a very poor novel. Paris thus becomes the setting of an ambition that is real but unstable: Cohn reads extensively, writes seriously enough to complete a book, and remains vulnerable to judgments that reduce the work and, by extension, the man behind it.

His life in Paris is made up of disciplined and social routines rather than a single literary vocation. He reads many books, plays bridge and tennis, and boxes at a local gymnasium. These activities connect his present to earlier identities. Boxing recalls the discipline through which he once responded to painful self-consciousness at Princeton; tennis becomes the basis of his friendship with Jake Barnes; reading and writing offer the newer identity he has acquired among literary people. Paris holds these selves together without resolving the tension between them.

Frances and the Social Geography of the City

Cohn’s Paris is inseparable from Frances. During the European stay, she first treats him with careless possession and exploitation, but toward the end of the second year, as she feels her looks declining, her attitude changes into an absolute determination that he should marry her. The city is therefore the setting in which a companionable arrangement hardens into pressure for marriage. Cohn believes that he loves her, and his susceptibility allows her to take him in hand; the relationship shapes where he goes, how he spends his resources, and what future he is expected to provide.

The pressure becomes visible in an evening shared by Cohn, Frances, and Jake Barnes. After dinner at L’Avenue’s, they go to the Café de Versailles for coffee. Cohn discusses taking Jake away for a weekend trip, hoping to leave town and get in a good walk. Jake proposes flying to Strasbourg and walking up to Saint-Odile in Alsace, adding that he knows a girl in Strasbourg who can show them the town. Frances kicks Jake under the table, first once and then again, while her chin lifts and her face hardens. The gesture turns an apparently casual travel plan into a charged social scene: Paris is the place from which Cohn imagines escape, but Frances’s silent reaction reveals how closely she polices his movements and attachments.

Friendships and Narrative Significance

In Paris, Cohn has two friends: Braddocks, his literary friend, and Jake, his tennis friend. These two relationships divide the aspects of his life that the city brings together. Braddocks belongs to Cohn’s literary ambitions and the culture of expatriate writing; Jake belongs to the physical, recreational world of tennis and walking. Cohn’s wish to travel with Jake shows that friendship provides an alternative to the enclosed bond with Frances, even though the proposed excursion immediately exposes the limits placed on that alternative.

Paris also functions as a setting of contrast. Cohn has crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of writing, yet he would rather be in America; he has found a literary life, yet his novel is judged harshly; he appears socially situated, yet his closest romantic relationship is increasingly coercive. The city gathers these contradictions rather than resolving them. Its significance lies in the way it makes expatriate life visible as both opportunity and dependence, a place where artistic aspiration can flourish alongside emotional confinement and where the prospect of departure is already present within everyday conversation.