THE OTHER PARIS NOTES

SUMMARY
One late spring afternoon, Carol Frazier, the twenty-two-year-old
protagonist, is concluding a visit with an acquaintance, Odile
Pontmoret, to a Parisian dressmaker, Madame Germain, who is
making Carol’s wedding gown. Odile disapproves of the traditional,
“unoriginal” gown that Carol chooses. Moreover, to Carol’s
annoyance, Odile blabs to the dressmaker that Carol fell in love at
first sight with her fiancé, Howard Mitchell, an economist, who, with
Carol and Odile, works in a U.S. government agency in Paris. Odile is
aware that Carol, perceiving Paris to be the city of romance, wants to
believe in the magic of the moment of falling in love. As they leave
the dressmaker’s apartment, Carol realizes that Odile is making fun
of her romantic notion. This realization occasions a review of the
preceding winter months, beginning with her engagement to
Howard. Her engagement and her subsequent relationship with
Howard are actually quite prosaic. Three weeks after she met him he
proposed to her, not in a romantic setting but at lunch, over a tuna
salad. She is not really in love with Howard, but common sense,
buttressed by college lectures on marriage, dictates that they have
the proper basis for marriage—that is, a similar social and economic
background. In choosing Howard, Carol herself dispenses with “the
illusion of love,” but having decided that he is the right person for
her, she feels the urge to be a part of romantic Paris. She therefore
sets about “the business of falling in love” with Howard.

Postwar Paris, with its drab streets and shabby people, is not
conducive to this plan, but she persists. Believing that befriending
the French would help, she approaches Odile, Howard’s secretary, a
thirty-year-old woman. Odile, shabbily dressed, money-conscious,
and resentful of American materialism, hardly evokes romantic Paris,
nor does Odile’s relationship with her twenty-one-year-old lover,
Felix, which Carol considers distasteful. Felix, a mid-European, lost
his family at the end of the war; he is in Paris without a passport or a
work permit, and he may well be involved in black-marketing. The
romantic in Carol finds him fascinating and mysterious, but the
realist perceives him to be lazy and parasitic.

Carol, still hoping to experience the elusive charms of Paris,

persuades Howard to accompany her to hear the carol-singing in the
Place Vendome. This, too, is a disappointment. The affair is artificially
staged for the media; the weather is wet and miserable. Later, when
Howard tells his friends about the evening, he is able to make it “an
amusing story,” and as Carol listens to him, it strikes her that
accounts of experience “could be perfectly accurate but untruthful,”
an observation reiterated toward the end of the story. Soon after
this, Odile invites Carol and Howard to the concert debut of her
sister, Martine. Carol is quite excited, believing that she finally is to
be allowed into the other life of Paris. Once more she is frustrated.
The audience is devitalized; the theater is falling apart. After the
concert, Carol and Howard observe Felix waiting outside the theater
for Odile; Odile’s family evidently does not accept him. Carol
momentarily becomes hysterical and rants against Odile’s snobbery,
Felix’s laziness, and their distasteful love affair. Her emotional
outburst is cathartic. After the concert, she stops “caring about Paris”
and believes that “she has become invulnerable.”

At this point, the past comes abreast of the present, as the narrative
returns to Carol and Odile leaving the dressmaker’s apartment. Carol
reluctantly agrees to accompany Odile to Felix’s apartment. Carol is
appalled at Felix’s dirty room and embarrassed by Odile’s and Felix’s
unabashed intimacy. Odile falls asleep, and Carol decides to leave.
Felix accompanies Carol to the Metro. There, declining his offer to
buy her a drink, she reprimands him for not working and advises him
to migrate to the United States, where he could start afresh. As Felix
explains to her the practical and emotional difficulties involved in
this, Carol becomes aware of Felix’s and Odile’s love for each other.
For a fleeting moment she wants to share in this romantic love that
has been denied her. She draws back, however, refusing to accept
that “such a vision could come from Felix and Odile,” two shabby
individuals spending hours together “in that terrible room in a
slummy quarter of Paris.”
As she returns to her apartment, she convinces herself that the
passage of time will allow her “a coherent picture, accurate but
untrue” of her experience in Paris. “The memory of Felix and Odile
and all their distasteful strangeness would slip away; for ’love’ she
would think, once more, ’Paris,’ and after a while, happily married,
mercifully removed in time, she would remember it and describe it
and finally believe it as it had never been at all.”