This is one of those strange Paris-soaked stories that I imagine Mavis Gallant writing on an afternoon in a café when she has had too many cups of espresso. When she is in that creative mode where every gesture seen, every syllable overheard, every small intimacy observed between strangers
Don’t be fooled: it’s still about Magdalena. Except she is called Lena by the “half a dozen widows of generals and bereft sisters of bachelor diplomats”. They “crowd her bedside table” – Magdalena’s/ Lena’s bedside table – with “bottles of cough mixture, lemons, embroidered table napkins, jars of honey,
Here readers return to the story of the man who married Magdalena, to “save” her during the war and who, then, married the colonel’s daughter, Juliette. He is Edouard, the poet, but I persist in my belief that he is the character whom author Henri Grippes’ based on his
The novelist who barely disguises the characters he has pulled from reality: here, again, it seems as though we catch a glimpse of another Poche. Now I wonder if Grippes wasn’t forced to camouflage him, after the moment in which Poche queried Grippes about when “What’s-His-Name struggles to prepare
The previous story ends with an imprisonment: “He had got the woman from church to dining room, and he would keep her there trapped, cornered, threatened, watched, until she yielded to Grippes and told her name – as, in his several incarnations, good Poche had always done.” I’m thinking
