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 accountant.
That Mavis Gallant is simply having fun with it all.
So that, when Edouard says that he “can’t wrench life around to fit some fantasy”, so that he turned his back on the draft of a novel he had written, I imagine that it is Henri Grippes who is complaining.
That it’s Henri riffing on those early drafts he previously mentioned, the drafts based on the character he’d invented after having met Poche, through the process of sorting out his taxation difficulties.
But, beyond that, I imagine that it is Mavis Gallant commenting directly on the fictional Henri Grippes and his efforts to wrench life around.
Commenting on a life which involves a pair of dissatisfying marriages (as, indeed, so many of Mavis Gallant’s stories revolve around). A life which involves a set of disappointed expectations (yes, that again, which I mean in the kindest way – I love stories about disillusionment, about that something-like-resignation, which feels both familiar and reassuringly distant).
This particular photo of Paris suits me for this story for two reasons.
First, because it recalls the character’s observations from the previous story, “Rue de Lille”, about the colour blue.
(I feel like these passages recall both this collection’s focus on artistry and, simultaneously, the first of the stories I read for this Mavis Gallant project, “The Other Paris”, about the contrast between a young woman’s ideas about Paris and courtship and the reality she discovers in the city as a single woman.)
“I daren’t measure against the expanse of Juliette’s life; it would give me the feeling that I had decamped to a height of land, a survivor’s eminence, so as to survey the point at which our lives crossed and mingled and began to move in the same direction: a long, narrow reach of time in the Rue de Lille. It must be the washy, indefinite colorations of blue that carpeted, papered, and covered floors, walls, and furniture and shaded our lamps which cast over that reach the tone of a short season. I am thinking of the patches of distant, neutral blue that appear over Paris in late spring, when it is still wet and cold in the street and tourists have come to early. The tourists shelter in doorways, trying to read their soaked maps, perennially unprepared in their jeans and then jackets. Overhead, there are scrapings of a color that carries no threat and promises all.”
I imagine these scrapings to be the kind of blue that appears in the photograph alongside. But I don’t actually believe that’s what’s described in this passage. Every time I read it, I imagine a different shade. And mostly it’s not a shade that I would call blue. Not a blue like the one in this photograph. But I like the idea of it being this kind of blue, the blue here. And I imagine that Grippes likes the idea of a man like Poche leading a life like this.
But that quote is from the previous story, from a time period earlier than readers witness here, in “The Colonel’s Child”. And, by now, we know more about how Juliette came to marry Edouard. We know more about that shared past.
Which is the other reason why I selected this photograph, not only for its insistent sort of blue, but because it is a view of a view, like a writer’s view of a writer.
And here we have this observation in the current musing: “You have to remember the period, and France occupied, to imagine how one could think and behave. We always say this ‘This of the times we had to live in’ – when the past is dragged forward, all the life gone out of it, and left unbreathing at our feet.”
If you were to imagine stories about France occupied, and how people thought and behaved, I don’t think one would be inclined to imagine stories like “A Recollection”, or that one would imagine stories like “Rue de Lille” and “The Colonel’s Child”, the stories which follow it.
But one can imagine unhappily married poets and women married too young to accurately predict where they might find a certain kind of happiness.
That’s all too easy to imagine.
Overhead in a Balloon‘s stories: Speck’s Idea / Overhead in a Balloon / Luc and His Father / A Painful Affair / Larry / A Flying Start / Grippes and Poche / A Recollection / Rue de Lille / The Colonel’s Child / Lena / The Assembly
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Mavis Gallant’s stories, as I read through her short fiction. This is the tenth story in Overhead in a Balloon. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story; I would love the company. Next story: “Lena”.
The last line: “I think she still trusted me at that moment; I hope so.” Does that mean there will be a time she won’t trust him anymore? Will we ever know?
I can’t decide if this story has a tender feel to it, like the last one, or one bordering on creepy. Is he taking advantage of her youth? But then marries her anyway, even though the word love never leaves his mouth? At least we know they are still together at the end. But what about in between? Do they ever have those children?
I was wondering that too: it seemed like such a random detail. You’re probably right, in thinking that she is directing us, as readers, to “all the other moments”, not “that” moment.
It’s rather ironic, too, I suppose, that Juliette does not outlive Magdalena, given that, if we are to believe that Magdalenawas on the verge of being captured by the Germans and rerouted to persecution, had Edouard not married her, then Magdalena’s life would have been truncated. Meanwhile, she survives and Edouard goes on to write to Lena about his having met Juliette and his intention to pursue a relationship with her instead. But, then, would that have mattered if, indeed, Edouard was only marrying her to keep her safe?
Whatever’s going on here, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with love, not really. At least, it doesn’t feel that way. Security, comfort: maybe?
I think you’re right. Maybe comfort and security were just as good as love then, right after the war.
Just catching up with your last three posts about this collection. Magdalena,Eduord and ci sound like fascinating complex characters, with important back stories.
I’ve had a lot of fun sorting out the connections between the stories and the characters. This might turn out to be my favourite of her collections, although not one of the more famous ones.
“The Colonel’s Daughter” a story narrated from Paris circa 1980 about events that happened forty years ago. Edourad is now in his early 60s, is looking back on when he met his second wife in war time Paris. (As I learned from reading Buried in Print’s insightful post on the story that this is a story in the middle of others about Edourad. I have not read these other stories. Of course this puts me at disadvantage but it does mean I will experiencing the story as most first publication readers probably did.)
Edourad wanted to enlist to fight with the Free French Army against the Germans. We learn he entered into a in name only marriage with a French actress of Jewish heritage in the hope it would protect her.
“GOT TO London by way of Marseilles and North Africa, having left Paris more than a year before. My aim was to join the Free French and General de Gaulle. I believed the weight of my presence could tip the scales of war, like one vote in a close election. There was no vanity in this. London was the peak of my hopes and desires. I could look back and see a tamed landscape. My past life dwindled and vanished in that long perspective. I was twenty-three.”
He seems to have a romantic conception of war and when the story begins he is a French hospital recovering from a motorcycle accident. He is assigned a hospital volunteer, Juliette, she is seventeen. We learn her father is a colonel in the Free French Army. They begin a relationship which continues once he is released. Having read maybe fifty stories by Mavis Gallant when we find them naked in bed together I was made to pause, why does Gallant do this? I think maybe it is the sixty two year old narrator wants to remember their first intimacies, the trust Juliette once had for him.
Old memories of relationships play an important part in lots of Gallant’s stories.
Mel u
Yes, right? There is something very-Gallant about this handful of Edouard stories but, simultaneously, something off-kilter in their telling.
Why does she approach the intimacy in their relationship differently here. Even in this same volume we have evidence of the more sophisticated scenes, a daily coupling on a sofa or something like that.
This is one of the reasons that I am suspicious of her pretending that it’s the novelist character we meet in “Grippes and Poche” who is actually writing these stories.
Which would also explain, in my theory, why the overly romantic view of war. That doesn’t fit with Gallant’s complex political experience and analysis of the ways in which international conflicts affect the lives of ordinary men and women.
As for when the stories were published, I don’t even know if the related stories were published in the same order in The New Yorker as they are presented in this volume of collected stories. But certainly she is all over the place with time anyhow. So I don’t think it matters at all!