The Other Paris by Mavis Gallant
"The Other Paris" by Mavis Gallant follows the journey of Carol Frazier, a 22-year-old American woman navigating her engagement to Howard Mitchell against the backdrop of postwar Paris. The narrative opens with Carol selecting a wedding gown alongside her acquaintance, Odile Pontmoret, who challenges Carol's romantic notions about love and marriage. Despite her desire to embrace the charm of Paris as a city of romance, Carol's relationship with Howard lacks genuine passion, as their engagement was marked by practicality rather than enchantment.
As Carol grapples with her feelings, she is drawn into Odile's life, which starkly contrasts her romantic ideals. Odile's relationship with Felix, a disillusioned young man living without legal status in Paris, evokes both fascination and discomfort in Carol. Throughout her experiences, including a disappointing concert outing and subsequent encounters with the realities of Parisian life, Carol’s romantic aspirations clash with the harshness of her surroundings. Ultimately, the story captures Carol's struggle to reconcile her longing for love with the stark realities of her engagement and the lives of those around her, culminating in a realization about the nature of memory and experience.
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The Other Paris by Mavis Gallant
First published: 1953
Type of plot: Social realism
Time of work: The early 1950's
Locale: Paris
Principal Characters:
Carol Frazier , the young protagonist, an American living in ParisHoward Mitchell , her fiancé, an American also living in ParisOdile Pontmoret , Carol's Parisian acquaintanceFelix , Odile's young lover, a mid-European refugee in Paris
The Story
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."
Bibliography
Canadian Fiction Magazine 28 (1978). Special issue on Mavis Gallant.
Essays in Canadian Writing 42 (Winter, 1990). Special issue on Mavis Gallant.
Gadpaille, Michelle. "Mavis Gallant." In The Canadian Short Story. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Grant, Judith Skleton. "Mavis Gallant." In Canadian Writers and Their Works, edited by Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Toronto: ECW Press, 1989.
Keith, William John. "Mavis Gallant." In A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada. Toronto: ECW Press, 1988.
Kulyk Keefer, Janice. Reading Mavis Gallant. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Schaub, Danielle. Mavis Gallant. New York: Twayne, 1998.
Simmons, Diane. "Remittance Men: Exile and Identity in the Short Stories of Mavis Gallant." In Canadian Women Writing Fiction, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.
Smythe, Karen. Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992.