“Forain” - A Set in Paris Short Story by Mavis Gallant - 1993

“Forain” - A Set in Paris Short Story by Mavis Gallant - 1993

“Forain took in the likeness of the man who had fought a war for nothing.”

“Forain” is included in The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant and her collection, Across The Bridge

Website of July in Paris - Thyme for Tea

 Buried in Print’s Mavis Gallant’s Mavis Gallant Project.

Mavis Gallant loved Paris.  I decided to begin my sixth year of
participation in July in Paris with one of her Paris  stories.

Mavis Gallant

April 11, 1922 - Montreal

1950 - moves to Paris

September 1, 1951- publishes, in The New Yorker, her first short story.  She would publish 116 stories in The New Yorker.

February 18, 2014 - passes away in her beloved Paris

Buried in Print began her read through of the short stories of Mavis Gallant in March of 2017. (It is projected to reach completion in September of this year.) Lots of the short stories are set in
Paris, often among expatriates who have cut most of their ties.  There are stories about American women who came seeking romance after the war ended, ex-French and German soldiers and several centering on emigrates from Poland, as is today’s story.

There are leitmotifs that emerge in Gallant’s stories if you read enough of them.  Among them are people who seem old before their time, a sense that the best days of European culture maybe passed, a preoccupation of emigrates with their compatriots to the exclusion of the French, a feeling life passes the people in the story by as they await a remittance of some sort.  Forain came to Paris after the war, he runs a publishing house specializing in translations of Central and Eastern European literature into French.
“He ran his business with a staff of loyal, worn-out women, connected to him by a belief in what he was doing, or some lapsed personal tie, or because it was too late and they had nowhere to go.”  This is a vision of Gallant’s Paris.

At thirty eight he is characterized as old.  He is very involved with
 the Polish community, rife with intrigue and gossip.

Gallant perfectly sets the stage in the opening sentences:

“ABOUT AN HOUR before the funeral service for Adam Tremski, snow mixed with rain began to fall, and by the time the first of the mourners arrived the stone steps of the church were dangerously wet. Blaise Forain, Tremski’s French publisher, now his literary executor, was not surprised when, later, an elderly woman slipped and fell and had to be carried by ambulance to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital.”

Of course a funeral often launches interior monolugues and involuntary memories about things that might have been or never again will be. We learn about his history with Tremski, a figure very much in accord with Gallant’s vision of expatriates in Paris.

Later on we learn Tremski’s work has attracted interest of young scholars:

“The chronicle of two generations, displaced and dispossessed, had come to a stop. The evaluation could begin; had already started. Scholars who looked dismayingly youthful, speaking the same language, but with a new, jarring vocabulary, were trekking to Western capitals – taping reminiscences, copying old letters. History turned out to be a plodding science. What most émigrés settled for now was the haphazard accuracy of a memory like Tremski’s. In the end it was always a poem that ran through the mind – not a string of dates.”

This is a great short story, I will close with these lines:

“Season after season, his stomach eaten up with anxiety, his heart pounding out hope, hope, hope, he produced a satirical novella set in Odessa; a dense, sober private journal, translated from the Rumanian, best understood by the author and his friends; or another wry glance at the harebrained makers of history. (There were few women. In that particular part of Europe they seemed to figure as brusque flirtatious mistresses or uncomplaining wives.) At least once a year he committed the near suicide of short stories and poetry. There were rewards, none financial.”

I hope very much to return to Mavis Gallant this month.

“Mlle. Dias de Corda” - A set in Paris short story by Mavis Gallant. First published January 4, 1993 in The New Yorker

“Mlle. Dias de Corda” - A set in 

Paris short story by Mavis Gallant.  First published January 4, 1993 in The New Yorker

This story is included in The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant and her collection, Across The Bridge.

Buried in Print’s Mavis Gallant Project 

Mavis Gallant

April 11, 1922 - Montreal

1950 - moves to Paris

September 1, 1951- publishes, in The New Yorker, her first short story.  She would publish 116 stories in The New Yorker. 

February 18, 2014 - passes away in her beloved Paris

Buried in Print is doing a full read through of the short stories of Mavis Gallant,one of the masters of the form.  She began in March 2017 and anticipates finishing in the fall of 2020.  I have access to about half of her stories and have been following along as I can since March 25, 2017, starting with "The Other Paris".  The full schedule is on her blog and all are invited to join the project.

Today’s story is narrated by a Parisian woman. The story is structuted around the changes in Paris that upset her and the chsnges wrought in her life when Mlle. Dias de Corda rented a room from her.

“YOU MOVED INTO my apartment during the summer of the year before abortion became legal in France; that should fix it in past time for you, dear Mlle. Dias de Corta. You had just arrived in Paris from your native city, which you kept insisting was Marseilles, and were looking for work. You said you had studied television-performance techniques at some provincial school (we had never heard of the school, even though my son had one or two actor friends) and received a diploma with “special mention” for vocal expression. The diploma was not among the things we found in your suitcase, after you disappeared, but my son recalled that you carried it in your handbag, in case you had the good luck to sit next to a casting director on a bus. The next morning we had our first cordial conversation. I described my husband’s recent death and repeated his last words, which had to do with my financial future and were not overly optimistic.”

The move in date 1975.

When she first moves in the narrators son is still at home.  Later she describes her daughter in law as of “mixed descent” because two of her grandparents were Swiss.  

We get a good picture of her preoccupations in these lines:

“I suppose no amount of coaching at a school in or near Marseilles could get the better of the southern o, long where it should be short and clipped when it ought to be broad. But, then, the language was already in decline, owing to lax teaching standards and uncontrolled immigration. I admire your achievement and respect your handicaps, and I know Robert would say the same if he knew you were in my thoughts.”

She speaks of “Asian colonization” of her neighborhood.

She begins more and more like a Parisian version of a Brexit supporter or an American Xenophobe:

“According to this report, by the year 2025 Asians will have taken over a third of Paris, Arabs and Africans three-quarters, and unskilled European immigrants two-fifths. Thousands of foreign-sounding names are deliberately “lost” by the authorities and never show up in telephone books or computer directories, to prevent us from knowing the true extent of their progress.”

Of course her math makes no sense and no one knows anything about the report.

As time goes by, long after she moved out, Mlle. Dias de Corta begins to appear on French TV.  Following her Career helps narrator stay connected to a Paris in which she increasingly feels is “not her Paris”.

In just a few Gallant illuminates the attitude of many Parisians to what they see, in a politely expressed fashion, as degredation of the City they loved.

Like Buried in Print remarked, this is one of my favourite Mavis Gallanf Stories.

“Kingdom Come” - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant. First published in 1986

“Kingdom Come” - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant. First published in 1986


This story is Included in Selected Stories as well as in Across The Bridge

Buried in Print’s Mavis  Gallant Project

Mavis Gallant



August 11, 1922 born in Montréal, in 1950 she moves to France to pursue her dream of being a writer


February 18, 2014, dies in Paris, a place she dearly loved

"In her preface to the present collection, Gallant advises her readers: “Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” Such advice may be superfluous. When you finish each of Gallant’s stories, it’s instinctive to stop and regroup. As much as you might wish to resume and prolong the pleasure of reading, you feel that your brain and heart cannot, at least for the moment, process or absorb one word, one detail more." Francine Prose in her introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant


I have been reading short stories by Mavis ‘ft-    since 2013.  I was delighted when a blogger I have happily followed for years, Buried in Print, announced they would be reading and posting on all her many short stories (116 published in The New Yorker alone) on a scheduled basis.   I am reading along with Buried in Print as I can. I have access to sbout half her stories.

This, to me, was among the most poigant of her stories I have so far read. I really like this story, maybe as it reflects the sadness of life now or because the central character is an elderly man contemplating his life history.  At 73, I can relate.  A very big difference between me and the man in the story is a am highly connected to my family and feel my blog is something I can take pride in.  He has nothing.

Here are the opening lines:


“AFTER HAVING SPENT twenty-four years in the Republic of Saltnatek, where he established the first modern university, recorded the vocabulary and structure of the Saltnatek tongue, and discovered in a remote village an allophylian language unknown except to its speakers, Dr. Domini Missierna returned to Europe to find that nobody cared. Saltnatek was neither lush nor rich nor seductive, nor poor enough to arouse international pity. The university survived on grants left over from the defense budget, and even Missierna had to admit he had not attracted teachers of the first order. He had wasted his vitality chasing money for salaries and equipment, up to the day when an ungrateful administration dismissed him and the latest revolutionary council, thanking him for nothing, put him on a plane.”

Missierna sees in his own end times the decline of Europe

“During the years when he was so obsessively occupied, Europe had grown small, become depleted, as bald in spirit as Saltnatek’s sandy and stony islands. The doubting voices were thin and metallic. No one was listening. His colleagues said, “One step after the other,” and “One at a time.” They trod upon discarded rules of address, raked the ground to find shreds of sense and reason. Salvation was in the dust or it was nowhere. Even if he were to reveal twenty new and orderly and poetic methods of creating order by means of words, he would be told, “We had better deal with matters underfoot, closer to home.”

He has children and grandchildren but he got a divorce long ago so he has no real family connections.

Like in so many of her stories in just a few pages Gallant sums up not just a life but a period of history.

"Florida" - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - 1969

"Florida" - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - 1969

You may read today's story here

Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

Included in The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant

Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

Mavis Gallant

April 11, 1922 - Montreal

1950 - moves to Paris

September 1, 1951- publishes, in The New Yorker, her first short story.  She would publish 116 stories in The New Yorker. 

February 18, 2014 - passes away in her beloved Paris

Buried in Print is doing a full read through of the short stories of Mavis Gallant,one of the masters of the form.  She began in March 2017 and anticipates finishing in the fall of 2020.  I have access to about half of her stories and have been following along as I can since March 25, 2017, starting with "The Other Paris".  The full schedule is on her blog and all are invited to join the project.

There are four short stories about the Carette Sisters, from Montreal. I have now read all but the first of them.  

THE CARETTE SISTERS 1933 (1985/8) The Chosen Husband (1985) From Cloud to Cloud (1985) Florida (1985)

As I read on in the short stories of Mavis Gallant, I do not sense any great fondness for Canada and less for America.  Maybe I am reading this into her stories from her leaving Canada and never coming back.

I see Florida motels in the lines below as kind of a symbol for an empty culture:

"BERTHE CARETTE’S SISTER, Marie, spent eight Christmases of her life in Florida, where her son was establishing a future in the motel industry. Every time Marie went down she found Raymond starting over in a new place: His motels seemed to die on his hands."

Berthe has lived with her sister ever since her husband died in 1969.  Raymond is presented as pretty much a failure, a man of little substance.  He fought in the Vietnamese war, he says in a snide remark to his mother that he had heard better French in Saigon than Montreal.  You have to wonder what a Canadian young man disliked so much he had to go to war in Vietnam to escape.

When Raymond picks his mother at the airport he has his wife Mimi with him.  He never told his mother earlier of his marriage.

All of the relationships are left for us to ponder.  I wondered why he married Mimi.

In just under ten pages Gallant gives us three lives, four if you count 

the sister, two countries, two cities, Cleveland comes in for some knocks.  

Mel u

"The Chosen Husband" - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant, first published in The New Yorker, April 15, 1985

"The Chosen Husband" - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant, first published in The New Yorker, April 15, 1985A

Included in The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant

Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

Mavis Gallant

April 11, 1922 - Montreal

1950 - moves to Paris

September 1, 1951- publishes, in The New Yorker, her first short story.  She would publish 116 stories in The New Yorker. 

February 18, 2014 - passes away in her beloved Paris

Buried in Print is doing a full read through of the short stories of Mavis Gallant,one of the masters of the form.  She began in March 2017 and anticipates finishing in the fall.  I have access to about half of her stories and have been following along as I can since March 25, 2007, starting with "The Other Paris".  The full schedule is on her blog and all are invited to join the project.

In the opening sentences of "The Chosen Husband" with her characteristic style Gallant lays out the family history in just a few sentences.

"IN 1949, A year that contained no other news of value, Mme. Carette came into a legacy of eighteen thousand dollars from a brother-in-law who had done well in Fall River. She had suspected him of being a Freemason, as well as of other offenses, none of them trifling, and so she did not make a show of bringing out his photograph; instead, she asked her daughters, Berthe and Marie, to mention him in their prayers.  They may have, for a while. The girls were twenty-two and twenty, and Berthe, the elder, hardly prayed at all. The first thing that Mme. Carette did was to acquire a better address. Until now she had kept the Montreal habit of changing her rented quarters every few seasons, a conversation with a landlord serving as warranty, rent paid in cash. This time she was summoned by appointment to a rental agency to sign a two-year lease. She had taken the first floor of a stone house around the corner from the church of Saint Louis de France. This was her old parish (she held to the network of streets near Parc Lafontaine) but a glorious strand of it, Rue Saint-Hubert."

We learn they are French Canadians.  ($18,000 in 1949 is roughly equal to $190,000 today). We learn there are two daughters in the family and they are Catholics.  We learn she elevated her social standing.  She becomes preoccupied with the upkeep of the Parrish church.

We soon learn she has been a widow a good while, like a number of people we meet in Gallant's stories, she seems intentionally to be old before her time, seeking an essence, a protective cover, in premature old age.

Both of the daughters are single.  The older one has an office job. One has a relationship of some sort with a man of Greek ancestry.  He fails Mme. Carette's son in law test on several grounds, not a Catholic, but at least Christian, too dark, and does not speak French.  The other daughter also has a suitor.  He comes to dinner on a regular basis.  There is no sex in either relationship.  

Gallant takes us slowly, you have to work her stories, into the characters of the daughter, the suitors and the mother.  We come to 

 see how Mme. Corette misses her husband.

"In quiet moments, Mme Carette imagines her funeral. She is forty-five years old and “death had been her small talk”. She still feels “cruelly the want of a husband, someone – not a daughter – to help her up the steps of a streetcar, read La Presse and tell her what was in it, lay down the law to Berthe”.

Such beautiful lines!

I was caught by surprise when international affairs resulted in a marriage.

Mel u

The Captive Neice - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - 1969

The Captive Neice - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant

Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

This story is included in two collections, In Transit and The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant

April 11, 1922 - Montreal

1950 - moves to Paris

September 1, 1951- publishes, in The New Yorker, her first short story.  She would publish 116 stories in The New Yorker. 

February 18, 2014 - passes away in her beloved Paris

I am reading along as best I can, having access to only about half of her stories, with Buried in Print on their read through of the Short Stories of Mavis Gallant.  

"The Captive Neice" has two central characters, a woman, guessing in her early twenties and a man, her loved and maybe can be seen as her captor, thirty nine years old.  For sure you will find him very annoying.  At first he keeps calling himself an old man then it is revealed he is just thirty nine.  The woman was raised by her aunt, her parents having passed.  The live together in a low rent hotel.  He stays in an reads and smoked cigarettes, the room reeks of them but it is too cold to open the window.

We are left to our imagination in deciding how their relationship began, where their money comes from and 

perhaps most of all, why the woman does not just move on.  She is 

pursuing a job in the theater.  The man seems to know the exalted man for whom she is auditioning.  They have words over this.

This is another story about a relationship that on the face of it makes little sense.  We are left to ponder the couple's 

past and future.

April Fish - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - 1968

April Fish - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - 1968


Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Reading Schedule 

Mavis Gallant on The Reading Life


August 11, 1922 born in Montréal, in 1950 she moves to France to pursue her dream of being a writer 



February 18, 2014, dies in Paris, a place she dearly loved

"In her preface to the present collection, Gallant advises her readers: “Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” Such advice may be superfluous. When you finish each of Gallant’s stories, it’s instinctive to stop and regroup. As much as you might wish to resume and prolong the pleasure of reading, you feel that your brain and heart cannot, at least for the moment, process or absorb one word, one detail more." Francine Prose in her introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant



This story is included in The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant and in another collection, In Transit.

April Fish has an estimated reading time of three minutes, far briefer than is typical of her work.  


The story is narrated by April, a fifty five year old single woman living in Switzerland.  She says she only there to avoid high income tax in her home country, to which she wishes she could return. We do not learn where she is from.  We do learn she is affluent, seems to live of Family money as her affairs are managed by a solicitor.  In Switzerland they call her Avril.

She has three adopted sons, now all young adults but still dependent on her.  

There is a mystery of character at the center of this story.  Is April a kind caring person or is she an adult spoiled brat who has a fit when she is denied her way, or a bit of both? She seems now bored with her sons and is outraged when her request to adopt a Vietnamese Baby in Switzerland for burn treatments  (1968 was height of The Vietnam War) is denied.

The reason the story is called April Fish in related to Venice.  Where i hope to be this summer.

Questions and Answers - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - first published in The New Yorker - May 20, 1966

Buried in Print on Mavis Gallant

August 11, 1922 born in Montréal, in 1950 she moves to France to pursue her dream of being a writer 

February 18, 2014, dies in Paris, a place she dearly loved

"Questions and Answers"  appears in The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant and In Transit in addition to first being published, as were so many of her stories, in The New Yorker.

As "Questions and Answers" opens the narrator offers an opinion:

"ROMANIANS NOTORIOUSLY ARE marked by delusions of eminence and persecution, and Madame Gisèle does not encourage them among her clientele. She never can tell when they are trying to acquire information, or present some grievance that were better taken to a doctor or the police. Like all expatriates in Paris, they are concerned with the reactions of total strangers. She is expected to find in the cards the functionary who sneered, the flunky who behaved like a jailer, the man who, for no reason, stared too long at the plates of the car. Madame Gisèle prefers her settled clients – the married women who sit down to say, “When is my husband going to die?” and “What about the man who smiles at me every morning on the bus?” She can find him easily: There he is – the jack of hearts. One of the queens is not far away, along with the seven of diamonds turned upside down. Forget about him. He is supporting his mother and has already deserted a wife."

From this I garner an impression of a group I never thought about before, Romanian expates in Paris. Gallant has marvelously shaped our views, maybe we think yes course all Romanians are part Gypsy/Roma so of course they believe in cards and are completely clannish.  

Amelia is there asking questions about her long time friend Marie, both came from Bucharest:

"Madame Gisèle, who is also Romanian but from one of the peripheral provinces, replies, “Who cares?” She and Amalia both speak their language badly. Amalia was educated in French, which was the fashion for Bucharest girls of her background thirty years ago, while the fortune-teller is at home in a Slavic-sounding dialect."

Marie is trying to get a visa to move to America, Amalia says Marie came to Paris when there were plenty of jobs, probably 1936 or so.  Where Marie and her husband arrived much latter and have never even gotten a French passport.  Of course this may well just be an excuse or jealousy.  Like any skilled reader of cards, Madame Giséle tells her clients things that will keep them coming back.

In a way Gallant has turned us into readers of cards, seeing into the past and futures of the characters in the story based on bits of information.

We learn about the lives of the women while in Bucharest.  Now in Paris it is almost as if they never left Romania.  For a reason left unexplained many of Madame Giséle's clients ask whether or not other Romanians are insane.  They speak terribly about each other but cling.

"Amalia, remembering that she is paying for time, now takes the tack that Madame Gisèle is concealing what she knows. “It is up to you to convince me,” she says. “Will Marie go to America?” “Everyone travels,” says Madame Gisèle. Well, that is true. The American consulate is full of ordinary tourists who can pay their passage and will see, they hope, Indian ceremonial dances."

In just ten minutes Gallant has taken us into life in two great European cities, if you ponder the immigration paths you can reconstruct European history in the middle 20th century.

Please feel free to read along.  The project is projected to finish in September of this year. 

"in Transit" - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - 1989

Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

"In Transit" - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - the title story in her 1998 Collection

This post is written in hope that Mass will once again be offered at Norte Dame Cathedral on Christmas Day in 2020

"In Transit" is set in the Helsinki  airport.  Of course one's experience now will vary depending  on the airport, since 1989 some airports like Singapore's are truly winderful and others thirty years past due for renovation.  One can assume the 1989 Helsinki Airport was strictly functional.

In airports people tend to project  onto strangers, to help pass the time.  There are two couples in our story, a newly married French couple, maybe 27 or so and a couple identified as Americans from their accents.  The French man is working on a series of articles for a Paris newspaper.  He understands English but hides this so he can ease drop.  Maybe journalism is just a code  name for superficial observations meant for newspaper readers.

The American couple are continuing what the Frenchman sees as a life time quarell about the nature of their relationship:

"The wild thoughts of the younger man were: They are chained for the rest of this life. Too old to change? Only a brute would leave her now? They are walking toward the door marked AMSTERDAM, and she limps. That is why they cannot separate. She is an invalid. He has been looking after her for years. They are going through the Amsterdam door, whatever their tickets said."

I imagine the Frenchman is wondering if they are his future.  He and his wife have already started what looks life a life time issue over why he left his first wife.

Is it just me or does Gallant often portray Americans in a one-demensional way?

Of course the young Frenchman might be totally wrong about the older couple.  

Mel u

When We Were Nearly Young - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - first published October 7, 1960 in The New Yorker

Buried in Print’s Mavis Gallant Project 

When We Were Nearly Young - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - first published October 7, 1960 in The New Yorker .  Included in the collection, In Transit as well as The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant.

Mavis Gallant

April 11, 1922 - Montreal

1950 - moves to Paris

September 1, 1951- publishes, in The New Yorker, her first short story.  She would publish 116 stories in The New Yorker. 

February 18, 2014 - passes away in her beloved Paris

I am reading along as best I can, having access to only about half of her stories, with Buried in Print on their read through of the Short Stories of Mavis Gallant.

Here is how the story begins

“IN MADRID, NINE years ago, we lived on the thought of money. Our friendships were nourished with talk of money we expected to have, and what we intended to do when it came. There were four of us–two men and two girls. The men, Pablo and Carlos, were cousins. Pilar was a relation of theirs. I was not Spanish and not a relation, and a friend almost by mistake. The thing we had in common was that we were all waiting for money.”

A number of Gallant’s stories are about persons out of their home enviorment but still loosely tied to where they came from.  The narrator of the story spends three days a week going to places people might employ to send her money, such as the offices of American Express, Cook’s travel or the post office.  We dont learn who is sending her money.  The two men are also waiting for money, one gets an allowance and one works at a bank.  The two men seem to anticipate one day getting a decent amount. They live in an unregistered pension (ths owner is evading taxes).  As Buried in Print said in her post, stories set in Pensions bring to mind Katherine  Mansfield.

Nine years in future narrator has lost touch with her friends. All dreaded passing thirty.

There is a sad feel to this story, of people with but shallow attachments.  The narrator says she hates reading. They were poor, but in the way of poor college students from rich families playing at poverty.

The project will continue until September 2020, please feel free to join in

Ambrosia Bousweau

Mel u

By the Sea - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - 1954

Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

My posts on Mavis Gallant

"By the Sea" by Mavis Gallant

“In terms of character, no man is the slightest match for a horse,” 

Mavis Gallant

April 11, 1922 - Montreal

1950 - moves to Paris

September 1, 1951- publishes, in The New Yorker, her first short story.  She would publish 116 stories in The New Yorker. 

February 18, 2014 - passes away in her beloved Paris

Today's story is set in a pension near Gilbralter, owned by an English woman.  The story very much reminded me of Katherine Mansfield's 1911 collection, In a German Pension.  The guests are a mixture of English, American and German.  The English sort of occupy one area, the French another. The story is structured through the conversations of the guests.  People are not quite what they seem.  No one seems particularly happy.  One woman says the main reason she does not go back to England is the six month dog quarantine rule.  Everyone seems to vaguely wish they were somewhere else but inertia keeps them from acting on their wishes.

This story is included in the collection, In Transit and in The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant. (I could not find it online.)

Buried in Print, a great source of reading life ideas, is doing a read through of all the 200 or so stories of Gallant.  I have access to about half the stories and am trying to follow along as I can. The read through is scheduled to finish in September 2020.  All are invited to participate.

Mel u

The Colonel's Chld - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - included in Overheard in a Balloon - 1983

Buried in Print’s Mavis Gallant Project 

Mavis Gallant on The Reading Life 

“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

Luc and his Father - A Short Story set in Paris by Mavis Gallant - 1982 - republished in Overhead in a Balloon and Other Stories

Paris in July 2019 - Hosted by Thyme for Tea

Mavis Gallant on The Reading Life

Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

Works Read so for Paris in July 2019

1. At the Existentialist Cafe:Freedom, Being and Apricot  Cocktails by Sarah Blackwell.  2016 - An exploration of the Parisian origins of French post World War Two Existentialism 
2. Suzanne's Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris by Anne Nelson. 2017- an important addition to French Holocaust Literature
3. Journey to the Edge of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine -1932
4. Death on The Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Celine - 1936
5. "Luc and his Father" - a set in Paris short story by Mavis Gallant - 1982

Please consider participating in Paris in July 2019, hosted by Thyme for Tea.  

This story was first published September 26, 1982 in the New Yorker.  It is included in Overhead  in a Balloon and other Stories, a 1990 collection of some of her based in Paris stories.

Mavis Gallant

April 11, 1922 - Montreal

1950 - moves to Paris

September 1, 1951- publishes, in The New Yorker, her first short story.  She would publish 116 stories in The New Yorker. 

February 18, 2014 - passes away in her beloved Paris

Mavis Gallant loved Paris.  Today's story, "Luc and his father",set in Paris around 1979, centers on the relationship of a young man, Luc, ready to start as has long been planned, engineering school, and his father.

All four of the works I have so far read for Paris in July 2019 are related to the social upheaval produced in French society by the World Wars.  All four works present a world in which old truthes no longer sustain people.  In the Existentialists we see a highly intellectualized presentation of this theme.  In the classic novels of Celine, we see a destroyed culture through the eyes of a French World War One trench warfare survivor.  In Suzanne's Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris by Anne Nelson we see the participation of the French in turning French Jews over to the Germans.  The righteousness people seem to be foreigners living in Paris more than native Paridians.  

As "Luc and his Father" opens, World War Two ended over thirty years ago but I detect a lingering influence as seen in the father's xenophobia (which extends even to the English) and his tendency to blame the ills of French society on the collapse of France's colonial Empire (he attributes the rising price of some agricultural products to the lose of Algeria).  

The family has just gotten very disappointing news.  Luc has flunked the entrance exam for engineering school.  The father blames Charles de Gaulle.  He thinks that in the old days his son would have not had to compete with students from former colonies for tutoring from his teachers.  He and his wife see this as evidence of the decline of French society.  

Like any Gallant story, there is a lot going on, including the intrusion of Luc's Russian girl friend, to the horror of his parents.

The characters in this story feel they have been robbed  of the entitlements due a "Real French Citizen" by France's post World War Two social policies.

With a Capital T - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - first published in Canadian Fiction Magazine -1977

Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

Mavis Gallant on The Reading Life

Gallant dedicated "With a Capital T" to Madeline and Jean-Paul Lemieux.  Jean -Paul (1904 to 1990) is a renown Canadian artist, focusing largely on the Quebec area.  They were married in 1937. (I did not find in my short research a personal connection with Gallant, if you have information on this please share.)

April 11, 1922 - Montreal

1950 - moves to Paris

September 1, 1951- publishes, in The New Yorker, her first short story.  She would go onto publish 116 stories in The New Yorker. ( I greatly enjoy looking at the covers of the issue in which a story was published.)

February 18, 2014 - passes away in her beloved Paris

"With a Capital T" is the last of six linked stories (all included in Home Truths) focusing on Linnet Muir, born in Montreal.  When we first met her she was 18, moving back from New York City to Montreal.  She is self supporting with few family ties and her only social contacts seem to be older men she works with.  World War Two is on and most of the young men are in the service.

In the final story she is twenty-one, working as journalist and is married to a Canadian Soldier serving in Europe.  There is no suggestion Linnet misses her husband, loves him or even really worries about him.  We learn little about him,,not even his first name. I did sense Linnet feels being married makes her a more to be taken seriously woman.  

Her main job seems to be to write captions for pictures.  Linnet has some fun with this. The managers at the paper are all men, they are depicted as quarrelling over who is in charge. Linnet is told never to criticize the government, after all their is a War on! Her politics are classic left wing.

"Churches and schools, banks and prisons, dwellings and railway stations were part of an imperial convallation that wound round the globe, designed to impress on the minds of indigenous populations that the builders had come to stay."

In an interesting interlude Linnet is sent to interview her own grandmother, who fears she is there looking for money.  We learn a little about Linnet's father, who died long ago.

The next two Gallant stories I will post upon are "Overhead in a Balloon" and "Luc and his Father".  The project is scheduled to end in September 2000.  

Varieties of Exile - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - first published in The New Yorker - January 11, 1976

Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

"Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story — or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall — is, Is it dead or alive?".. 

Mavis Gallant

April 11, 1922 - Montreal

1950 - moves to Paris

September 1, 1951- publishes, in The New Yorker, her first short story.  She would go onto publish 116 stories in The New Yorker. ( I greatly enjoy looking at the covers of the issue in which a story was published.)

February 18, 2014 - passes away in her beloved Paris

Thinking about the quote from Gallant with which I began this post, all her stories past her test-she can put so much life in just a few pages.

“Varieties of Exile” is included in the collection Home Truths. It is one of six linked stories centering on Linnett Muir. (I learned from Buried in Print’s post on this story that Gallant wrote six linked stories about Linnett.) The first story in the series, “In Youth there is Pleasure” introduces us to a young woman moving back from New York City to her home town in Montreal.  I knew I was going to like her when I learned she was reading Sylvia Townsend Warner.  (If you have not read her Elfin Kingdom stories you are in for a real treat.  Like Gallant, Warner published many stories in The New Yorker.). She is maybe 18 and on her own emotionally and financially.

As “Varieties of Exile” opens World War Two has just started.  Montréal is inundated with European exiles.

“In the third summer of the war I began to meet refugees. There were large numbers of them in Montreal–to me a source of infinite wonder. I could not get enough of them. They came straight out of the twilit Socialist-literary landscape of my reading and my desires. I saw them as prophets of a promised social order that was to consist of justice, equality, art, personal relations, courage, generosity. generosity. Each of them–Belgian, French, Catholic German, Socialist German, Jewish German, Czech–was a book I tried to read from start to finish. My dictionaries were films, poems, novels, Lenin, Freud. That the refugees tended to hate one another seemed no more than a deplorable accident. Nationalist pig-headedness, that chronic, wasting, and apparently incurable disease, was known to me only on Canadian terms and I did not always recognize its symptoms. Anything I could not decipher I turned into fiction, which was my way of untangling knots. At the office where I worked I now spent my lunch hour writing stories about people in exile. I tried to see Montreal as an Austrian might see it and to feel whatever he felt. I was entirely at home with foreigners, which is not surprising the home was all in my head.”

As i read this, knowing Gallant wanted so much to leave Canada forever, if this is drawing at all on her life history.  I admit as i read the Canada based stories i look for her reasons for leaving.

All of her coworkers are older men.  Most married but they advise her against marriage.  She meets a man on a train.  She calls him an “English Remitance Man”.  A remitance man lives on money from home, sent on condition he live 

forever in Exile.  Usually he did something his father did not like at all so he paid him to leave.  As Linnett tells the story, the remitance man never really grows up, saved but cursed by his father’s money.  Linnett develops some feelings for him but he is married and her feelings were weak.

Linnett lives a Reading centered life.  She experiences things through her resding.  She makes a reference to Stefan Zweig.  I find this very interesting.  Zweig was driven into exile by his vision of a collapsing European culture.  Even though he made a fortune from his writings, he was kind of a remitance man.  His family wealth freed him to write, travel, and collect objects de art.

He was an Austrian Jew who tried to define himself as Austrian, in exile from his Ashganazi roots.  I saw that Linnett was reading “The Russians”, she is getting more into Central European Literature. 

As the story progresses Linnett marries.  As you read the Linnett stories keep in mind they are her looking back on the past.  She sees her past as part of a plot leading to her present.