[In the following essay, Griffith accounts for the inconsistencies in the route Charlie takes from the Ritz Bar to the home of Lincoln and Marion Peters.]

Although "Babylon Revisited" is probably the most anthologized and analyzed of Fitzgerald's short stories, neither editor nor critic has noted the strange route taken by Charlie Wales from the Ritz Bar to Lincoln Peters's home in the Rue Palatine. In the opening scene Charlie discusses former days with Alix, the barman at the Ritz, and departs to visit his daughter at the Peters's home on the Left Bank. Leaving the bar, located in the Place Vendôme (on the Right Bank), he obviously walks north on the Rue de la Paix to the Place de l'Opera, where five streets intersect, including the Boulevard des Capucines and the Avenue de l'Opera. "At the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines he took a taxi."

Clearly this cab went southwest (to Charlie's left, since he was walking north) to the Place de la Madeleine, where it turned south onto the Rue Royale and into the Place de la Concorde, for we are told in the next sentence: "The Place de la Concorde moved by in pink majesty; they crossed the logical Seine, and Charlie felt the sudden provincial quality of the Left Bank." They must have crossed the river at the Pont de la Concorde, and Charlie's intent is presumably to take the Boulevard St. Germain southeast to the Rue Palatine (located just behind St. Surplice)—a reasonable enough route.

However, the opening sentence of the next paragraph asserts that "Charlie directed his taxi to the Avenue de l'Opera, which was out of his way." Fitzgerald uses litotes to good effect on occasion, but this is singularly inappropriate. There are three ways of reaching the Avenue de l'Opera from the taxi's current position at the Left Bank end of the Pont de la Concorde. They may stay on the Left Bank, going east along the river to one of the bridges opposite the Louvre, recross the Seine, and come onto the Avenue de l'Opera as it dead-ends into the Rue de Rivoli. Or they may turn around immediately, go back across the Pont de la Concorde, and take the Rue de Rivoli to the same intersection. Both these routes, unfortunately, take them to the extreme southeast end of the Avenue de l'Opera, and the only direction they can go is northwest, directly away from the Left Bank and their goal. The third alternative is to retrace their path exactly—back across the same bridge, through Concorde, up the Rue Royale, past the Madeleine, and via the Boulevard de la Madeleine and the Boulevard des Capucines to Charlie's original corner at the Rue de La Paix. From this point they can turn southeast on the Avenue de l'Opera; and however improbable this route may appear, especially in late afternoon traffic, it is the only one which will at least permit them to take the Avenue in the right direction.

After passing Brentano's book store, just a block south, and a middle class restaurant called Duval's, both quite accurately on Charlie's new route to the Rue Palatine via the Avenue de l'Opera, "they rolled on to the Left Bank and he felt its sudden provincialism. . . ." The wording of this passage provides the key to the problem, for Fitzgerald has used almost the identical words ("Charlie felt the sudden provincial quality of the Left Bank") to conclude the account of the first crossing. An author might conceivably become sufficiently confused to have his character cross a river twice going in the same direction, but no competent craftsman would so duplicate his phraseology, especially when it contains a striking idea like the attribution of "sudden provincialism" to the Left Bank. The obvious explanation is that the second sentence is a rewritten version of the first. If one extends this idea to the whole preceding paragraph, assuming that the entire paragraph was an expanded and revised version of the earlier sentence, intended to be substituted for it, the inconsistencies in itinerary are readily accounted for.

A brief examination of Fitzgerald's artistic purposes in the account of Charlie's taxi ride will indicate how this duplication could have occurred. He is establishing a contrast between the life led by Charlie and his friends before the crash (when they were "a sort of royalty") and the bourgeoise respectability represented by the "provincial" Left Bank life of Lincoln Peters (whose very name suggests democracy and rock-like stability). He achieved this very simply in first draft by mentioning the "pink majesty" of La Concorde and following it immediately with the "sudden provincial quality" of the Left Bank. However, in rewriting he found this inadequate, a mere contrast of the spirits of the two Banks. Two things were missing: the sense of glory past (for La Concorde was still there, still majestic), and the suggestion of Charlie's own regret—now that it is no longer possible to live like a king—that he had not been a member of that simpler, stabler class for which he still feels a tinge of contempt. Both these things must be established before the conversations with the Peters take place if the reader is to understand Charlie's relationship with them, and Fitzgerald achieves this very neatly by rerouting the taxi past the Palais Royale and contrasting the cab horns of the present with the trumpets of the Second Empire, by indicating the close of an age of creative literary culture by the drawing of the iron grill across Brentano's, and by Charlie's regrets, seeing the "trim little bourgeois hedge of Duval's," that "he had never eaten at a really cheap restaurant in Paris." He then revised his original sentence referring to the "sudden provincialism," with no mention of passing La Concorde, and used it to conclude the new taxi route through the Right Bank. He neglected, however, to delete the original sentence for which it substituted.

This sort of reconstruction of creative process is necessarily open to question, but in this instance the evidence seems sufficient. Traces of exactly the same sort of revision, designed to enrich through addition of suggestive symbolic detail, appear in the account of Charlie's visit to Montmartre later the same evening. Indeed, the association between the closed grill at Brentano's and the disappearance of the cafe called The Poet's Cave suggests the two passages were reworked at the same time.

A work printed during the author's lifetime and allowed to stand uncorrected by him should, no doubt, be considered as representing his final intention. However, when the choice is between perfect consistency and complete absurdity, and when the error may be accounted for readily and corrected easily—by the omission of a single sentence—it would appear an editorial obligation to do so. Presumably, Fitzgerald would have preferred having his text tampered with to being thought unversed in the geography of Paris.