[In the following essay, Simmons examines the figure of the Remittance Man in Gallant's short fiction.]

In a semi-autobiographical series of stories in Mavis Gallant's Home Truths, the nineteen-year-old Linnet Muir returns to Montreal after a childhood spent, from the age of four, in a series of Canadian and American boarding schools. After probing various mysteries about her family and her past, such as the circumstances of her father's death, Linnet will, like Gallant, leave Canada permanently for France.

Linnet's investigations among her father's friends—she has broken with her mother—produce several versions of her father's death, and the girl soon decides that, whatever the actual events, “he had died of home-sickness; sickness for England was the consumption, the gun, everything” (Home Truths, 235). Then, on a commuter train, she meets Frank Cairns, a remittance man, and in studying him, the young Linnet seems to find a key that unlocks the mystery of her father's life and her own.

The Remittance Man, Gallant writes, was a peculiarly British institution through which young people, usually sons, were sent away to live lives of puzzled exile, never quite understanding what had been their crime:

Like all superfluous and marginal persons, remittance men were characters in a plot. The plot … described a powerful father's taking umbrage at his son's misconduct and ordering him out of the country. … Hordes of young men who had somehow offended their parents were shipped out. … Banished young, as a rule, the remittance man … drifted for the rest of his life, never quite sounding or looking like anyone around him, seldom raising a family or pursuing an occupation … remote, dreamy, bored. … They were like children waiting for the school vacation so they could go home, except that at home nobody wanted them: the nursery had been turned into a billiards room and Nanny dismissed.

(266-68)

In characterizing the Remittance Man, Gallant describes not only Linnet's English-exiled father, lost to his child and himself, not only the child Linnet, exiled at an unusually young age to a particularly strict religious school by non-religious parents, but also something she sees in the Canadian personality. Here, everyone seems to feel a sense of loss; it is a country of children pushed from some all-but-forgotten nest: “I've never been in a country where there was so much gap between reality and dream,” Gallant said of Canada in an interview. “The people's lives don't match up to what they seem to think they were and the people invent things or they invent backgrounds or they invent families. … In Europe, you can't invent because everyone knows too much” (quoted in [Neil K. Besner, The Light of Imagination: Mavis Gallant's Fiction. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988)], 8).

The Remittance Man also seems to provide a model for the array of characters, usually Canadian or English but sometimes Central European, who have been transplanted to the Paris or Riviera of Gallant's short stories. All are versions of the Remittance Man, for all, though we may not be shown the reasons, are adrift, not quite connecting with the life going on around them. All seem to have suffered some early loss, and, by choosing to live abroad, they are only acting out their inner sense of exile. Life abroad is Gallant's pervasive metaphor, not only for exile but also for the self-exile that inevitably follows. Paradoxically, life abroad also is seen by Gallant's characters as holding out the hope of a cure, at least for the symptoms of self-exile. In a foreign place, connection can be replaced by romance; identity can be replaced by a role that is necessarily simplified for foreign consumption. The unlucky among Gallant's characters are cured of their yearning for connection and identity; they find a role and disappear into it. The lucky may be forced, for a moment, to see themselves in their full infirmity; in this moment, though fleeting, they find home.

In Gallant's boarding-school story, “Thank-you for the Lovely Tea,” included in the “At Home” section of Home Truths, Gallant goes even further than in the avowedly autobiographical Linnet Muir section to get to the source of self-exile. Here we see in its infancy the loss of the places and relationships that allow one to know oneself. In the story, three young girls leave school for a few hours to take tea with Mrs. Holland, the mistress of Ruth's father. The girls have suffered different types of loss: May has been separated from her identical twin, who has been sent to another school thousands of miles away; Helen has been torn from a large, warm, crude family by a relative who wants to make her a lady; Ruth's mother, for unknown reasons, has gone to live in another country and Ruth has been sent to school.

At tea, Mrs. Holland's tense insecurity rocks the girls' emotional boat, and their responses show how self-exile works at an early age. May, lost from her twin and mirror, is lost from herself. With no self to refer to, she imitates Ruth, whether in the choice of ice cream or her example of cruelty to Helen, even though it is much more painful to be the torturer than to be the victim. Helen, who has been trained to despise her crude family, desires only to stay in the controlled boarding-school world forever, even though her reverence for the school's stiff gentility makes her the butt of the other girls' jokes. She can't imagine facing life as an adult because she perceives the limbo into which she has been cast; she can never go back to being like her family, but also knows she will never really be a “lady” like the girls with more refined backgrounds. Ruth demonstrates the third and most chilling response. While the others, despite their defenses, blunder against their real feelings of loss during the tense tea, Ruth does not, for already she has learned to banish the suffering self by banishing all feeling. Afterwards she wonders if she would “ever care enough about anyone to make all the mistakes those around her had made” (HT, 16).

In “The Other Paris,” the title piece of Gallant's first short-story collection, published in 1956, we see a young North American woman a few years older than the Ruth in “Thank-you for the Lovely Tea,” but one who has not yet learned how to make herself invulnerable to the desire for some kind of feeling. At twenty-two, Carol Frazier is working in an American governmental agency in post-World War II Paris, and has just become engaged to marry her boss, Howard Mitchell. Carol is not in love with Howard and feels this to be a problem, but is certain she would be if only she could find the romantically picturesque Paris of films and songs. She believes that if she “spoke to the right person, or opened the right door, or turned down an unexpected street, the city would reveal itself and she would fall in love” (The Other Paris, 9).

Though she is young and “romantic,” Carol has already unconsciously given up any claim to real connection or deep feeling, hoping only that charming scenes might allow her to manufacture a mood resembling love and happiness. But cold and dreary postwar Paris does not oblige. Rain obscures the sunrise from the steps of Sacré-Coeur, Christmas carols on the Place Vendôme are a crass media event, and a private concert to which Carol and Howard have been invited is a crashing failure as part of the ceiling comes loose, faulty wiring causes lights to flash off and on, and Carol is snubbed by her hosts, faded aristocratics who are not, after all, particularly picturesque.

Finally, and by accident, Carol does “turn down an unexpected street,” finding herself in the impoverished and dirty room where her coworker, Odile, carries on an entirely uncharming affair with the refugee Felix, a boy much younger than Odile, closer in age to Carol herself. And suddenly Carol does feel something, moved by the love Felix and Odile have for one another, an emotion so authentic it does not need to be charming or even appropriate to survive. Suddenly, Carol imagines a powerful love, being loved herself, not by Felix, certainly not by Howard, but by “some other man, some wonderful person who did not exist.” For a moment she feels as if she has “at last opened the right door,” but quickly she retreats (OP, 28). A true Remittance Man, Carol cannot want love, she recognizes in this moment, only romance, and what she has just experienced must be scorned out of existence: “That such a vision could come from Felix and Odile was impossible. … she remembered in time what Felix was—a hopeless parasite. And Odile was silly and immoral and old enough to know better” (OP, 29). She decides to forget the real, troubling, fantasy-challenging Paris, to remember instead “the Paris of films.” She will also, it is clear, forget her momentary “vision” of love and settle for a marriage that has, after all, begun in Paris and “would sound romantic and interesting, more and more so as time passed” (OP, 30).

In “The Remission,” a story in Gallant's 1979 collection, From the Fifteenth District, Alec Webb, upon learning that he has an incurable disease, leaves England with his wife and children to die on the French Riviera. Here he goes into a three-year remission, and both illness and remission represent another “variety of exile.”

Like the father in the Linnet Muir stories, Alec is a father who is there but not there, who can “see his children, but only barely.” Cut off from adult responsibility by illness and exile, he had “left [them] behind” (From the Fifteenth District, 90). He cannot see his children because he has become a child again himself, aimless, of the moment, utterly unable to comprehend responsibility to others or self. Only romance moves him. For him, the momentary cure is not a romantic French scene, but a dream of lost England, as in the midst of a medical “crisis” he appears fully dressed—though having substituted a scarf for a tie—to watch the coronation of Elizabeth II on television.

Alec's condition is mirrored by the entire English colony; though they are not literally ill, all exist in a limbo similar to Alec's remission. Cut off from adult responsibility, they play at life, acting out parts. When they do have ailments, the local doctor notes, they are “nursery ailments; what his patients really wanted was to be tucked up next to a nursery fire and fed warm bread-and-milk” (FD, 82). They all have a story of themselves, a role they play, which, like Alec's illness, explains their existence in simple terms. The caricature of this is Wilkinson, who literally plays the role of an Englishman in films set on the Riviera. He plays “the chap with the strong blue eyes and ginger mustache … who flashed on for a second, just long enough to show there was an Englishman in the room,” and who is good with a line such as “Don't underestimate Rommel” (FD, 95, 99).

The others, too, have invented roles for themselves, repeating their lines over and over. Mr. Cranefield is a writer of romance novels that repeat the story of the same imaginary blond couple. On his table are framed pictures of the young man and woman, actually illustrations cut from magazines, which are his models. “I keep them there,” he says, “so that I never make a mistake” (FD, 87). There, too, is Mrs. Massie, who greets every newcomer with a gift of her Flora's Gardening Encyclopaedia (her name is not, of course, Flora) and the information, “It is by way of being a classic. Seventeen editions. I do all the typing myself” (FD, 107). And there is Major Lamprey, whose story is that he intends “to die fighting on my own doorstep” (FD, 112) no matter who invades the Riviera.

Alec's wife, Barbara, also finds release on the Riviera from adult responsibilities, as she ceases to function as a parent and takes on a new, simpler role as Wilkinson's lover. It is as if, having moved up in English society by marrying Alec, Barbara now sees that a pretend upper-class Englishman is even better than a real upper-class Englishman.

While characters in many of Gallant's stories are offered the chance to break out of their roles—though they seldom take that opportunity—that does not happen here. “The Remission” is not really about the adults, but about the children and how they are formed. Here we see both the hopeless end and the near-hopeless beginning of the life of exile that obsesses Gallant's work. The children are deserted not only by their parents, who are lost in their own childish dreams, but also by the other adults who are equally useless in their vague offers of help, possible typing jobs, pocket money from gardening, or advice: “You will grow up you know” (103). As exile produces adults who cannot act as adults, it also produces children who cannot act as children. As the adults slough off responsibility for fantasy, the children are crushed by the need to find something to tell them who they are. They cling to their one useful memory of their father, his warning that it is dangerous to smoke in bed. “‘Death is empty without God,’ one of the children shrills at the funeral. ‘Where did that come from?’ everyone asks. ‘Had he heard it? Read it? Was he performing? No one knew’” (FD, 111). Their mother is only an embarrassment, and they study her “as if measuring everything she still had to mean in their lives” (FD, 102). As if aware that they have been stunted, the children now “talk as if they are still eleven or twelve when Alec had stopped seeing them grow,” and to others they look like “imitations of English children—loud, humorless, dutiful, clear” (FD, 103). Slowly the children begin to lose identifying characteristics. They no longer look much alike, or like their parents. They stop fighting, stop speaking to each other, barely seem to know each other. Though the details of these children's exile are different from Ruth's in “Thank-you for the Lovely Tea,” the result is the same. Banished young from adult concern, they are miniature versions of the Remittance Man. Until the children can invent roles for themselves, they are defined by nothing but loss, and the only way to banish the suffering is not to feel. At fourteen, Molly knows “there was no freedom but to cease to love” (103).

In her collection Overhead in a Balloon, 1979, Gallant no longer sees Europe through the eyes of romantic North Americans or British. The Paris of these stories is seen rather “through the imaginations of native or long-time Parisians [who] see Paris as the centre and the circumference of the universe.” This is a Paris in which “old buildings are being demolished, trees cut down, whole blocks gutted to make way for parkades or shopping centres” (LI [Light of Imagination], 140). The politics of the seventies and eighties also infuses the stories and, in “Speck's Idea,” art dealer Sandor Speck loses one gallery to demolition when his block is replaced by a parking garage. Another gallery is bombed by Basque separatists who mistake his gallery for a travel agency exploiting their country.

But though we now have a more sophisticated and knowledgeable view of Paris, it is still the city of dreams, still holding out the promise of an answer, a cure. In Speck's Paris, there will always be an audience for lectures on such topics as “the secrets of Greenland,” because “in no other capital city does the population wait more trustfully for the mystery to be solved, the conspiracy laid bare” (Overhead in a Balloon, 12). And even longtime residents like Sandor Speck cannot help glimpsing Paris as a movie set in a “French film designed for export … the lights … reflected, quivering, in European-looking puddles” (OB, 5).

Sandor Speck is both a native Parisian and another variety of exile, the second generation in France of a family coming from somewhere in central Europe. Even if he is on his native soil, we still recognize him as a Remittance Man, a “character in a plot” he must work to invent. As Carol Frazier believes love will follow if she can contact romantic and picturesque Paris, Sandor Speck—whose failures in marriage have caused him to all but give up on love in its ordinary form—believes he will feel secure if he can connect himself to wealthy and powerful Paris. Thus, he moves his gallery to an exorbitantly expensive building and seeks out opportunities to rub elbows with the prominent. Though Speck is more sophisticated than Carol, he is not much more successful at inducing Paris to provide the settings he believes will allow him to manufacture the feelings he needs. The “upper class hush” of his expensive neighborhood is continually shattered by left-wing attacks on a right-wing bookstore, and the sirens of ambulance and police. And his exalted neighbors, counts and princes, are “spiteful, quarrelsome, and avaricious” (OB, 1), even more disappointing than the aristocrats who snub Carol.

Speck does not maneuver Paris into the proper settings much better than does Carol, yet he is more practiced at manipulating his love life, which, after the breakup of his last marriage, appears to be subsumed by art. He is in search of an unknown painter who will give the art industry the “revitalization” editorials are calling for, and will benefit his finances and reputation. Much as Mr. Cranefield of “The Remission” lovingly depicts the perfect blond couple in romance after romance, Speck sits down with a pencil and pad to draw up specifications for the perfect French artist:

A French painter, circa 1864-1949, forgotten now except by a handful of devoted connoisseurs. Populist yet refined, local but universal, he would send rays, beacons, into the thickening night of the West, just as Speck's gallery shone bravely into the dark street.

(OB, 8)

The artist's politics must be drawn with painstaking precision. Should the artist have been a member of the Resistance? The Resistance is no longer chic; its youngest members are in their seventies. But what about state-subsidized museums, where Resistance work would be prized, possibly even required? Speck solves the problem by writing: “1941—Conversations with Albert Camus” (OB, 9). As Speck lists on his pad all the characteristics of the perfect artist, only one little thing is missing, a person who can be made to embody these characteristics, the artist himself, “the tiny, enduring wheel set deep in the clanking, churning machinery of the art trade” (OB, 14).

Speck happens to hear of an obscure, long-dead artist named Hubert Cruche (“Don't get rid of the Cruches,” Speck advises the acquaintance who mentions his collection of the artist's work), and Speck sets out to the Paris suburbs to court the painter's widow. He approaches her, as he always approaches artists' widows, through a “subtle approximation of courtship” (OB, 18), winning her to his will by listening to her accounts of life with the great man and of her own vital importance to his work, as he pretends to eat the sickening sweets she adores. He plays his role, never forgetting his mission, to take possession of the Cruche paintings she owns and, most importantly, to appropriate the myth of the artist, which he will then rework into the myth he needs. Indeed, Speck's attempt to win the widow and her dead husband, his mixing of “courtship” and “bargain hunting,” serves as a metaphor for the attempt to love, or find something resembling love, in much of Gallant's work. And while Carol Frazier and even Barbara Webb, the adulterous wife of “The Remission,” are still romantics, Speck knows himself to be more advanced, a bit of a whore: “It was true that his feeling for art stopped short of love; it had to. The great cocottes of history had shown similar prudence.” He is a whore for the obvious financial reasons but also, as probably is the case with most whores, as with remittance men, he does not dare feel: “For what if he were to allow passion for painting to set alight his common sense? How would he be able to live, then, knowing that the ultimate fate of art was to die of anemia in safe-deposit vaults?” (OB, 29). And how to love if love, too, is always locked away to die?

But Speck's manipulations crash to a halt as the artist's Saskatchewan-born widow, Lydia, not only fails to respond to Speck's “pseudo courtship” in the expected way but also seems to see through his manipulations with bewildering ease. Deprived of the role he relies on, Speck is suddenly naked and vulnerable. The ridiculous old widow in her shabby house now appears “as a tough little pagan figure, with a goddess's gift for reading men's lives.” As Carol, exposed to the passionate Felix, has a sudden vision of being loved, Speck has “a quick vision of himself clasping her knees and sobbing out the betrayal of his marriage” (OB, 24), the last thing in the world he meant to include in his assault on the widow.

Indeed, Speck has met his match. Far from being charmed and manipulated, Lydia seems to take Speck's approach as an opportunity to arrange a contest between him and an Italian art dealer, the prize being Lydia, her paintings, and the myth of Hubert Cruche. Speck responds by “falling back on the most useless of all lover's arguments … ‘I was there first’” (OB, 41).

In the end, after seeming to favor the Italian, Lydia comes back to Speck and allows him to mount the first Cruche show. The show will then proceed to Milan, where, hyped by the prestige of a Paris opening, Lydia's paintings will probably sell for a great deal of money. Speck sees that his choices had been arranged for him, either to go second and to seem to be taking crumbs, or to go first and set up the fortunes of his rival. He elects to go first.

Speck is thoroughly defeated by Lydia and knows it. Still he is granted a moment of uplift at the end of the story, an uncommon event in Gallant's work. The weather improves, there's a cab at the cab stand as he returns from Lydia's suburb by bus (having wrecked his Bentley upon hearing about his rival), and he “seemed to have passed a mysterious series of tests, and to have been admitted to some new society, the purpose of which he did not yet understand. He was a saner, stronger, wiser person” than he had been before (OB, 47). He decides to sign his own catalog introduction to the Cruche show, rather than ghosting it for some important person as he had intended.

The tests Speck has passed are similar to those undergone by many of Gallant's adult characters. He has been given the dangerous opportunity to see through his own pretenses to the real self beneath. When this danger presents itself to Carol Frazier she flees, preferring a life of empty illusion to catching a glimpse of her desire for and fear of connection. Speck emerges, however, as from the wreck of his Bentley, battered but alive, and feels an immense if fleeting sense of relief. He is, after all, unlike Carol, momentarily alive. And he has formed a real, if tawdry, connection, finding with Lydia “a patch of landscape they held in common—a domain reserved for the winning, collecting, and sharing out of profits, a territory where believer and skeptic, dupe and embezzler, the loving and the faithless could walk hand in hand” (OB 46). This is not much of a connection, and it is steeped in irony. But it is something, and more than Speck had before he met Lydia.

Lydia's secret weapon, that which allows her to wreck Speck's sophisticated and practiced charade, seems to be the bleak power she derives from her childhood in Saskatchewan. Speck, as he recognizes, has been both “defeated” and paradoxically, albeit briefly, saved by a “landscape,” the “cold oblong” of a province (OB, 43). Similarly, in “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” a story collected in the “Canadians Abroad” section of Home Truths, the urbane, lost Peter Frazier is momentarily ripped out of his self- and life-denying pretenses by Agnes Brusen, a plain little woman, “poor quality really” from a small town in Saskatchewan (HT, 129). It is as if in Gallant's world pretense will spring up given the slightest nourishment of culture or sophistication. While it may be true, as Gallant says, that “in Europe you can't invent because everyone knows too much,” this does not stop her characters from going to Europe and devoting themselves to the attempt. Integrity, ironically, seems to be nurtured in those cold and barren Canadian landscapes where buds of pretense, along with almost everything else, freeze on the vine.

In “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” Peter Frazier is doing the postwar “international thing,” but not very successfully. He is a true Remittance Man, living on the crumbs of a fortune which was made by his great-grandfather, a Scottish immigrant to Canada, guarded by his grandfather, and used up by his father. Like the British abroad in “The Remission,” Peter is cut off from the wealth and prominence that is the only birthright he can imagine, and he tries to reinvent himself by playing a role. He poses as the devil-may-care son of a wealthy and powerful family, entirely unable to take the ordinary struggles of life seriously, living as if his work were a “pastime, and his real life a secret so splendid he could share it with no one except himself” (HT, 115). He has married Sheilah, a flashy woman of a poor background, one who supports Peter's view of himself as “a peacock” and does what she must to lure opportunity their way as Peter dreams his life.

Banished from his birthright, Peter is banished again, this time from the Canadian society of Paris. Having made an ass of himself at an important wedding—he is only beginning to grasp that he must be a little careful—his connections fail him. He is shipped out to glamourless Geneva, where he makes a faint pretense of working at a clerk's job while he and Sheilah await their next opportunity. His superior in this job is a young Canadian woman, Agnes Brusen, whose education and career is the product of great sacrifice by her Norwegian immigrant family. Though Peter finds her unattractive, boring, even ridiculous—she cannot begin to function at one of Sheilah's mock-elegant little dinners—he is also afraid of her. In her, he recognizes his own proud, ambitious, fervent immigrant ancestors, feels the “charge of moral certainty round her, the belief in work, the faith in undertakings.” And in her presence, he glimpses himself as the played-out end of the line. She is at the beginning, and she seems to say to him, “You can begin, but not begin again” (HT, 118).

Nothing much happens between Peter and Agnes. Unused to alcohol, she gets drunk at a party, and Peter is ordered by the hostess, a woman he now understands he must cultivate, to take her home. Lonely and frightened, sickened by the swinishness of the supposedly refined and educated world her family has sacrificed so much for her to reach, she clings to him briefly and tells him her story, how, as a child in a big family, she would get up early on a summer morning to watch the ice wagon going down the street. In such a moment, she tells him, “it's you, you, once in your life alone in the universe. You think you know everything that can happen. Nothing is ever like that again” (HT, 132). And that is really all. Peter returns home, where Sheilah is just coming in all aglow, having apparently seduced a man she met at the party and thereby secured Peter the promise of a job in Ceylon.

Nothing happens. But for the rest of Peter's life, as he and Sheilah knock around the world, “always on the fringe of disaster, the fringe of a fortune,” still viewing themselves as “peacocks,” he thinks of Agnes almost as if they had once been lovers. Like Peter, Agnes is also in exile, lonely and lost. Unlike Peter, she has a little shred of home to hold onto, a moment when the self was felt, that gives her an integrity Peter has never had. She shares this with him, and sometimes throughout the years he allows himself to use it, to feel how it would be to have a self:

Nothing moves except the shadows and the ice wagon and the changing amber of the child's eyes. The child is Peter. He has seen the grain of the cement sidewalk and the grass in the cracks, and the dust, and the dandelions at the edge of the road. He is there. He has taken the morning that belongs to Agnes, he is up before the others, and he knows everything. There is nothing he doesn't know.

(HT, 134)

This knowledge does not have much to do with the life Peter must live. In real life as he knows it, morning is all about “dimness and headache and remorse and regrets” (HT, 134). In real life, Peter doesn't know what he would do with Agnes's morning. Finally, self-knowledge and the integrity that comes with it is as bleak and barren as a slab of sidewalk in a dusty Saskatchewan town. Gallant's characters don't want it at this price. But in cherishing Agnes and her morning, Peter, one of the lucky in Gallant's world, is able at least to know what has been lost.

Writings by Mavis Gallant

The Other Paris. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1956; London: André Deutsch, 1957; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. Includes “The Other Paris,” “Autumn Day,” “Poor Franzi,” “Going Ashore,” “The Picnic,” “The Deceptions of Marie-Blanche,” “Wing's Chips,” “The Legacy,” “One Morning in June,” “About Geneva,” “Señor Pinedo,” and “A Day Like Any Other.”

From the Fifteenth District: A Novella and Eight Short Stories. New York: Random House, 1979; London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. Includes “The Four Seasons,” “The Moslem Wife,” “The Remission,” “The Latecomer,” “Baum, Gabriel, 1935-( ),” “From the Fifteenth District,” “Potter,” “His Mother,” and “Irina.”

Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories. Toronto: Macmillan, 1981; New York: Random House, 1985. Introduction by Mavis Gallant. Includes “Thank You for the Lovely Tea,” “Jorinda and Jorindel,” “Saturday,” “Up North,” “Orphan's Progress,” “The Prodigal Parent,” “In the Tunnel,” “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” “Bonaventure,” “Virus X,” “In Youth Is Pleasure,” “Between Zero and One,” “Varieties of Exile,” “Voices Lost in Snow,” “The Doctor,” and “With a Capital T.”

Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris. Toronto: Macmillan, 1986; New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Includes “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,” “On the Colonel's Child,” “Lena” and “The Assembly.”