This is a special 50th episode of the podcast. To celebrate, we have one of our favorites — Mavis Gallant — and not just one, but four stories.
There’s a series of four Mavis Gallant stories that might be presented to us in various sequences and that feature the stories of three characters — "Edouard, Juliette, and Lena."
We hope that’s clear. Four stories. Three characters. Edouard narrates throughout.
It starts with “A Recollection” a rather vague title for a story that establishes a lot that’s going on during a contentious time in occupied France.
Edouard tells of his marriage of convenience with Magdalena. Whose convenience is it? She is over ten years older than he is. She is originally from Hungary and a Jewish convert to Catholicism. She avoids deportation thanks to her marriage to Edouard. But while he finds her cosmopolitan and curious in her choice to be ignorant about politics, they part ways.
Another woman in his life appears in “The Colonel’s Daughter” and in “Rue de Lille." Her name is Juliette.
Edouard has been on some adventures and Juliette — still a tender-aged teen — visits him in the hospital. She is a lonely girl — an only child whose father has been lost in the war and whose mother remains distant and aloof.
In Edouard she finds a cause. In her, he finds someone to take care of, a woman-child.
But it’s clear, his attempts to blunt the sharp edges of her loneliness, fall short. And as she grows older, it is as if he has stayed just exactly who he has always been. And through it all, she is the polar opposite of the Magdalena with her expensive, sophisticated attire and Chanel perfume.
Juliette would like to have children. There is even a name for an imagined child. But Magdalena will not give Edouard the divorce that would allow him to marry Juliette and have a child.
But that’s not quite the point, as we discuss in our conversation.
Everyone gets older in this series of stories. Things outside the characters change. Technologies take hold. Conventions change. Wars begin. Other wars begin. Disasters change the landscape.
But the tiny stories we carry around with us that come from exactly who we are at our core — are immutable — for better or for worse.
Mavis Gallant is the author of "A Recollection,” “The Colonel’s Daughter, “The Rue de Lille,” and “Lena.”
