The Other Paris Gallant Summary

In the short story “The Other Paris,” written by Mavis Gallant in 1953, he tells us about marriage. He does this through two characters “Carol” and “Howard,” who get married. They don’t know each other at all until this instant. Through this he shows us that the ideal marriage doesn’t need love to be able to workout. In the first paragraph we learn about Carol. It starts off by saying that “If anyone had asked Carol what precise moment she fell in love, or where Howard Mitchell proposed to her, she would have imagined, quite sincerely, a scene that involved all at once in Seine, moonlight, barrows of violets, acacias in flower, and a confused misty background of the Eiffel tower and little crooked streets.” In this big long sentenced we learn that hypothetically if someone asked her about her love life she would have imagined something she thinks is romantic. The word we need to look at is “imagined.” This means that this isn’t what happened. We get a lot of imagery in this to learn her idea of marriage. She goes on to say, “this was what everyone expected, and she had nearly come to believe it herself.” This is where we learn how Carol is. She is a realist and doesn’t believe in
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We go on to learn they, “had known each other less than three weeks, and their conversation, until then, had been limited to their office.” They barely even knew each others’ name and they’re getting engaged. The passage tells us that “Carol was twenty-two; no one had proposed to her before, except an unsuitable medical student with no money and eight years’ training still to go.” So Carol is very young and acts like she needs to hurry up and marry. She would have married someone one but at the moment they didn’t have money so they weren’t, “suitable.” This shows she’s not into marriage for love she’s in it for