Rohmer takes Pascal's Pensées for his text. According to Pascal we meet our sense of the void with nausea, ennui, anxiety: "All our unhappiness stems from the fact that we are incapable of sitting quietly by ourselves in a room." (pp. 132-33)

[In Chloe in the Afternoon, Chloe is, for Frédéric] the inauthentic diversion from mortality and from eternity, as represented by his marriage and embodied by his children. For Frédéric, like many, fears the happiness of fulfillment; he tells us that he dreams madly of a life made of "first loves", that is to say—though he doesn't realize this—a life without death. In a stunning parade of impersonations, which Rohmer makes the most of visually, Chloe sees him in the afternoons, subtly giving him his wish, this safe feeling of constant newness, while his wife works on her graduate thesis...