Summary

When Yvonne moves to Paris for her spring semester abroad, she moves in with Pauline’s grandmother in a boarding house just off the Avenue Mozart. She is intoxicated by the city despite her lack of sophistication, “the curse of being born on the wrong side of the Atlantic” (63). Pauline’s grandmother reminds Yvonne constantly of her provincial ways, her twangy speech, her flawed French, her tacky taste in clothes. The elderly woman talks of her own family’s glorious roots in Medieval French history and its proud generations of titled aristocracy although the family has clearly fallen on hard times as they must now take in boarders. Nevertheless, the old woman takes pleasure in reminding Yvonne that she is “a long way from Dallas” (59). The woman is determined to make a “lady” (59) out of Yvonne.

At one of the grandmother’s lavish...