The Little Paris Bookshop

Catherine and Perdu embrace, both enjoying feeling the touch of another person after long periods of loneliness. Before kissing Catherine or moving their intimacy further, Perdu stops. He senses that Catherine isn’t ready yet. Perdu holds Catherine while she cries and talks about her divorce. After she falls asleep, he opens Manon’s 21-year-old letter.

Manon’s letter reveals that she left Perdu because she was dying and because she thought her death would be less painful for him if he were mad at her. “But I was wrong,” she writes (82). She asks Perdu to come see her at her family’s home in southern France so that she can tell him everything before she dies.

Perdu feels extreme shame and grief after reading Manon’s letter. He worries that she must have thought he didn’t love her enough to come. In reality, he had been too angry to read the letter, so he’d never gotten the message. He briefly tells Catherine about Manon and then leaves her apartment, unable to look at Catherine or talk about it more.

Perdu is overwrought the next morning, tormented with thoughts of Manon dying while waiting for him to come.

Onboard the Literary Apothecary, Perdu decides he must take action. He readies the boat and casts off from the bank. Max Jordan comes running along the sidewalk just as Perdu is casting off. Max throws his belongings onboard—some of them landing in the river—before leaping onto the moving boat himself.

At first, Perdu struggles to steer the large boat; it has been a long time since it has moved. But soon he gets the hang of things, and the two head down river. Max tells Perdu that he wants to look for a story to write. Moving away from Paris on the boat, Perdu feels freer and more hopeful than he has in many years.

In a diary entry dated July 30, 1986, Manon describes leaving the South of France to head to Paris. Her family comes to the train station to see her off, but her fiancé, Luc, does not. He was worried she wouldn’t get on the train if he were at the station because she’d be worried about him. She thinks he’s right. Manon is sad to leave home, but excited to be able to miss Luc and her hometown—she’s never been away long enough to miss either one.

Manon writes that she will be in Paris for a year before returning home to marry Luc. She describes their plans for a “free marriage,” stating that Luc “won’t ask questions if [she] come[s] home late from time to time, and if, in the years that follow, [she] go[es] off to Paris or somewhere else on [her] own” (102).

Manon describes meeting Perdu on the train to Paris. She is attracted to him, and taken by his vision for his floating bookshop, which he is currently working on.

Perdu enjoys the quiet on the river once they’ve left the urban areas. He feels energized to be driving the boat, taking action in a life that has been mostly stagnant for many years. He thinks back to a trip that he took with Manon in the countryside. Perdu realizes that, for the first time in a long while, he can remember Manon without breaking down.

Max and Perdu begin referring to the boat as Lulu, the boat’s name before Perdu converted it to a bookshop. The two men have very little food, as they left the city without stocking up. Max’s wallet fell into the river when he jumped aboard, and Perdu has only a bit of cash from the register.

While digging around for food and supplies, Max finds a flag that Manon had stitched for the boat. Perdu recalls a conversation that he and Manon had while she was sewing the flag, about why she wanted to marry Luc. She told him that she loved him and wanted to be both Luc’s wife and Perdu’s lover. He tells her that’s enough for him, so long as she wants him for her “whole long life” (116). Perdu urges Max to fly the flag on the boat.

A policeman stops Max and Perdu on the river and charges them a fine because they don’t have lifejackets or a proper boating license. They are short on cash, but the policeman accepts books for part of the payment. The policeman recognizes Max and asks him to sign a copy of Night. Max admits to Perdu that he’s hiding from fans and the press because he’s afraid they’ll ask what he’s working on. Max also opens up to Perdu about his father, who abused him as a child and who does not approve of his work as a writer.

Lulu turns sideways in the river while Perdu and Max are lost in conversation. Perdu manages to steer the boat back into the flow of the river, to the applause of three women on another boat. They follow the women’s boat into the busy marina of Saint-Mammès. Reflecting on Max’s youth leads Perdu to think about his best friend from childhood, Vijaya.