56 pages • 1-hour read
Last Twilight in Paris
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Chapter 19-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of antisemitic violence and death.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Louise. Paris, 1953”
It is 1953. When the door opens, Louise is shocked to see Joe standing there. She is reminded that he is the love of her life, and he has come to help her search for answers. He listens to her news, and she is surprised to learn that he took care of the children on his own after she left.
Louise flashes back to Germany, 1944. She finds Ian, and he tells her they cannot be intimate anymore, and that it never should have happened. She agrees, a little hurt. He says they cannot let what happened to Franny “interfere” with their work. He knows Louise spoke with one of the POWs; he is angry and says he can’t protect her. She confronts him about Franny’s request for his help and the strange circumstances of her death. Ian tells Louise she’s being sent home, and it’s her own fault for refusing to follow instructions.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Helaine. Paris, 1944”
It is 1944. One morning, while Helaine is setting up her counter in Lévitan, she hears that the Allies have landed in Normandy. Collaborators begin to flee the city, and Miriam fears she will have to make her escape sooner than she planned. Helaine believes the Allies will liberate the prisoners, but Miriam says the Germans will kill them rather than risk them bearing witness to what the Germans have done.
Miriam studies possible escape routes. Fewer trucks arrive with loads of stolen goods, and Helaine realizes Gabriel isn’t coming to save her—she must save herself. Helaine tells Miriam she will escape with her, and they plan to go the next night. Though they feel guilty about the consequences the others will face when their absence is discovered, they have no choice.
The next night, they make their way up the stairs but find the door to the roof locked. Maxim catches them and tells them all doors will be locked now, and it’s clear he fears prisoners escaping on his watch. Reluctantly, Miriam and Helaine return to their beds.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Louise. Paris, 1953”
In 1953, Louise rushes past the secretary to the dormitory room in the old Lévitan building. Determined to look for clues, she finds a spot on the wall where the paint is darker than the rest, and there’s a set of hash marks nearby. She can tell there’s a hollow area behind the plaster, and she tears at it.
Louise finds a leather-bound journal there, inscribed with the name, “Helaine Weil Lemarque,” and it contains several stories and a drawing of a necklace with a half-heart shape. Louise takes it with her and wonders if Helaine stayed in Paris after the war.
She checks a phone book, finding only a G. Weil. It’s possible that Helaine used her husband’s initial and her own surname. Louise writes down the address for G. Weil and hurries to her hotel. She leaves a note for Joe to meet her there with the film.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Helaine. Paris, 1944”
It is 1944. The prisoners are awakened abruptly, and Miriam says they’re being evacuated. Helaine shoves the necklace in her pocket but has no time to retrieve her journal. She realizes Miriam is right: The Germans won’t leave any witnesses behind. They are herded onto a bus, and Helaine knows this is their last chance to escape. She pulls the cord, ringing the bell and signaling her intention to the others. The next time traffic compels the bus to stop, she shouts “Go!” and the prisoners surge toward the door. Helaine gets outside, but Miriam is caught by a guard; when Helaine looks back, Miriam waves Helaine away. Helaine runs off into the night.
She hides for six days, only coming out when she hears cheers on the street and sees American tanks. She asks a Red Cross volunteer for help, and he directs her to a facility offering food and shelter. Soon, she moves to a displaced persons camp.
One day, she tries to get information about missing loved ones, and she is told they don’t have information on POWs. There is, however, a record of her mother’s death. Helaine learns that all those who did not escape the bus were shot and that a fire killed everyone remaining at the camp where Gabriel was held.
Helaine stays in the displaced persons camp because she has nowhere to go. She begins to write again, reconstructing her old stories and writing new ones, too. When she starts to get sick, unable to keep food down, she goes to the doctor and learns she is pregnant. She is thrilled but sad that Gabriel will never know his child. One day, she hears cello music and realizes it is the song Gabriel wrote for her. She follows it and finds him.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Louise. Paris, 1953”
In 1953, Louise arrives at the address for G. Weil. Helaine answers, and Louise introduces herself. She explains that she’s looking for information about the heart necklace and produces the notebook. Helaine is elated to see her book again, and Louise is shocked when Helaine produces her half of the necklace.
Helaine says that, shortly after Gabriel visited her at Lévitan, he tried to send his half of the necklace to her to let her know that he could not return. Joe arrives, Helaine introduces Gabriel, and they all talk. Helaine explains that she never legally took Gabriel’s name, but—to honor her family—he took hers after the war.
Gabriel explains that he was using his position to get information for the resistance, but someone betrayed them. He needed to tell Helaine, somehow, to save herself, so he decided to send the locket. After his arrest, he learned of a traitor who was getting into the camps and revealing Allied intelligence, so he wanted not only to get the necklace to Helaine, but also to send evidence of the traitor’s identity.
Joe pulls out an envelope with the developed film inside. Gabriel points out the civilian in the background handing an envelope to a German officer, and Louise recognizes Ian with a gasp. Gabriel says he used the Red Cross as a cover to deliver classified documents to the Germans and feed false intelligence to the British.
When Franny—Gabriel’s sister—came to the camp, he saw his chance to get the necklace out. Louise tells him Franny died, and he feels guilty for endangering her. He didn’t tell Franny anything about the traitor’s identity to protect her, but then she inadvertently asked Ian—the very traitor in question—for help delivering the necklace. Thus, Ian must have killed Franny or had her killed.
Gabriel assumes that his friend, the violinist, found the necklace among Franny’s belongings and sent it to Lévitan after Gabriel’s transfer. Joe assures Helaine that the English government will still care about Ian’s treason. She and Gabriel have a daughter and a wonderful life, but Helaine has never been able to completely escape the trauma she endured.
Helaine asks what happened to Louise during the war, and Louise recalls being sent home. She had to report to the War Office, and she did what they asked, but it made her feel like she couldn’t talk about how she suffered. Now she feels she can finally talk about it, and that this will help to repair her relationship with Joe. She realizes that keeping her past from him drove a wedge between them.
Helaine can relate to Louise’s feelings, though for different reasons. Gabriel and Louise encourage her to write her own story, and Helaine considers it. Gabriel and Joe encourage Louise to start a business, helping people find those they lost in the war. Gabriel would like her help finding his youngest sister, and Helaine wants Louise to find her father. Joe promises to stop hiding his pain and to be more open with Louise, lessening her anger and closing some of the distance between them.
Epilogue Summary: “Louise. England, 1953”
It is 1953. In the month since Louise left Paris, she has started a private detective agency. She writes to Gabriel, updating him on what she’s learned about his sister. Joe is in therapy. Ian was arrested, and he will stand trial for his crimes. Authorities found the necklace in his belongings, and Louise asks that they send it to Helaine. Louise and her mother have a healthier relationship now, and her mother has stopped drinking and visits often.
Chapter 19-Epilogue Analysis
Through the development of Helaine and Louise’s characters, the narrative highlights The Enduring Effects of Trauma and Loss. Just prior to her evacuation from Lévitan, Helaine realizes that she must save herself, and that she has the strength and ability to do so. She spent her childhood believing herself to be too weak to survive in the world—the result of her illness and her parents’ overprotectiveness—then she grew to depend upon Gabriel: Even after he left France, she counted on his return to save her as he had promised to do. When she hears of his arrest, though, Helaine realizes, “She could do it; she had to [save herself], because there was simply nobody else anymore. She was not the same person she had been when Gabriel left” (288). Her many losses finally compel her to realize that she is different from the person she once was, and this change in her character is attended by other fundamental shifts.
When Louise shows up at her door, 10 years after the war, Louise says that Helaine “eye[s] [her] suspiciously. She looks puzzled and even a little alarmed. [Louise is] not surprised, considering the trauma [Helaine] has lived through. Of course she would be fearful of a stranger at her door” (307). Helaine’s default reaction, even a decade after her escape, is to be suspicious of strangers, questioning their personal motives for approaching her home, which is an effect of her immense wartime trauma. Louise understands the way the effects of trauma and loss can linger because she, too, experiences them.
Louise and Joe’s struggles to process and cope with their wartime losses also demonstrate The Interplay Between One’s Past and Identity. After she returned from the war, Louise felt a real sense of loss—about Franny, about her relationship with her mother, about the way she was forced to leave France—but “hadn’t [talked about what she went through]. Until now. Now [she] see[s] that it is okay to tell [her] story and that [her] suffering is as real as anyone else’s” (318). Louise needs to recognize her trauma as real and legitimate in order to heal and move forward with Joe. Likewise, Joe must be open to accepting and sharing his own feelings of loss and stop trying to relegate them to the past without healing them in the present. Being open about their feelings enables Louise and Joe to reconnect, with both building a post-war identity that feels more authentic for both of them.
This section also throws in a major revelation and plot twist about Ian’s true identity as a German collaborator and traitor to the Allied cause, serving as the culmination of the novel’s exploration of The Moral Complexities of Resistance. Earlier in the novel, Helaine endured hearing rumors that Gabriel was a German collaborator and heard others criticizing him for his supposed treason. Gabriel was falsely accused of being a collaborator while working loyally for the resistance the entire time, while a true collaborator—Ian—successfully disguised himself as someone seeking to resist the Germans through his apparent support of POWs. Ian’s treason throws his past behavior and motives into a new light: His reluctance to help Franny was due less to wanting to help others and more about wishing to support the Germans, and he was willing to betray those who trusted him to achieve his ends. Ian’s treason reinforces the idea that those who appear to be working for a good cause are not always as principled as they may seem.
Helaine and Louise’s developing understanding of their own life stories also emphasizes how necessary it is for one to possess The Freedom to Control One’s Narrative. As a child, Helaine longed to be free of her family’s home, and she found an escape in books and stories, even writing her own. She takes control of her life when she begins to take her walks and, later, when she chooses to leave her childhood home and marry Gabriel. As an adult, she continues to write in her journal, especially at Lévitan, when her body is, once again, denied the freedom she craves. The very act of writing is generative, an empowering act of creation, and her main character in a story, Anna, sounds almost like Helaine’s alter ego: Anna is free to travel, make friends, and live her life without concern that she’s being surveilled or could be imprisoned.
After the war, Helaine reconstructs the stories she wrote before the war, “wishing she had the journal she left behind […]. There were new stories, too, and she began to see that the things she […] dreamed about doing through her fiction […] might be possible once the war was over” (303). Helaine associates writing with living, hoping to make real the events she wrote about in her fiction. Likewise, after finally discovering the necklace’s importance and how it connected to Franny’s death and Ian’s strange behavior, Louise claims, “People’s stories matter, and how they end, matters” (318). She conceives of lifetimes as “stories,” tales with beginnings, middles, and endings, and she recognizes the significance of those stories’ meanings.
Gabriel suggests that Helaine become a journalist and, later, that she write her own story, but becoming a writer is something she doesn’t even begin to consider until long after the war is over. When she is confined—first by her parents and, later, by the Germans—she lacks the power to control her own life story, so she writes about someone else, a girl she makes up. When Helaine is finally at liberty to live as she chooses and to control her own narrative, she begins to believe she can write it at last.
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