The Paris Novel

Celia St. Vincent is Stella’s mother, who dies suddenly in a car accident before the start of the novel and leaves Stella a sum of money and a plane ticket to Paris that sets up Stella’s journey of Self-Discovery Through Food and Art. As a teenager, Celia (real name Constanza Vincente) changed her name and left her life behind to become a member of high society, reinventing herself completely by copying the way her wealthy clients spoke, acted, and dressed. Reichl briefly adopts Celia’s point of view—the only perspective besides Stella’s that the author employs in the novel—to add context and nuance to Stella’s fraught history with her mother, underscoring Reichl’s thematic interest in The Relationship Between Family and Personal Identity. At the beginning of Chapter 3, Reichl explores Celia’s cold and ruthlessly ambitious approach to life through her aversion to parenthood, which she describes as “one of the few failures of her life” (16). The author characterizes Celia as inattentive and self-absorbed as a mother, making fun of Stella rather than paying attention to her and nurturing her interests and forcing her to serve at her dinner parties. Stella feels invisible and inadequate, as Celia constantly reminds her of how she falls short of her expectations. From Stella’s perspective, motherhood is an inconvenience for Celia, infringing on her lifestyle. In evoking Celia’s perspective, Reichl provides the nuance of her desperation to escape an under-resourced background and highlights the negative impact of that desperation on Stella.

Stella and Celia are estranged by the time the novel begins, but Celia functions as an antagonist within the story, despite her physical absence from it. Stella harbors unspoken resentment toward Celia for neglecting her and failing to protect her from Mortimer. She openly resists indulging in anything that would link her to Celia, such as fine dining or luxury experiences. Reichl positions the two women as direct foils, characterizing Celia as outgoing, bold, and social, while Stella is shy, introverted, and unassuming. Stella initially attempts to define herself in opposition to her mother, but over the course of the novel, she realizes how this mindset has limited her experiences and prevented her from embracing a full and expansive life. By the end of the story, Stella can empathize with Celia’s own struggle with her identity and is finally able to define herself independent of her mother.

Jules is a wealthy art collector and curator who functions as a guide and helper to Stella on her journey of Self-Discovery Through Food and Art. Jules’s knowledge about the art world of Paris proves invaluable over the course of Stella’s arc as he introduces her to Manet’s Olympia and helps direct her search into Victorine-Louise Meurent’s lost paintings—a propulsive engine of Reichl’s plot. He has a son, Jean-Marie, with whom he has had a strained relationship since the death of his wife, Séverine. Early in the novel, Jules triggers Stella’s past trauma stemming from her childhood assault by her mother’s suitor, causing her to resist his attempts to befriend her. However, despite her fears, Jules consistently treats her with respect and care and eventually integrates her as part of his family. As their friendship progresses, Jules earns Stella’s trust and becomes a parental figure—representing the opposite of what Stella experienced with Celia. Jules shows genuine interest in her and her thoughts, as well as her budding talents and potential, and makes an effort to widen her worldview and gift her with new experiences. Stella suspects that his tense relationship with his son makes him long for the father-child connection they once had, making their friendship mutually healing.

The coincidental connection between Stella and Jules’s late wife, Séverine, creates a sense that their meeting—and, by extension, everything that happens on Stella’s trip to Paris—is fated, adding a playful, whimsical element to the narrative tone. Jules speaks fondly about his late wife, and Reichl makes it clear that both he and his son are still reeling from her death. Jules initially approaches Stella when he notices her wearing Séverine’s favorite dress purchased from a shop. He takes Stella to restaurants that Séverine liked, noting that Stella eats with the same “intensity” that she did, frequently referencing parallels and similarities between Stella and Séverine. Jules ultimately comes to view the protagonist as part of his family, evidenced by the story’s resolution in which Stella inherits Séverine’s black Dior dress as a daughter would. Jules helps Stella loosen her cautious and rigid hold on her life and embrace the world of art, culture, and food, allowing Stella to uncover her true self.

Historical figure Victorine-Louise Meurent was a French artist’s model and painter—the favored model of painter Edouard Manet; his most famous works featuring her include Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and Olympia (1863). The latter was particularly controversial at the time of its exhibition, owing to Meurent’s confident, confrontational gaze and body language. In addition to modeling for some of the most well-known French painters of her time, Victorine was a painter in her own right; her works were exhibited at the prestigious Paris Salon, though, as Stella discovers in Reichl’s novel, most of these paintings have been lost.

When Reichl first drafted The Paris Novel in 2020, only one painting of Victorine’s had been found. When her self-portrait was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2021, Reichl included it in the novel, although her protagonist finds it in 1983. When Stella views Olympia in person, she becomes fascinated with Victorine, and her journey to find her lost artworks is not only an attempt to ensure that Meurent’s talents are known to the world but also a critical part of Stella’s arc of Self-Discovery Through Food and Art. Victorine becomes a symbol of feminine strength and courage, from her famously self-confident gaze in Manet’s Olympia to her later efforts to succeed as a woman in the then-male-dominated world of art. Reichl’s narrative suggests that Stella’s quest to find Victorine’s lost work mirrors her own newfound courage and growing sense of her own power.

As Reichl’s novel depicts, the real George Whitman was the owner of the famed Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company who invited travelers and artists to stay at the bookstore for free in exchange for helping around the shop, reading a book per day, and writing an autobiography. As many as 30,000 travelers are estimated to have lived at Shakespeare and Company, a tradition that continues to the present day. George passed away in 2011, and the shop is currently run by his daughter, Sylvia.

Like Jules, George functions as a father figure to both Stella and the rest of the “Tumbleweeds” in Reichl’s narrative—he takes a personal interest in the protagonist’s quest to find Victorine’s paintings and urges her to locate her father, underscoring the novel’s thematic engagement with The Relationship Between Family and Personal Identity. During the events of The Paris Novel, Shakespeare and Company hosts a number of Tumbleweeds and visitors with whom Stella lives and quickly develops bonds, including Daniel, a writer who befriends Stella and views her as a “little sister”; George’s daughter, Lucie, who accompanies Stella to find Victorine’s paintings; and a number of well-known writers. At Shakespeare and Company, Stella feels as if she’s part of a community for the first time—a surrogate family that provides the support and care that she lacked in her childhood, facilitating the development of her personal identity and the healing of her past trauma.

Jean-Marie, Jules’s son, took his mother’s death particularly hard, which strains his relationship with his father. Jules detests Jean-Marie’s fiancée, Eugenie, whom he thinks is only marrying Jean-Marie for the fortune he will inherit—Eugenie also secretly sells Jules’s late wife’s clothing, which is how the Dior dress ends up in Stella’s possession, providing the inciting incident for Reichl’s narrative. Jean-Marie’s acceptance of Stella as part of their family brings the plot full circle when he gifts her his mother’s Dior dress with her own name sewn inside in the novel’s resolution. The author also teases a future romance between Jean-Marie and Stella in the story’s denouement.