This story opens with an epigraph from an unidentified source, which translated from the French, states: “And every day after the sadness | We count as happy days” (125). Following this epigraph, the story begins with the protagonist Hastings, recently arrived in Paris from America to attend the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and looking for a place to live. Reverend Byram, an old family friend, helps him search for apartments in the respectable parts of the city. They agree on a place on the Street of Our Lady of the Fields, situated in between the bourgeois area of the Montparnasse Quarter and the bohemian area of the Latin Quarter.

After settling in, Hastings wanders to the Luxembourg Gardens where he meets Clifford, a neighbor and art student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Clifford introduces Hastings to a beautiful young woman named Valentine. Valentine and Clifford have a cryptic conversation, which seems to imply that Clifford flirts with Valentine while also seeing another woman named Cecile. Valentine does not approve of this. Hastings mistakes Valentine for another art student when she speaks of several of the Beaux Arts instructors.