Georgette Hobin
The poule Jake picks up on the Boulevard and squires to dinner — introduced to literary Paris, as a joke, under a famous singer's name.
A paying evening and a decent dinner. Jake Barnes picks her up on the boulevard and takes her to a restaurant she says is no great thing of a restaurant, though she cheers up over the food. When he leaves the dance later that night with Brett Ashley, he leaves fifty francs for her behind the bar.
The book
At a glance
- A poule of the Boulevard, Jake's dinner companion for one Paris evening
- Chapters III–IV, then gone
- Brussels — she corrects Jake, who guesses Liège
- Mademoiselle Georgette Leblanc, Jake's fiancée
- A vague sentimental idea that it would be nice to eat with someone
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeGeorgette belongs to the novel's first movement: a working girl Jake collects on the Boulevard out of loneliness more than appetite, stands a dinner, and tows along to a literary party, where he introduces her — deadpan — as Georgette Leblanc, borrowing the name of a genuinely famous French singer for the joke. The expatriate literati absorb the gag with varying success, and the evening becomes the book's first exhibit of a crowd amusing itself at everyone's expense, including its own.
She is a small part with a working function: her frank, tired professionalism — sick of Paris, unimpressed by everyone — is the book's first honest voice, and her dinner with Jake quietly plants the fact of his wound before the reader can know what it means. In a novel whose named cast is mostly borrowed from life, she is one of the few done in pure invention; even her joke-name, fittingly, was stolen from a real person.
How the book draws them
- The candorEverybody's sick, she offers over dinner, herself included — the book's flat postwar diagnosis, delivered first by its least literary character.
- The jokeOne borrowed name, one straight face — the real Georgette Leblanc was an international opera celebrity, which was the entire point.
- Her own nameShe lets the gag run exactly as long as it amuses her, then gives Mrs. Braddocks the truth flatly: her name is Hobin. Asked whether it was a joke, she agrees — one to laugh at, and Jake is a fool.
- The teethShe makes a joke over the wine, smiles, and shows all her bad teeth. It is the only physical detail the book gives her, and it is doing a job.
- On ParisFrances asks whether she loves the city. She says it is expensive and dirty, declines to be talked out of it, and turns to Jake to observe that he has nice friends.
- The dance hallAt the bal musette she calls the place a box to sweat in, then dances with each of the young men who arrive with Brett — one of whom announces her, loudly, as an actual harlot.