13 Little Blue Envelopes

Richard drops Ginny off at the airport, expressing regret that they didn’t have the chance to talk much and reminding Ginny to call him should she need anything. Checking in for her flight to Rome, Ginny is self-conscious about her unwieldy backpack, which makes her feel clumsy and obtrusive.

Ginny is surprised when her flight lands not at Rome’s main airport but at a small, secondary airport far outside of town. She follows other travelers to a bus and rides the bus into the city. Ginny is amazed at how old and foreign Rome looks. The guestroom at Ortensia’s house is a small room in the attic. 

Ginny reflects on how Aunt Peg’s artistic approach to life also often meant that she was forgetful or flaky. This thought makes Ginny nervous as she realizes that, in following Peg’s rules for the trip, she is placing a lot of trust in her aunt’s discernment and advice.

Rome is hot and very crowded. The city is difficult to navigate, and Ginny feels overwhelmed. She notices how the tourists—in their sneakers and with their battery-operated fans and big bottles of water—contrast from the chic-looking Romans on their Vespas, smoking cigarettes and carrying designer bags.

At the Roman Forum, Ginny follows a tour group for a bit before asking the guides for directions to the statues of Vestal’s virgins. Ginny is underwhelmed when she sees the crumbling ancient statues. She leaves a quarter for offering to the statues and opens Aunt Peg’s next letter.

Aunt Peg acknowledges that Ginny is likely hot and annoyed with all the tourists at the temple. Then, Peg describes her life-long contradictory desires: On the one hand, she wants to be a solitary artist who lives an untraditional lifestyle. On the other hand, she loves the ideas that Vesta represents about the comfort and safety of home.

Aunt Peg tells Ginny that one of the symbols for the goddess Vesta is bread and cake. So, in honor of Vesta, she asks Ginny to invite a Roman boy out for cake. Peg anticipates that this task will be hard for the shy Ginny.

Ginny is frustrated with her aunt; the task of asking a boy out not only intimidates Ginny but also makes her think about Keith and their angry parting in London.

At the famous Trevi Fountain, Ginny is filling her water bottle when a group of little children surround her. A young Roman man shoos them away, telling Ginny that the children were trying to steal her valuables. Using the excuse of thanking him for his help, Ginny decides to ask this guy out for cake. He declines cake but agrees to a coffee. His name is Beppe.

Beppe is a few years older than Ginny and is very suave. Beppe takes Ginny out for a gelato. When he hears that she is traveling alone, he invites her to meet his sister who lives in “the best part of town” (148).

Beppe’s sister’s apartment is in a neighborhood called Travestere. Ginny is awed by the picturesque beauty of the streets in the neighborhood. The inside of the apartment building reminds Ginny of Aunt Peg’s old building in New York.

There are family photos in the apartment, and Ginny sees Beppe in several of them. However, his sister is not home. Beppe evades Ginny’s questions when she asks where his sister is, simply saying that she is a busy doctor. Beppe pours them some wine. Then he kisses Ginny, playing with her hair. Ginny isn’t interested in it but feels like it is an experience that she should have, so she doesn’t stop him at first. This changes when he tries to pull her down onto the floor. She pulls away, but he persists, this time trying to unbutton her pants. Ginny gets up and leaves.

After leaving, Ginny returns to the statues at Vesta’s temple and leaves them another offering: the button from her pants.

Next, Aunt Peg sends Ginny to Paris. She encourages Ginny to take an overnight train from Rome to Paris and to stay in the Montparnasse neighborhood once she arrives. Montparnasse is Paris’s famous artists’ quarter.

Once in Paris, Aunt Peg tasks Ginny to go to the Louvre Museum. She is to open her next envelope there.

In Ginny’s coach on the train to Paris, there are five other passengers. Ginny passes the time by writing a second letter to Miriam. She jokes that she must have fallen into someone else’s life because she’s having adventures that sound “cool” (160). In describing her encounter with Beppe, Ginny continues a running joke that she and Miriam have about Ginny being a magnet for sketchy guys.

After a few hours, the other passengers in the cabin configure the benches for sleeping. Ginny is amazed to see the six sleeping platforms, which she thinks look like surfboards.

In the morning, Ginny disembarks from the train in Paris and finds a hostel in the Montparnasse neighborhood. The hostel locks guests out during the day for cleaning. The woman at the front desk tells Ginny to take her sheets upstairs to a bunk room but that she will have to leave shortly after for the daily lockout.

In the bunk room, there is a group of girls from Minnesota who are traveling together. Ginny wishes that they would invite her to join them for the day, but they don’t.

Ginny finds her way to the Louvre and is relieved to be inside with all the other tourists because it makes her feel like she fits in. She is grateful to Aunt Peg, who taught her to be comfortable around art and in places like museums and galleries. She finds a bench and sits down to open Peg’s next letter.

In her eighth letter, Aunt Peg describes how she was essentially out of money by the time she got to Paris. After having a delicious meal in a run-down Parisian cafe and learning that they were planning to close for a month while most of the city was on summer vacation, Peg proposed a plan to the cafe owner: Peg would redecorate the cafe in exchange for food and a place to sleep. The owner agreed.

For the next month, Peg did little else other than painting and decorating the cafe. She made curtains out of aprons and broke old plates to make a mosaic. Peg was thriving and felt like she was experiencing the same Paris that passionate artists have experienced throughout history.

Peg’s next assignment is for Ginny to find the cafe based on the information and description in the letter.

At the hostel that evening, feeling lonely, Ginny resists the temptation to email Miriam. She figures that Aunt Peg’s rules wouldn’t stop her from contacting Keith, so she logs on to a computer and looks up his email address on the college website. After deliberating about what to write him, she decides on “Hey, just wanted to say hi. I’m in Paris right now” (172).

Keith writes back immediately and asks where she’s staying. She gives him the name of her hostel.

In the morning, Ginny is unprepared for showering in a hostel because they don’t provide towels or soap. She uses a sweater to dry off. She notices the other girls eyeing her and thinks that for once, she is a “little more dangerous than the people around her” (173).

After walking around a bit, Ginny realizes just how many cafes there are in Paris. Unsure of where to start her search, she goes back into the hostel and approaches the woman at the front desk. The woman scolds her for being in the hostel during lockout hours. The woman softens a bit and tells Ginny to find someone named Michel Pienette at the market; he will know how to find the quirkily decorated cafe because he sells vegetables to all the chefs in the area.

Ginny observes that the market looks just like a photo from her textbook. A chef waiting to buy veggies from Michel helps translate, and Michel tells Ginny that the cafe she is looking for is called Les Petits Chiens. This means “the little dogs.” The surly Michel points Ginny down a narrow street.

Les Petits Chiens is a tiny little cafe on a charming street. Ginny knows that it is the right place when she sees curtains made from aprons hanging in the windows. Inside, the walls are covered with a collage of photos of the small dogs seen all around Paris. Around the photos, Aunt Peg had drawn cartoon poodles and added touches of black and pink paint. The tables and chairs are painted in vibrant rainbow hues.

Ginny meets Paul, the owner of the cafe. He offers Ginny a drink and tells Ginny how brilliant, and how persistent, Peg had been. Ginny can’t bring herself to tell Paul that Peg is dead. After leaving the cafe, Ginny is sad and lonely. She wants to crawl into her bunk and cry. Keith surprises her in the lobby of the hostel.

Ginny is shocked to see Keith, and he teases her about her speechlessness. He tells her that one of the French international students to whom they gave a ticket of Starbucks: The Musical arranged for him to perform the show at their university’s art festival.

Keith and Ginny enjoy an evening of strolling around Paris eating crepes. After dark, they pass a cemetery. Keith insists that they should see it and hops the fence. Ginny clumsily, and reluctantly, follows.

While in the cemetery, Keith asks Ginny if she’s still angry with him for stealing the toy from Mari’s house. He apologizes, and Ginny explains that she knows he’s not a bad person but that it felt like a personal violation because Mari was so important to Aunt Peg.

The conversation turns to Peg. Keith asks how she died, and Ginny tells him that it was brain cancer. Then, Ginny asks Keith if he only wanted her around because she had given him money. He tells her no; he likes her because she is “mad” and “pretty” and “pretty sane for a mad person” (185). They kiss.

A police officer finds them kissing in the cemetery and escorts them back outside the fence. Ginny is terrified that they are being arrested and closes her eyes tightly in fear. When she opens her eyes again, she is surprised to find that the police officer is gone and that all he’d done was ask them to stop trespassing.

Ginny misses curfew and is locked out of her hostel. Keith tells her that she can sleep on the floor where he’s staying but then realizes that the trains out to the suburbs have stopped for the night. They wander to the Tuileries gardens and lay down on benches near a fountain. Feeling slightly apprehensive, yet happy to be with Keith and in Paris on a beautiful night, Ginny falls asleep.

In the morning, they have breakfast together before Keith has to leave to perform his play. He tells Ginny that he’s headed to Scotland for the Fringe Festival next. He asks her to message him. She’s sad to see him go.

Ginny writes a third letter to Miriam, excitedly describing how Keith came to find her in Paris. She tells Miriam that she wants to follow Keith to Scotland.