Chapter Book One of Tender is the Night - Study Guide by F. Scott Fitzgerald

and Rosemary stay up all night and catch a ride home in a market wagon. At eleven o'clock, Abe meets Nicole at the train station. Abe is love with Nicole. He has given up on life, Nicole insists. He is an alcoholic and, tired of their world, is lacking energy to make a new one. As such, coldness falls between them. Mary, Rosemary and Dick join them, and the sad figure of Abe and the "spectacle of gigantic obscenity" are lightened by the gregarious Dick. The girl, who had greeted Nicole briefly and snubbed her, shoots her lover in the train station. The violence highlights the beginning of dissolution as Abe leaves, Mary's departure is impending and catastrophe and "vague unhappiness" (97) haunts the remaining party. Later Collis Clay, late to meet Rosemary, joins Dick for a drink and hints towards Rosemary's not-so-innocent sexual past which throws Dick into confusion and longing for her.

The next disruption comes in the form of the police visiting Nicole looking for Abe North as they have arrested a "Negro" for the robbery he reported. As far as the Divers are concerned however, Abe is in America. There is a series of jumbled telephone calls and Nicole laments Abe's dissipation, "So many smart men go to pieces nowadays" (112). The scene shifts to the Ritz and the drinking and fooling of Abe North, confused and living a nightmare he is haunted by the fact he should get Freeman out of jail. Abe and Mr Peterson the legal witness, interrupt Rosemary and Dick after their moments alone kissing. Abe entangles himself within the personal lives of the Black community in Paris and Jules Peterson is seeking protection from those he is to testify against. However Abe's drunken dissolution results in the murder of Peterson who Rosemary finds in her bedroom. Dick tries to smooth out the trauma as he soothes the upset Nicole with a harsh and racist exclamation of white superiority ("it's only some nigger scrap" (123)), and then hushes up the scandal and manipulates the hotel owner. It is at this point that Nicole has her outburst as Dick and Rosemary come upon her in the bathroom as she is traumatised, disturbed and accuses her husband. Rosemary realises "what Violet McKisco had seen in the bathroom of Villa Diana" (TN 126).