Chapter I of The Sun Also Rises introduces us to the novelist Robert Cohn, a graduate of Princeton University who married a wealthy woman and founded a literary journal soon after college. When Cohn's wife left him, he became involved with a woman named Frances Clyne, and they traveled together to Paris, where they are living at the start of the novel's action. It is the mid-1920's.
Cohn visits the story's narrator and main character, Jake Barnes, in the Paris offices of the newspaper for which Jake works. Later, Jake picks up a prostitute named Georgette, and the two of them join a group including Cohn, Frances, and some others. The group goes dancing at a nightclub, where a woman named Brett (also known as Lady Ashley, because she is, by marriage, a titled British aristocrat) appears. Cohn is attracted to Brett, but she leaves the club with Jake.
Jake tries to kiss Brett, but she withdraws, telling him that although she loves him, she "can't stand it." (Apparently, Jake has been castrated in combat during the Great War and cannot consummate his love for Brett.) They rejoin their friends and are joined in turn by a Greek Count named Mippipopolous before Jake returns to his apartment, where he lies in bed, drunk and miserable. The next day, Cohn speculates that he may be in love with Brett, and Frances tells Jake that she believes Cohn plans to break up with her.
