(IMO, if you have to think about the answer, the answer is obviously no.) David is on his own in Paris and goes to a gay bar in St Germain des Prés with an older homosexual, Jacques.

We go back in time to spring, David lives in Paris and his girlfriend Hella went on a trip to Spain, mostly to think about David’s marriage proposal. And Giovanni would not be about to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine. If this were not so I would not be alone in this house tonight. People are too various to be treated so lightly. David reflects on the fateful events that led him there, alone in this house, full of regrets and self-loathing. We understand that he’ll be leaving soon, that his former girlfriend is already on her way back to America and that Giovanni will be executed the next morning. (Like Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where Baldwin used to live). When the book opens, David, a twenty-eight, tall and blond American is in alone in a house in a village in the South of France. Life in that room seemed to be occurring underwater, as I say, and it is certain that I underwent a sea-change there. I did not really stay there very long-we met before the spring began and I left there during the summer-but it still seems to me that I spent a lifetime there. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room. I scarcely know how to describe that room.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956) French title: La chambre de Giovanni.

Giovanni's room first edition