Holland and the Dutch
The narrator vividly depicts the Dutch, he likes them “swarming on the sidewalks, wedged into a little space of houses and canals, hemmed in by fogs, cold lands, and the sea steaming like a wet wash. I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.” They walk along with us, to be sure, and yet see where their heads are: in that fog compounded of neon, gin, and mint emanating from the shop signs above them, to the author’s mind. And their country, Holland, is a kind of dream for Jean, “a dream of gold and smoke—smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole land, around the seas, along the canals. Their heads in their copper-colored clouds, they dream; they cycle in circles; they pray, somnambulists in the fog’s gilded incense; they have ceased to be here.” This vivid description helps the reader to imagine these people, their way of life, and, in particular, the narrator’s attitude to them, his interest to them.
Love to the victims
Jean says: “Yet it was enough for me to sniff the slightest scent of victim on a defendant for me to swing into action. And what action! A real tornado! My heart was on my sleeve. You would really have thought that justice slept with me every night. I am sure you would have admired the rightness of my tone, the appropriateness of my emotion, the persuasion and warmth, the restrained indignation of my speeches before the court.” Thus the author highlights the protagonist’s self-esteem, self-assurance. He enjoyed being in the role of protector of a victim, it was a kind of art for him – he created his own “masterpieces” in this field.
A black speck
Once, when the narrator was in a cruise, he saw a black speck on the steel-gray ocean: “I turned away at once and my heart began to beat wildly. When I forced myself to look, the black speck had disappeared. I was on the point of shouting, of stupidly calling for help, when I saw it again. It was one of those bits of refuse that ships leave behind them.” This event impressed him very strongly. It seemed to him that it was that woman in black, whom he hadn’t saved from suicide. “That cry which had sounded over the Seine behind me years before had never ceased, carried by the river to the waters of the Channel, to travel throughout the world, across the limitless expanse of the ocean, and that it had waited for me there until the day I had encountered it. I realized likewise that it would continue to await me on seas and rivers, everywhere, in short, where lies the bitter water of my baptism. Here, too, by the way, aren’t we on the water? On this flat, monotonous, interminable water whose limits are indistinguishable from those of the land? Is it credible that we shall ever reach Amsterdam? We shall never get out of this immense holy-water fount.” Though Jean seems to not pay much attention to that case with the woman, here the reader sees that this event touched him greatly, that it will never let him free, he’ll never “get out of this immense holy-water fount.”
