Take a sheer animal of a man. Take the incredible Hollander with cobalt-blue breeches, shock of orange hair pasted over forehead, pink long face, twenty-six years old, had been in all the countries of all the world: “Australia girl fine girl—Japanese girl cleanest girl of the world—Spanish girl all right—English girl no good, no face—everywhere these things: Norway sailors German girls Sweedisher matches Holland candles” … had been to Philadelphia; worked on a yacht for a millionaire; knew and had worked in the Krupp factories; was on two boats torpedoed and one which struck a mine when in sight of shore through the “looking-glass”: “Holland almost no soldier—India” (the Dutch Indies) “nice place, always warm there, I was in cavalry; if you kill a man or steal one hundred franc or anything, in prison twenty-four hours; every week black girl sleep with you because government want white children, black girl fine girl, always doing something, your fingernails or clean your ears or make wind because it’s hot…. No one can beat German people; if Kaiser tell man to kill his father and mother he do it quick!”—the tall, strong, coarse, vital youth who remarked: “I sleep with black girl who smoke a pipe in the night.” Take this animal. You hear him, you are afraid of him, you smell and you see him and you know him—but you do not touch him. Or a man who makes us thank God for animals, Judas, as we called him: who keeps his moustaches in press during the night (by means of a kind of transparent frame which is held in place by a band over his head); who grows the nails of his two little fingers with infinite care; has two girls with both of whom he flirts carefully and wisely, without ever once getting into trouble; talks in French; converses in Belgian; can speak eight languages and is therefore always useful to Monsieur le Surveillant—Judas with his shining horrible forehead, pecked with little indentures; with his Reynard full-face—Judas with his pale almost putrescent fatty body in the _douche_—Judas with whom I talked one night about Russia, he wearing my _pelisse_—the frightful and impeccable Judas: take this man. You see him, you smell the hot stale odour of Judas’ body; you are not afraid of him, in fact, you hate him; you hear him and you know him. But you do not touch him. And now take Surplice, whom I see and hear and smell and touch and even taste, and whom I do not know. Take him in dawn’s soft squareness, gently stooping to pick chewed cigarette ends from the spitty floor … hear him, all night: retchings which light into the dark … see him all day and all days, collecting his soaked ends and stuffing them gently into his round pipe (when he can find none he smokes tranquilly little splinters of wood) … watch him scratching his back (exactly like a bear) on the wall … or in the _cour_, speaking to no one, sunning his soul….