The Stockholm archipelago is the setting of a remembered episode that shifts the narrator from an ill-fated pursuit of Brigitte to his first sight of the enemy. An unnamed island and its pine trees offer him neither romance nor comfort: sent there by Brigitte, he wanders gloomily while she remains with her husband, and submits to his aunt’s daily regimen of bathing in the icy Baltic Sea.

Setting and Recalled Episode

After a story of his was translated and published in America, the narrator received 150 dollars and used the money to travel to Sweden in pursuit of Brigitte. He found her married and tried to reach an arrangement with her husband, who insisted on keeping her exclusively to himself. As the narrator was getting out of hand, Brigitte exiled him to her aunt’s summer house on a small island in the Stockholm archipelago. He wandered among the pine trees in a landscape associated with Swedish legends while Brigitte and her husband remained together.

The island stay also becomes a physical ordeal. To calm the narrator’s nerves, Brigitte’s aunt required him to bathe for an hour each day in the icy waters of the Baltic Sea, sitting on the shore with a watch in hand to enforce the duration. The narrator recalls himself as frozen, vertical, morose, and unhappy; even while stretched out on a rock waiting for the sun to thaw him, he remained within the aunt’s strict routine.

First Sight of the Enemy

While lying on a rock, the narrator saw an airplane marked with swastikas cross the sky. He identifies this as his first encounter with the enemy. The sight gives the island episode a significance beyond romantic disappointment and bodily discomfort: in this remote Swedish setting, the threat of war first enters his experience as something visible overhead.

The narrator places that sight against his earlier inattention to events in Europe. He recalls that he had difficulty sustaining hatred and had trusted France’s silence, its army, and its leaders. His mother’s patriotic certainties had protected him from anxiety, like a private Maginot Line. The plane crossing the sky marks a first breach in that insulated outlook, making the Stockholm archipelago a point of contact between his personal story and the approaching conflict.