Boulogne enters the narrative as the destination of an abrupt journey and the stage for a compact sequence of comic encounters. The narrator sends the reader there, then arrives among people he treats as fellow debtors and sinners. His joking alarm at being pursued, his attempt to court a passing young woman, and his inquiry about the town’s sights give Boulogne a role less as a described landscape than as a busy stopping place in the book’s wandering narrative.

Arrival and the Pursuit

The narrator first directs his reader to make for Boulogne, turning the place-name into a destination at the end of an address that has dwelt on the unfairness of making a reader pay for pages he has no right to sell. The shift is characteristic of the book’s mobile form: instead of continuing the argument, he moves the reader onward and begins another episode. Boulogne is thus introduced as a point of departure into fresh company and fresh digression.

On arrival, the narrator imagines himself among a cheerful company of debtors and sinners, but immediately says he cannot stay because he is being pursued and expects to be overtaken before he can change horses. Those around him speculate about the charge against him, proposing high treason, murder, or debt. Their guesses are a comic chorus rather than a settled account of any accusation: the scene supplies no evidence that the narrator is actually charged with one of these crimes. His own explanation shifts the stakes from ordinary debt to the debt of Nature, making the pursuer an emblem of mortality rather than a named human authority.

A Courtship Lost to the Digression

As the narrator hurries through Boulogne, a young woman passes on her way from matins. He offers her a compliment as the sun is rising, asks her to delay the long-striding figure following him, and pleads for enough time to gain a little distance. The episode briefly makes the town a setting for attempted courtship, but the narrator’s urgent appeal is directed less toward a relationship than toward escaping his pursuer.

The Irish host then remarks that all this courtship has been wasted: the young woman had already gone beyond hearing. The scene’s reversal is small but decisive. The narrator has fashioned an elaborate plea for an audience that was not listening, and his host supplies the practical correction. When the narrator calls him a simpleton, the rebuke also turns back on the speaker: in the rush of his own performance, he has mistaken eloquence for communication.

The Town as a Place of Brief Encounters

The passage does not offer a sustained description of Boulogne’s streets, institutions, or inhabitants. Instead, the town is assembled through transient encounters: the imagined crowd debating the cause of the narrator’s flight, the woman returning from matins, and the Irish host commenting after she has passed out of hearing. Boulogne’s literary character in this episode comes from this succession of voices and missed connections, not from a geographical portrait.

Asked whether there is anything else in Boulogne worth seeing, the host recommends a fine seminary for the humanities. The narrator agrees that there could not be a finer one. This is the passage’s clearest specific claim about a local attraction, though it remains brief and conversational; no further account of the seminary or its teaching is given. The exchange closes the location’s introduction by offering a civic point of interest after the comic business of pursuit and unsuccessful address.

Narrative Function

Boulogne joins the narrator’s onward movement through France to the book’s resistance to straight-line storytelling. The direction to travel there is followed not by a conventional description of arrival, but by a burst of voices, a speculative list of possible offenses, an appeal to a passing woman, and a host’s belated observation. The place provides the occasion for these disconnected turns while the pursuit by Death gives them a shared pressure: even a stop to admire the town or court a stranger is imagined as time borrowed from an advancing end.

The episode also displays the narrator’s self-conscious command of the reader. He first sends the reader toward Boulogne, then speaks as if he himself must leave it at once; his movement is presented as both urgent plot and playful performance. The young woman’s departure before she can hear the compliment sharpens the gap between the narrator’s fluent words and their effect in the world. Boulogne therefore matters chiefly as a narrative crossroads, where travel, mortality, social comedy, and the book’s digressive manner briefly converge.