17. In his epilogue to the 1979 reprint of Van Deyssel’s novel, Harry Prick assumes that the novel was aimed at a readership of what he calls the ‘Amsterdam crème de la crème of that time’, the upper echelons of Dutch society. He suggests a primarily biographical interest on the side of the readers and supposes that only members of the Amsterdam bourgeois elite would have been able to recognize the architect Cuypers in the literary character of Mr Reeve, May’s father, p.136.