ity of his dismal forebodings had
nothing to do with the length of time devoted by Monsieur Duchemin to
kicking idle heels in the town of Nant; where the civil authorities
proved considerate in a degree that--even making allowance for the
local prestige of the house of Montalais--gratified and surprised the
confirmed Parisian. For that was just what the good man was at heart
and would be till he died, the form in which environment of younger
years had moulded him: less French than Parisian, sharing the almost
insular ignorance of life in the provinces characteristic of the native
boulevardier; to whom the sun is truly nothing more or less than a
spotlight focussed exclusively on Paris, leaving the rest of France in
a sort of crepuscular gloom, the world besides steeped in eternal
night.

The driver-guide of La Roque turned out to have been a thorough-paced
scamp, well and ill-known to the gendarmerie; the wound sustained by
Monsieur d'Aubrac bore testimony to the gravity of the affair, amply
excusing Duchemin's interference and its fatal sequel; while the
statements of Mesdames de Sevenie et de Montalais, duly becoming public
property, bade fair to exalt the local reputation of Andre Duchemin to
heroic stature. And, naturally, his papers were unimpeachable.

So that he found himself, before his acquaintance with Nant was
thirty-six hours of age, free once more to humour the dictates of his
own sweet will, to go on to Nimes (his professed objective) or to the
devil if he liked. A freedom which, consistent with the native
inconsistency of man, he exercised by electing to stop over in Nant for
another day or two, at least; assuring himself that he found the town
altogether charming, more so even than Meyrueis--and sometimes
believing this fiction for as much as twenty minutes at a stretch.

Besides, the weather was unsettled ....

The inn, which went by the unpretending style of the Grand Hotel de
l'Univers, he found clean, comfortable, and as to its cuisine
praiseworthy. The windows of the cubicle in which he had been
lodged--one of ten which sufficed for the demands of the itinerant
Universe--not only overlooked the public square and its amusing life of
a minor market town, but commanded as well a splendid vista of the
valley of the Dourbie, with its piquant contrast of luxuriant alluvial
verdure and grim scarps of rock that ran up, on either side the wanton,
glimmering river, into two opposed and overshadowing pinna