Four kilometres above Sahurs is the Napoleonic column marking the spot where the ashes of Bonaparte were landed between their transfer from the boat which brought them up the river to that which bore them to Paris. As I approached this column from above, Sunny Jim, on her wheel, approached it from Sahurs. Her friend Yvonne was with her (wonderful, in this land, is the celerity with which the barriers surrounding Christian names are thrown down!), and the dog. The ride on to Sahurs is on a road that deflects from the river. It is over-arched with elms continuously. Thérèse (that's her name) calls it _la Cathédrale_: and the roof of branches aloft is like the groined roof of a cathedral. M. Duthois and madame come out to meet you. It's a welcome and a half they give--none of your English polite formulas and set courtesy. A warm, human, thoroughgoing sincerity sweeps you into the hall, and there you stand in a hubbub of greeting and interrogation (of which less than half is intelligible: but no matter!) for ten minutes, everyone too busy talking to move on, until Thérèse suggests we go round the garden and the orchard. Everyone goes. Thérèse gives us the French for every flower and shrub to be seen, and the old man makes valiant, clumsy attempts at English, and you make shamelessly clumsy attempts at French. One evidence of the thoroughgoing courtesy of the French is that they will never laugh at your attempts at their language. We smile at them: somehow their English is amusing. Possibly the reason they do not smile at us attempting French is that there is nothing at all amusing in our flounderings--more likely to irritate than amuse. The old man is accommodating in his choice of topics that will interest you and be intelligible--accommodating to the point of embarrassment. He talks quite fifteen minutes about the shape and coloration of your pipe, certain that this will interest the selfish brute. Madame doesn't say a word--carries on a sort of conversation with smiles and other pantomime. Somehow, in the garden (I don't know how) Yvonne got named _Mme. la Comtesse_ by M. Duthois. This for the time being embarrassed her into complete and blushing silence because we all took it up. All manner of difficulties were referred to the superior wisdom of _la Comtesse_. It was she who must decide as to the markings of the aeroplane humming up in the blue; the month when the red currants would be ripened; the relationship of the two crows croaking in the next field; the term of the War's duration.