Would he go to Sicily alone? It was essentially a journey to be made with a woman. Something rather capricious, a lovely little animal--"Has been in several famous collections," as they say in the auction catalogues. Exquisite hands and feet, and who would talk about herself all the time, would lose the keys of her luggage, write her name in the moisture on the windows and expect one to get out at each station to buy her "souvenirs" of the country. No, he would go alone. Lewis very seldom slept, just a few hours, perhaps, towards the dawn. The house was quite quiet. Outside it was raining. Three o'clock struck. Time to start work. He took from beneath his pillow "_A Treatise on the Possession of the Subsoil in European Countries: Italy.... Code Napoléon, Recconi law, March 18th_, 1873." He made marginal notes and then, putting on his glasses, drafted a scheme for the development of the deposits of San Lucido. VII THE P.L.M. railway bore Lewis rapidly and powerfully away from the life of Paris. After leaving the campanile of the Gare de Lyon behind during dinner, they followed the graceful river outlines of the Seine to Charenton (with its shallops). Then the intoxicating descent through the Burgundian vineyards; after which night lasted as far as Italy. Lewis only knew Europe from having travelled through it on business, often imperfectly, always hurriedly, without ever opening either his eyes or his heart to it. He knew all about the time tables and itineraries, even though he liked throwing regular routes and through tickets to the winds. He sacrificed depth to length, and, like all his contemporaries, he was--he and his nerves--the victim of the spirit of speed. His business sense was really nothing but a taste for adventure. He worked as he would have played, heedless of rules, selfishly, without giving a thought to the needs of the nation or of the period. "I don't care a damn," he wrote to Martial, "for the inner meaning of things." Lewis liked leaving France if he did not like leaving Paris; "this cosmo_im_politan," as Monsieur Vandémanque dubbed him, maintained that he felt far more bewildered beyond the fortifications of Paris than beyond the frontiers of France.