The gong in front of me continues to sound lugubriously at fixed intervals, and the heralds continue to announce me to the people by prolonged cries, resounding through the little powdery streets under the still burning evening sun. One sees unused land and cultivated fields. Here and there granite monsters, defaced, shapeless, half buried, worn by years, indicate what was formerly the entrance to a palace. Before a door which surmounts a tricolored pavilion the procession stops, and I dismount. For seven or eight months our fifty soldiers of the marine infantry have been quartered here, spending a whole long winter at Laï-Chou-Chien, separated from the rest of the world by snow and icy steppes, and leading a Crusoe-like existence in the midst of the most perplexing surroundings. It is a surprise and a joy to come among them, to see again their honest home faces, after all the yellow ones we have met along the road, darting sharp enigmatical glances at us. This French quarter is like a bit of life, gaiety, and youth in the midst of mummified old China. It is plain that the winter has been good for our soldiers, for the look of health is on their cheeks. They have organized themselves with a comical and somewhat marvellous ingenuity, creating lavatories, douche rooms, a schoolroom where they teach French to the little Chinese, and even a theatre. Living in intimate comradeship with the people of the town, who will before long be unwilling to see them go, they cultivate vegetable gardens, raise chickens and sheep, and bring up little ravens by hand like orphan babies. It is arranged that I should sleep at the house of the mandarin after having supped at the French post. So at nine o'clock they come for me to conduct me to the "Yamen" with lanterns of state, decorated in a very Chinese fashion and as big as barrels. The Chinese Yamen is always of tremendous extent. In the cool night air, picking my way by the light of lanterns, amongst huge stones and between rows of servants, I pass through a series of courts two hundred metres long, with I don't know how many ruined porticoes and peristyles with shaky steps, before reaching the crumbling and dusty lodging which the mandarin intends for me,--a separate building in the midst of a sort of yard, and surrounded by old trees with shapeless trunks. There, under the smoky rafters, I have a great room, with whitewashed walls, containing in the centre a platform with seats like a throne, also some heavy ebony arm-chairs; and as wall decorations some rolls of silk spread out, on which poetry, in Manchou characters, is written. In the wing on the left is a small bedroom for my two servants, and on the right one for me with window-panes of rice paper. On a platform is a very hard bed with covers of red silk, and, lastly, an incense burner, in which little sticks of incense are burning. All this is rural, naïve, and superannuated, antiquated even for China.