But now the unreality of his singular change of fortune was vanishing. Every village priest who came after dark to take a glass of wine with them at their inn sent it farther into the past, every provincial noble greeting him on the step of his remote and quiet house added a note to the drumming reality which dominated his waking moments and disturbed his sleep at night. Day by day they rode on, passing through two or three villages between such halts as were needed by the horses. At every hamlet, in the large villages, where they rested and had their food, at the remote little town where they passed a night, there was always some one expecting them, who came and talked of the weather and more or less skilfully brought in the numeral nineteen. "Nineteen! Nineteen!" It was a watchword all over France. Long before, on the banks of the Dordogne, Loo had asked his companion why that word had been selected--what it meant. "It means Louis XIX," replied Dormer Colville, gravely. And now, as they rode through a country so rural, so thinly populated and remote that nothing like it may be found in these crowded islands, the number seemed to follow them; or, rather, to pass on before them and await their coming. Often Colville would point silently with his whip to the numerals, scrawled on a gate-post or written across a wall. At this time France was mysteriously flooded with cheap portraits of the great Napoleon. It was before the days of pictorial advertisement, and young ladies who wished to make an advantageous marriage had no means of advertising the fact and themselves in supplements to illustrated papers. The walls of inns and shops and _diligence_ offices were therefore barer than they are to-day. And from these bare walls stared out at this time the well-known face of the great Napoleon. It was an innovation, and as such readily enough accepted. At every fair, at the great fête of St. Jean, at St. Jean d'Angély and a hundred other fêtes of purely local notoriety, at least one hawker of cheap lithographs was to be found. And if the buyer haggled, he could get the portrait of the great Emperor for almost nothing. "One cannot print it at such a cost," the seller assured his purchasers, which was no less than the truth. The fairs were, and are to this day, the link between the remoter villages and the world; and the peasants carried home with them a picture, for the first time, to hang on their walls. Thus the Prince President fostered the Napoleonic legend. Dormer Colville would walk up to these pictures, and, as often as not, would turn and look over his shoulder at Barebone, with a short laugh. For as often as not, the numerals were scrawled across the face in pencil.