He found himself all at once in a low, whitewashed village straggling on each side of the road. Outside an _estaminet_ decorated with the double dice box indicating that it was also a _débit de tabac_ hung a row of newspapers in a tin file. It struck him that he had not seen a paper for some days. He descended and bought one. It bore the date of the tenth of September. [Illustration: THE HORSE, WITHOUT HIS CONSCIOUS GUIDANCE, TOOK THE BEWILDERED MAN TO CHARTRES] The horse, without his conscious guidance, took the bewildered man to Chartres. There he pulled new-found wits together. He took his midday meal in the _salle à manger_ of a humble inn full of country folk who had come for the morrow’s fair. His caravan he had left by the wayside on the entrance avenue of plane-trees, in charge of a shock-headed boy, one of a family owning a yellow-and-red-striped caravan, apparently in an analogous line of business with his own. In those far-off blissful days, a five-franc piece shone vast and silvery before lowly eyes.... He had entered the humble inn instinctively, as one accustomed to such accommodation, without giving a thought to the pretentious Hôtel du Grand Monarque on the _great_ place, where the refined of all nations naturally sought their sustenance. He sat down at a crowded table between a wizened, blue-bloused peasant with a cropped white head and a neck like that of a moulting parrot craning over a dingy white collar around which was tied a half-inch of black ribbon by way of cravat, and a buxom farm-wife in spotless head-gear, brilliant silk neckerchief and great gold earrings. They ate lusciously with great clatter and prestidigitation of knives, and drank the little grey stony wine, and talked of crops and cattle and marriages and deaths. And Paradyne, as brown and dusty and with as little outer pretensions to gentility as any of them, found himself talking to his neighbours of these elemental things with a familiarity born of custom. And then from the lady: ‘Monsieur was a stranger in the _pays_?’ Yes, he was a _marchand forain_, a hawker. He sold a bit of everything and went where he thought the market was best. She opined that one must make _pas mal_--a tidy bit--of money. But for herself she did not like the adventurous life. Not that she had tried it. She could not conceive happiness outside the family. _Tiens_, she had a husband--she made a movement of her head towards a food-absorbing male by her side--and five children. She lived at Gallardon eighteen kilometres off, and had no desire to travel. Once had she been to Paris; but _oh, là, là!_ No, truly the family was the only thing. But he must have a family somewhere?