They paused to admire the Renaissance Fontaine Médicis, set in startling contrast against the rugged background of rock, with its graceful balustrade and its medallion enclosing the bust of the worthy Pierre de Bourdeille, Abbé de Brantôme, the immortal chronicler of horrific scandals; and they crossed the Pont des Barris, and wandered by the quays where men angled patiently for deriding fish, and women below at the water’s edge beat their laundry with lusty arms; and so past the row of dwellings old and new huddled together, a decaying thirteenth-century house with its heavy corbellings and a bit of rounded turret lost in the masonry jostling a perky modern café decked with iron balconies painted green, until they came to the end of the bridge that commands the main entrance to the tiny water-girt town. They plunged into it with childlike curiosity. In the Rue de Périgueux they stood entranced before the shop fronts of that wondrous thoroughfare alive with the traffic of an occasional ox-cart, a rusty one-horse omnibus labelled “_Service de Ville_” and some prehistoric automobile wheezing by, a clattering impertinence. For there were shops in Brantôme of fair pretension—is it not the _chef lieu du Canton_?—and you could buy _articles de Paris_ at most three years old. And there was a Pharmacie Internationale, so called because there you could obtain Pear’s soap and Eno’s Fruit salt; and a draper’s where were exposed for sale frilleries which struck Martin as marvellous, but at which Corinna curved a supercilious lip; and a shop ambitiously blazoned behind whose plate-glass windows could be seen a porcelain bath-tub and other adjuncts of the luxurious bathroom, on one of which, sole occupant of the establishment, a little pig-tailed girl was seated eating from a porringer on her knees; and there were all kinds of other shops including one which sold cabbages and salsifies and charcoal and petrol and picture postcards and rusty iron and vintage eggs and guano and all manner of fantastic dirt. And there was the Librairie de la Dordogne which smiled at you when you asked for devotional pictures or tin-tacks, but gasped when you demanded books. Martin and Corinna, however, demanded them with British insensibility and marched away with an armful of cheap reprints of French classics disinterred from a tomb beneath the counter. But before they went, Martin asked: “But have you nothing new? Nothing from Paris that has just appeared?” “_Voici, monsieur_,” replied the elderly proprietress of the Library of the Dordogne, plucking a volume from a speckled shelf at the back of the shop. “_On trouve ça très joli._” And she handed him _Le Maître de Forges_, by Georges Ohnet. “But this, madam,” said Martin, examining the venerable unsold copy, “was published in 1882.” “I regret, monsieur,” said the lady, “we have nothing more recent.” “I’ll buy it if it breaks me—as a curiosity,” cried Corinna, and she counted out two francs, seventy-five centimes.