In the upshot, however, the necessity of his dismal forebodings had nothing to do with the length of time devoted by Monsieur Duchemin to kicking idle heels in the town of Nant; where the civil authorities proved considerate in a degree that—­even making allowance for the local prestige of the house of Montalais—­gratified and surprised the confirmed Parisian.  For that was just what the good man was at heart and would be till he died, the form in which environment of younger years had moulded him:  less French than Parisian, sharing the almost insular ignorance of life in the provinces characteristic of the native boulevardier; to whom the sun is truly nothing more or less than a spotlight focussed exclusively on Paris, leaving the rest of France in a sort of crepuscular gloom, the world besides steeped in eternal night.

The driver-guide of La Roque turned out to have been a thorough-paced scamp, well and ill-known to the gendarmerie; the wound sustained by Monsieur d’Aubrac bore testimony to the gravity of the affair, amply excusing Duchemin’s interference and its fatal sequel; while the statements of Mesdames de Sevenie et de Montalais, duly becoming public property, bade fair to exalt the local reputation of Andre Duchemin to heroic stature.  And, naturally, his papers were unimpeachable.

So that he found himself, before his acquaintance with Nant was thirty-six hours of age, free once more to humour the dictates of his own sweet will, to go on to Nimes (his professed objective) or to the devil if he liked.  A freedom which, consistent with the native inconsistency of man, he exercised by electing to stop over in Nant for another day or two, at least; assuring himself that he found the town altogether charming, more so even than Meyrueis—­and sometimes believing this fiction for as much as twenty minutes at a stretch.

Besides, the weather was unsettled ....

The inn, which went by the unpretending style of the Grand Hotel de l’Univers, he found clean, comfortable, and as to its cuisine praiseworthy.  The windows of the cubicle in which he had been lodged—­one of ten which sufficed for the demands of the itinerant Universe—­not only overlooked the public square and its amusing life of a minor market town, but commanded as well a splendid vista of the valley of the Dourbie, with its piquant contrast of luxuriant alluvial verdure and grim scarps of rock that ran up, on either side the wanton, glimmering river, into two opposed and overshadowing pinnacles of crag, the Roc Nantais and the Roc de Saint Alban—­peaks each a rendezvous just then for hosts of cloud that scowled forbiddingly down upon the peaceful, sun-drenched valley.

Moreover, even from the terrasse of the cafe below, one needed only to lift one’s eyes to see, afar, perched high upon a smiling slope of green, with the highway to Millau at its foot and a beetling cliff behind, the Chateau de Montalais.  Seated on that terrasse, late in the afternoon of his second day in Nant, discussing a Picon and a villainous caporal cigarette of the Regie (to whose products a rugged constitution was growing slowly reconciled anew) Duchemin let his vision dwell upon the distant chateau almost as constantly as his thoughts.