Thanks to his savings, a harbor official found it to his interest to offer him the choice of three boats.  One was sailing to Egypt, another to Australia, another to Montevideo and Buenos Aires, which made the strongest appeal to him? . . .  Desnoyers, remembering his readings, wished to consult the wind and follow the course that it indicated, as he had seen various heroes of novels do.  But that day the wind blew from the sea toward France.  He also wished to toss up a coin in order to test his fate.  Finally he decided upon the vessel sailing first.  Not until, with his scanty baggage, he was actually on the deck of the next boat to anchor, did he take any interest in its course—­“For the Rio de la Plata.” . . .  And he accepted these words with a fatalistic shrug.  “Very well, let it be South America!” The country was not distasteful to him, since he knew it by certain travel publications whose illustrations represented herds of cattle at liberty, half-naked, plumed Indians, and hairy cowboys whirling over their heads serpentine lassos tipped with balls.

The millionaire Desnoyers never forgot that trip to America—­forty-three days navigating in a little worn-out steamer that rattled like a heap of old iron, groaned in all its joints at the slightest roughness of the sea, and had to stop four times for repairs, at the mercy of the winds and waves.

In Montevideo, he learned of the reverses suffered by his country and that the French Empire no longer existed.  He felt a little ashamed when he heard that the nation was now self-governing, defending itself gallantly behind the walls of Paris.  And he had fled! . . .  Months afterwards, the events of the Commune consoled him for his flight.  If he had remained, wrath at the national downfall, his relations with his co-laborers, the air in which he lived—­everything would surely have dragged him along to revolt.  In that case, he would have been shot or consigned to a colonial prison like so many of his former comrades.

So his determination crystallized, and he stopped thinking about the affairs of his mother-country.  The necessities of existence in a foreign land whose language he was beginning to pick up made him think only of himself.  The turbulent and adventurous life of these new nations compelled him to most absurd expedients and varied occupations.  Yet he felt himself strong with an audacity and self-reliance which he never had in the old world.  “I am equal to everything,” he said, “if they only give me time to prove it!” Although he had fled from his country in order not to take up arms, he even led a soldier’s life for a brief period in his adopted land, receiving a wound in one of the many hostilities between the whites and reds in the unsettled districts.