“Have you no suggestion, Monsieur, to offer?” I asked, “whereby I may obtain this essential information concerning Captain Vauvenarde?”

“His old comrades in the regiment might know, Monsieur.”

“And the regiment?”

He opened the Annuaire Officiel de l’Armee Francaise, just as I might have done myself, and said: 

“There are six regiments.  One is at Blidah, another at Tlemcen, another at Constantine, another at Tunis, another at Algiers, and another at Mascara.”

“To which regiment, then, did Captain Vauvenarde belong?” I inquired.

He referred to one of the dossiers that the orderlies had brought him.

“The 3rd, Monsieur.”

“I should get information, then, from Tlemcen?”

“Evidently, Monsieur.”

I thanked him and withdrew, to his obvious relief.  Seekers after knowledge are unpopular even in organisations so far removed from the Circumlocution Office as the French Ministere de la Guerre.  However, he had put me on the trail of my man.

During my homeward drive through the rain I reflected.  I might, of course, write to the Lieutenant-Colonel of the 3rd Regiment at Tlemcen, and wait for his reply.  But even if he answered by return of post, I should have to remain in Paris for nearly a week.

“That,” said I, wiping from my face half a teacupful of liquid mud which had squirted in through the cab window—­“that I’ll never do.  I’ll proceed at once to Algiers.  If I can get no news of him there, I’ll go to Tlemcen myself.  In all probability I shall learn that he is residing here in Paris, a stone’s throw from the Madeleine.”

So I started for Algiers.  The next morning, before the sailing of the Marechal Bugeaud, one of the quaint churns styled a steamship by the vanity of the French Company which undertakes to convey respectable folk across the Mediterranean, I ate my bouillabaisse below an awning on the sunny quay at Marseilles.  The torrential rains had ceased.  I advised Rogers to take equivalent sustenance, as no lunch is provided on day of sailing by the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique.  I caught sight of him in a dark corner of the restaurant—­he is too British to eat in the open air on the terrace, or perhaps too modest to have his meal in my presence—­struggling grimly with a beefsteak, and, as he is a teetotaller, with an unimaginable, horrific liquid which he poured out from a vessel vaguely resembling a teapot.

My meal over, and having nearly an hour to spare, I paid my bill, rose and turned the corner of the quay into the Cannebiere, thinking to have my coffee at one of the cafes in that thoroughfare of which the natives say that, if Paris had a Cannebiere, it would be a little Marseilles.  I suppose for the Marseillais there is a magic in the sonorous name; for, after all, it is but a commonplace street of shops running from the quays into the heart of the town.  It