“Wait!” he cried before we had taken three steps. “What country did you say you came from?”
“America,” I answered.
“L’Amérique! And, being in America, you come to France? Oh, my soul, what idiocy!” And, waving his arms above his head, he fled to the shade of his office.
We journeyed along as before, showing our papers at each village, and once being stopped in the open country by a gendarme on horseback. By the time we reached Briare in the early afternoon, the miners looked so lean with hunger that I offered to pay for a meal for three. They needed no second invitation, and led the way at once to a place that looked to me like nothing but an empty warehouse. The miners pushed open a door, and we entered a low room, gloomy and unswept. Around the table to which we made our way, through a forest of huge wine barrels, were gathered a dozen or more peasants.
The keeper of the place set out before us a loaf of coarse bread and a bottle of wine, and then went back to his seat on a barrel. His shop was really the wine cellar of a restaurant that faced the main street. The fare would have cost us twice as much there. One of the miners asked me if he might order two sous’ worth of raw salt pork. Having obtained my consent, he did so, and he and his companion ate it with great relish.
I left my companions behind soon after, for they could not walk the thirty miles a day that I had planned for myself, and passed on into the vineyard and forest country. In the fields left bare by the harvesters, peasant women were gathering with the greatest care every overlooked straw they could find, and, their aprons full, plodded homeward.
The inhabitants were already lighting their lamps when I entered the village of La Charité. The bells of a gray church began to ring out the evening angelus. Squat housewives gossiped at the doors of the stone cottages that lined the road. From the neighboring fields heavy ox-carts, the yokes fastened across the horns of the animals, lumbered homeward. In the dwindling light a blacksmith before his open shop was fitting with flat iron shoes a spotted ox tied up on its back in a frame.
I inquired for an inn, and was directed to a ramshackle stone building, one end of which was a stable. Inside, under a sputtering lamp, huddled two men, a woman, and a girl, around a table that looked as if it had held too much wine in its day and was for that reason unsteady on its legs. The four were so busy eating bread and soup that they did not see me come in.
Walking forward to attract attention in the dim light, I stepped on the end of a loose board that supported two legs of the tipsy table, causing the bowl of soup to slide into the woman’s arms and a loaf to roll to the earthen floor. That was unlucky but it made them notice me. One of the men was the proprietor, the other a tramp who spoke very queer French. All the evening, waving his arms above his head, he talked excitedly of the misfortunes he had lived through.
At last the girl agreed to show me to a room. She led the way out of doors, up an outside stairway, to a hole about four feet high over the stable. Here I spent the night, and at daybreak I resumed my journey.