I rose and, climbing over a forest of legs to the door, grasped the knob and was about to give it a yank, when the exit of the officer the night before, with the clang of heavy bolts shot home, came back to memory. I sat down again with the others, and following their example, filled my pipe, as the only consolation left me. Nor was one of these outcasts, who told of days of fasting and the bitter pangs of hunger, without his supply of the soothing weed.
Traffic was already beginning in the street outside. Now and then some facetious passer-by stopped to peer through the bars at us and to sneer: “Bah! Messieurs les vagabonds. Sales bêtes!” Others carried their jocosity so far as to toss pebbles and clods of earth in through the grating; to which treatment my companions in misery were powerless to reply, except by spitting out viciously at their tormentors and promising them a summary vengeance when once they were released.
An hour after daylight a gendarme came to unlock the doors. I pushed out with the rest and set off in the direction of Marseilles. I had not gone five paces, however, when I heard a shout behind me:
“Eh, toi! Où est-ce que tu vas comme ça?”
I turned around in surprise.
“Come along here, you,” roared the officer, and with the rest I filed back to the gendarmerie, the butt of the derisive grimaces of passing urchins.
At headquarters each of us was registered again, as we had been the night before, after which we were permitted to go our several ways. There was no means of changing my wealth into French coin until the banks opened, two hours later. Scorning to delay so long, I turned away breakfastless to the westward, convinced that some village banker would come to my assistance by the time France was wide awake. But at high noon I was still plodding on, dizzy with hunger and the fatigue of climbing a low, uninhabited spur of the Alps that stretches down to the Mediterranean west of Cannes, with that infernal Italian note still in my pocket. At four in the afternoon I reached the village of Fréjus. A merchant, whom I ran to earth after a long search, agreed to accept the likeness of Vittore Emanuele at a half-franc discount; and I sat down on the village green with an armful of bread and dried herring—my first meal in twenty-eight hours.
I paid, that night, for a flea-bitten lodging in Le Puget, but concluded next day that the three francs remaining could be better invested in food than in sleeping-quarters. When darkness again overtook me, therefore, I applied for accommodations at the gendarmerie of Cuers. The village was too small to boast an Asile de Nuit, but after long argument I induced the rustic in charge of the town hall to allow me to occupy the solitary cell which the hamlet reserved for the incarceration of its felons. It was a three-cornered hole under the stairway leading to the upper story, and I spent the night in durance vile; for the rustic, for some reason unknown, insisted on locking me in.
Next day I pressed steadily onward through a hungry Sunday of pouring rain, the mud of the highway oozing in through the expanding holes of my dilapidated shoes. From time to time a facetious innkeeper peered out through the downpour to shout: “Hé donc, toi! You don’t know it’s raining, perhaps?” But bent on reaching Marseilles before my last coppers had been scattered, I dared not linger to give answer.
Late Sunday evening is an inconvenient hour to look for the municipal officers of an unimportant French village. Back of the central place of Le Beausset I found the hôtel de ville, a decrepit, one-story building; but I knocked at the back door, the entrée des vagabonds, for some time in vain. A passing villager advised me to “go right in.” I opened the door accordingly and stepped inside, only to be driven out again by a series of feminine shrieks before I had an opportunity to make out, in a badly-lighted kitchen, the exact source of the uproar. I sat down in the rain outside the door that had been slammed and bolted behind me and waited.