"Vive Kitchenaire!"
The echoes have hardly died away when a tear-choked voice greets me. "Ah, Mademoiselle, but the news is bad to-day." Tears are rolling down the little Frenchwoman's face. So deep is her grief I fear a personal loss. But she shakes her head. No, it is not that. She hands me a paper and, stunned, I read the news. As I cross the street and turn towards home the world seems shadowed. Sorrow has drawn her veils closely about the town—sorrow for the man whom it trusted and whose privilege it had been to honour.
[CHAPTER V]
SETTLING-IN
Our first duty on arriving in the town was to go to the Bureau de Police and ask for a permis de séjour. We understood that without it there would be short shrift and a shorter journey into a world which has not yet been surveyed. So we sallied forth to the Bureau at break of day, and there we interviewed an old grognard—the only really grumpy person I met in France—who scowled at us and scolded us and called the devil to witness that these English names are barbarous, the chatter of monkeys, unintelligible to any civilised ear. We soothed him with shaking knees; suppose he refused us permission to reside in the town? And presently he melted. He never really liquified, you know, there was always a crust; but once or twice on subsequent occasions a drop, just a teeny, weeny drop of the milk of human kindness oozed through. He demanded our photographs, and when he saw my "finished-while-you-wait" his belief in our Simian ancestry took indestructible form. The number of my photographs now scattered over France on imposing documents is incalculable, and the number of times I have had to howl my age into unsympathetic ears so great that all my natural modesty in dealing with so delicate a subject has wilted away.
The grognard dismissed us at length, feeling like the worm that perisheth, and a fortnight or so later presented us with our permis de séjour (which warned us that any infringement of its regulations would expose us to immediate arrest as spies), and with an esoteric document called an Extrait du Registre d'Immatriculation whose purpose in history we were never able to determine. No one ever asked to see it, no one ever asked to see our permis de séjour, in fact the gendarmes of the town showed a reprehensible lack of interest in our proceedings.
In addition to these we were provided as time went on with a carte d'identité, a permission to circulate on a bicycle in districts specified, a permission to take photographs not of military interest, and later on with a carnet d'étranger which gripped us in a tight fist, kept us at the end of a very short chain, and made us rue the day we were born. And of course we had our passports as well.
Not being a cyclist, I used that particular permission when tramping on the Sabbath beyond the confines of the town. Once a bright military star tried to stop some one who followed my example. "It is a permission to cycle. You are on foot," he argued.