his passage. As he went along the streets, he looked as usual everybody in the eye; but that very same evening he vanished{12} from Toulon. It wasn’t that he was afraid of anything. His mind was as calm as the natural set of his florid face. Nobody could know what his forty years or more of sea life had been, unless he told them himself. And of that he didn’t mean to tell more than what he had told the inquisitive captain with the patch over one eye. But he didn’t want any bother for certain other reasons; and more than anything else he didn’t want to be sent perhaps to serve in the fleet now fitting out in Toulon. So at dusk he passed through the gate on the road to Fréjus in a high two-wheeled cart belonging to a well-known farmer whose habitation lay that way. His personal belongings were brought down and piled up on the tailboard of the cart by some ragamuffin patriots whom he engaged in the street for that purpose. The only indiscretion he committed was to pay them for their trouble with a large handful of assignats. From such a prosperous seaman, however, this generosity was not so very compromising. He himself got into the cart over the wheel, with such slow and ponderous movements, that the friendly farmer felt called upon to remark: “Ah, we are not so young as we used to be—you and I.” “I have also an awkward wound,” said Citizen Peyrol sitting down heavily.
{12}
And so from farmer’s cart to farmer’s cart, getting lifts all along, jogging in a cloud of dust between stone walls and through little villages well known to him from his boyhood’s days, in a landscape of stony hills, pale rocks, and dusty green of olive trees, Citizen Peyrol went on unmolested till he got down clumsily in the yard of an inn on the outskirts of the town of Hyères. The sun was setting to his right. Near a{13} clump of dark pines with blood-red trunks in the sunset Peyrol perceived a rutty track branching off in the direction of the sea.
{13}
At that spot Citizen Peyrol had made up his mind to leave the high road. Every feature of the country with the darkly wooded rises, the barren flat expanse of stones and sombre bushes to his left, appealed to him with a sort of strange familiarity, because they had remained unchanged since the days of his boyhood. The very cartwheel tracks scored deep into the stony ground had kept their physiognomy; and far away, like a blue thread, there was the sea of the Hyères roadstead with a lumpy indigo swelling still beyond—which was the island of Porquerolles. He had an idea that he had been born on Porquerolles, but he really did not know. The notion of a father was absent from his mentality. What
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