As we failed to meet anybody who could show us the way, the few peasants we had questioned having responded by unintelligible cries, we produced our map and our compass, and, locating ourselves by the setting sun, we resolved to head straight for Daoulas.  Instantly our vigour returned, and we started across the fields, vaulting fences and ditches, and uprooting, tearing and breaking everything in our way, without giving a thought to the stiles we left open or the damaged crops.

At the top of a slope, we discovered the village of l’Hopital lying in a meadow watered by a stream.  A bridge spans the latter and on this bridge is a mill; beyond the meadow is a hill, which we started to climb nimbly, when suddenly we saw, by a ray of light, a beautiful yellow and black salamander creeping along the edge of a ditch with its slender tail dragging in the dust and undulating with every motion of its speckled body.  It had come from its retreat under a big stone covered with moss, and was hunting insects in the rotten trunks of old oak-trees.

A pavement of uneven cobblestones echoed beneath our feet, and a street stretched out before us.  We had arrived in Daoulas.  There was light enough to enable us to distinguish a square sign swinging on an iron rod on one of the houses.  We should have recognised the inn even without the sign, as houses, like men, have their professions stamped on their faces.  So we entered, for we were ravenous, and told the host above all things not to keep us waiting.

While we were sitting in front of the door, waiting for our dinner, a little girl in rags came along with a basket of strawberries on her head.  She entered the inn and came out again after a short while, holding a big loaf of bread in both hands.  Uttering shrill cries, she scampered off with the alertness of a kitten.  Her dusty hair fluttered in the wind and stood out straight from her wizened face, and her bare legs, which she lifted high in the air when running, disappeared under the rags that covered her form.

After our meal, which comprised, besides the unavoidable omelet and the fatal veal, the strawberries the little girl had brought, we went up to our rooms.

The winding staircase with its worm-eaten steps groaned beneath our weight, like a sensitive woman under a new disillusion.  At the top was a room with a door that closed on the outside with a hook.  We slept there.  The plaster on the once yellow walls was crumbling away; the beams of the ceiling bent beneath the weight of the slated roof, and on the window-panes was a layer of dust that softened the light like a piece of unpolished glass.  The beds, four walnut boards carelessly put together, had big, round, worm-eaten knobs, and the wood was split by the dryness.  On each bed was a mattress and a matting, covered with a ragged green spread.  A piece of mirror in a varnished frame, an old game-bag on a nail, and a worn silk cravat which showed the crease of its folds, indicated that the room belonged to some one who probably slept there every night.