CHAPTER VI
THE WINDMILL
There was between Nantes and Rennes an established service of three
stage-coaches weekly in each direction, which for a sum of
twenty-four livres - roughly, the equivalent of an English guinea
- would carry you the seventy and odd miles of the journey in some
fourteen hours. Once a week one of the diligences going in each
direction would swerve aside from the highroad to call at Gavrillac,
to bring and take letters, newspapers, and sometimes passengers. It
was usually by this coach that Andre-Louis came and went when the
occasion offered. At present, however, he was too much in haste to
lose a day awaiting the passing of that diligence. So it was on a
horse hired from the Breton arme that he set out next morning; and
an hour's brisk ride under a grey wintry sky, by a half-ruined road
through ten miles of flat, uninteresting country, brought him to the
city of Rennes.
He rode across the main bridge over the Vilaine, and so into the
upper and principal part of that important city of some thirty
thousand souls, most of whom, he opined from the seething, clamant
crowds that everywhere blocked his way, must on this day have taken
to the streets.
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