“Rain began, as it does in central and northern France. The skies were overcast; the south lay behind. The people at the stations were no longer Latins, happy and idle, but Gauls, worried and industrious, the world’s busiest workers, thriftiest savers, hardest haters, and best bureaucrats. Their talk was sharp and quick; they would stand no nonsense; one could imagine that it was they who had first conceived passports, to prevent the world’s denizens from moving about their planet as they chose.”
