Once in Paris, Desnoyers found himself quite bewildered. He confused
the names of streets, proposed visits to buildings which had long since
disappeared, and all his attempts to prove himself an expert authority
on Paris were attended with disappointment. His children, guided by
recent reading up, knew Paris better than he. He was considered
a foreigner in his own country. At first, he even felt a certain
strangeness in using his native tongue, for he had remained on the ranch
without speaking a word of his language for years at a time. He was used
to thinking in Spanish, and translating his ideas into the speech of his
ancestors spattered his French with all kinds of Creole dialect.

"Where a man makes his fortune and raises his family, there is his true
country," he said sententiously, remembering Madariaga.

The image of that distant country dominated him with insistent obsession
as soon as the impressions of the voyage had worn off. He had no French
friends, and upon going into the street, his feet instinctively took him
to the places where the Argentinians gathered together. It was the same
with them. They had left their country only to feel, with increasing
intensity, the desire to talk about it all the time. There he read the
papers, commenting on the rising prices in the fields, on the prospects
for the next harvests and on the sales of cattle. Returning home, his
thoughts were still in America, and he chuckled with delight as he
recalled the way in which the two chinas had defied the professional
dignity of the French cook, preparing their native stews and other
dishes in Creole style.

He had settled the family in an ostentatious house in the avenida Victor
Hugo, for which he paid a rental of twenty-eight thousand francs. Dona
Luisa had to go and come many times before she could accustom herself to