(Ali Baba protects the lovers! Gives them the luck of bandits, and no guilt; for love fills certain people and expands them beyond all laws; there is no time, no place for regrets, hesitations, cowardices. Love runs free and reckless; and all the gentle trickeries perpetrated to protect others from its burns—those who are not the lovers but who might be the victims of this love's expansion—let them be gentle and gay about these trickeries, gentle and gay like Robin Hood, or other games of children; for Anahita, the moon goddess, will then judge and mete out punishment, Mr. Policeman. So wait for her orders, for I am sure you would not understand if I told you my father is delightfully clear and selfish, tender and lying, formal and incurable. He exhausts all the loves given to him. If I did not leave his house at night to warm myself in Rango's burning hands I would die at my task, arid and barren, sapless, while my father monologues about his past, and I yawn yawn yawn... It's like looking at family albums, at stamp collections! Understand me, Mr. Policeman, if you can: if that were all I had, I would indeed be in danger of jumping into the Seine, and you would have to take a chill rescuing me. See, I have money for a taxi, I sing a song of thanksgiving to the taxi which nourishes the dream and carries it unbreakable, fragile but unbreakable everywhere. The taxi is the nearest object to a seven-leagued boot, it perpetuates the reverie, my vice, my luxury. Oh, you can, if you wish, arrest me for reverie, vagabondage of the wildest sort, for it is the cell, the mysterious, the padded, the fecund cell in which everything is born; everything that man ever accomplished is born in this little cell...)

The policeman passed by and did not arrest her, so she confided in him and found him rich with knowledge. He knew of many barges here and there. He knew one where they served fried potatoes and red wine to fishermen, another where hobos could spend the night for five cents, one where a woman in trousers carved big statues, another one turned into a swimming pool for boys, another one called the barge of the red lights, for men, and beyond this one there was a barge that had been used by a troupe of actors to travel all through France, and there she might inquire as it was empty and had been deemed unsafe for long voyages...