Toward the end of the war, Benoit was sent off on his own with forged papers; he wound up working as a horse groom at a chalet in the Loire valley. Mandelbrot describes this harrowing youth with great sangfroid.

All the outrageously bad taste and gaudy draggletailedness of English girls of the same degree were exactly reproduced. But the drunken ruffianism that would have attended such a gathering in England was altogether absent; […]

The bear mauled him in a terrible way.

Now that the frame is complete, we can start on the walls.