*In the part of France she was talking about, the Saône and the Loire ran in parallel courses about fifty miles apart, but in opposite directions. The Saône flowed south to its confluence with the Rhône and thence to Marseille. The Loire ran north to Orléans, where it bent westward and continued down to the Atlantic. Several miles north of Lyon was the portage that linked these two rivers: a road, or rather a bundle of roads and tracks, that cut westward over a line of hills to the town of Roanne, about fifty miles away, which lay on the upper Loire.