We receive the stone tablets

We had just missed our train from Gare du Nord to Compiegne. The boy in the information booth told us that we would have to go exchange our tickets some for a later train, and pointed us in the general direction. We went in the general direction. We asked at another booth. We were directed toward some machines. The machines did nothing for us; they gave us neither directions nor exchanged our tickets. They were for purchasing tickets; we hoped to avoid that option.

My wife and I wandered, like the Israelites in the desert, a desert made of concrete and filled with people; we wandered for another ten or twenty meters, before we found our Mount Sinai; we were prepared to receive the stone tablets. 

Surprisingly, there was a line. When we got to the head of the line, I made conversation with the short, sturdy woman whose blue uniform seemed too large, and her cap was slightly askew, as if she had been in a scuffle and had not yet straightened the chapeau; her job seemed to be to tell people which window to go to for help. She proved to be more pleasant than she appeared. I explained that we needed to exchange tickets for a later train; she confirmed that we were in the right place. Shortly, the man who had been in the line ahead of us returned, saying that the worker at the window did not speak English, so could not help him. Fortunately, we had been conversing in French, so she directed us to the now vacant window. 

I don't know if the man was tall, or if he was standing on something that made him loom high above us. He had sandy colored hair and seemed a little older than most of the people with whom we had dealt in France for this sort of stuff. I explained that we had missed our train. Naturally, he wanted some details. He asked if our train from Versailles had been late. I told him that I didn't know, but that it couldn't have been late by more than a few minutes. I explained that the M4 ligne was down and that we had had to take a longer route from Gare Montparnasse, and that's why we had missed our train. I left out the confusion I had experienced in the bowels of the station, trying to find our departure point. He looked at the train schedules and went to speak with a supervisor. He returned with one stone tablet for each of us; by which I mean he gave us replacement tickets at no charge. This was typical of the superior way that we were treated by the French during out visit. My wife thinks it was because I spoke the language. Another friend suggested that it was because of my winning personality; that made me laugh...but I'm not going to rule it out. Maybe it was just our good fortune to consistently encounter folks both congenial and hospitable. It made our experience very enjoyable, in spite of the various mishaps and Maxwell Smart moments.