The narrator, posing as Sadie, joins the Moulinards at the Café de la Route for an evening of drinking and music. She observes René playing accordion, Florence singing, and notes that Mr. Crouzel and the local old men treat Pascal as the commune's emissary, drinking with him alone among the Moulinards. She watches Naïs working dourly behind the bar, reflecting on her loss of her sister and her father Bruno's transition from Parisian radical to country man. Crouzel's elderly mother briefly joins, sharing a story in Occitan. Throughout, the narrator notices the two tramps in Mao caps watching the group intently from a bench in the square.

The next day, Sadie invents an excuse to leave the library and stages a reencounter with the couple. She introduces herself as Pascal's friend's wife and a Le Moulin comrade, claiming an action is being planned and that the commune may need their help. She invokes the man in the convertible (Lemon Incest) as evidence that suspicious people are watching the commune.

The couple, Denis and Françoise, share their backstory: veterans of the Susa Valley struggle against the TAV train, Denis served a year in Italian prison and is now banned from the region. Destitute, they hitchhiked from Bussoleno hoping to settle at Le Moulin, only to be humiliatingly rejected by Pascal. Françoise, embittered, is receptive when Sadie suggests Pascal himself might be the informant betraying the commune. Sadie names accomplices, including Aurélie, asks for secrecy, and learns the couple have removed their phone SIMs and camped in woods off the D79. She arranges to meet them there in a few days.