Pascal brings Sadie to Le Moulin's library, a converted barn where four well-groomed young men from upper-class Parisian backgrounds work on collaborative writings. A teenage girl named Florence silently delivers coffee, unintroduced. Sadie observes the class hierarchy of the commune: these educated boys resemble high-status medieval monks, while Burdmoore, René, and the laborers struggling outside with a postholer are the lower-status drudges performing the physical work. Sadie is assigned to translate the group's book, with Alexandre gathering sources and Jérôme reviewing her English.

Sadie reflects at length on political identity, concluding that people's professed beliefs are really tools to shore up fragile egos and signal group belonging. She argues that politics do not exist inside people; what lies at their core, accessible only in solitary four a.m. moments, is a hard, immutable substance she calls "salt."

This metaphor came to her literally at 4 a.m. in Cardona, northern Spain, while surveilling a Spanish subminister named Platon. After tailing him from Girona—where he met with Catholic clergy—to Cardona, she stayed in a parador castle overlooking the ancient salt mines. Watching the moonlit mountain of salt, she articulated her personal creed: life ends, there is no fairness, the world is lawless and random, and she prefers immutable truths to shifting opinions.

The next morning, Sadie followed Platon into the impoverished medieval village below, which reminded her of war zones. While Platon entered a municipal building, she watched a disabled or zealous woman crawling on cardboard along the cobblestones past a church, where a priest in stained robes smoked a cigarette, observed her indifferently, then went back inside. Platon emerged and departed in the opposite direction.