In any case, this procedure was the central tent-pole holding up Jack's understanding of how Paris worked. Applied to the problem of selling Turk, it told him that somewhere in the southern part of the Marais, near the river, there lived rich men who had no choice to be in the market for war-horses – or, if they had any brains in their heads at all, for stud-horses capable of siring new ones. Jack talked to the man who managed the livery stable, and he followed hay-wains coming in from the countryside, and he tailed aristocrats riding back from the military parades at the Champs de Mars, and learned that there was a horse-market par excellence at the Place Royale.