"Lizette, show these ladies to the room of Madame de Sévigné. If they desire a sitting-room—to the Marmousets."
The inn-keeper gave his commands in the quiet, well-bred tone of a man of the world, to a woman in peasant's dress. She led us past the open court to an inner one, where we were confronted with a building still older, apparently, than those grouped about the outer quadrangle. The peasant passed quickly beneath an overhanging gallery, draped in vines. She was next preceding us up a spiral turret stairway; the adjacent walls were hung here and there with faded bits of tapestry. Once more she turned to lead us along an open gallery; on this several rooms appeared to open. On each door a different sign was painted in rude Gothic letters. The first was "Chambre de l'Officier;" the second, "Chambre du Curé," and the next was flung widely open. It was the room of the famous lady of the incomparable Letters. The room might have been left—in the yesterday of two centuries—by the lady whose name it bore. There was a beautiful Seventeenth century bedstead, a couple of wide arm-chairs, with down pillows for seats, and a clothes press with the carvings and brass work peculiar to the epoch of Louis XIV. The chintz hangings and draperies were in keeping, being copies of the brocades of that day. There were portraits in miniature of the courtiers and the ladies of the Great Reign on the very ewers and basins. On the flounced dressing-table, with its antique glass and a diminutive patch-box, now the receptacle of Lubin's powder, a sprig of the lovely Rose The was exhaling a faint, far-away century perfume. It was surely a stage set for a real comedy; some of these high-coiffed ladies, who knows? perhaps Madame de Sévigné herself would come to life, and give to the room the only thing it lacked—the living presence of that old world grace and speech.
Presently, we sallied forth on a further voyage of discovery. We had reached the courtyard when Monsieur Paul crossed it; it was to ask if, while waiting for the noon breakfast, we would care to see the kitchen; it was, perhaps, different to those now commonly seen in modern taverns.
The kitchen which was thus modestly described as unlike those of our own century might easily, except for the appetizing smell of the cooking fowls and the meats, have been put under lock and key and turned over to a care-taker as a full-fledged culinary museum of antiquities. One entire side of the crowded but orderly little room was taken up by a huge open fireplace. The logs resting on the great andirons were the trunks of full-grown trees. On two of the spits were long rows of fowl and legs of mutton roasting; the great chains were being slowly turned by a chef in the paper cap of his profession. In deep burnished brass bowls lay water-cresses; in Caen dishes of an age to make a bric-a-brac collector turn green with envy, a Béarnaise sauce was being beaten by another gallic master-hand. Along the beams hung old Rouen plates and platters; in the numberless carved Normandy cupboards gleamed rare bits of Delft and Limoges; the walls may be said to have been hung with Normandy brasses, each as burnished as a jewel. The floor was sanded and the tables had attained that satiny finish which comes only with long usage and tireless use of the brush. There was also a shrine and a clock, the latter of antique Norman make and design.
The smell of the roasting fowls and the herbs used by the maker of the sauces, a hungry palate found even more exciting than this most original of kitchens. There was a wine that went with the sauce; this fact Monsieur Paul explained, on our sitting down to the noonday meal; one which, in remembrance of Monsieur Renard's injunctions, he would suggest our trying. He crossed the courtyard and disappeared into the bowels of the earth, beneath one of the inn buildings, to bring forth a bottle incrusted with layers of moist dirt. This Sauterne was by some, Monsieur Paul smilingly explained, considered as among the real treasures of the inn. Both it and the sauce, we were enabled to assure him a moment later, had that golden softness which make French wines and French sauces at their best the rapture of the palate.
In the courtyard, as our breakfast proceeded, a variety of incidents was happening. We were facing the open archway; through it one looked out upon the high-road. A wheelbarrow passed, trundled by a peasant-girl; the barrow stopped, the girl leaving it for an instant to cross the court.
"Bonjour, mère—"
"Bonjour, ma fille—it goes well?" a deep guttural voice responded, just outside of the window.
"Justement—I came to tell you the mare has foaled and Jean will be late to-night."
"Bien."