In Vanity Fair: A Tale of Frocks and Femininity

by Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd

The omelette of Madame Poulard is another excuse for a motor pilgrimage from Trouville. One goes all the way to Mont St. Michel for it, but the run is a beautiful one and the omelette would be well worth even a journey over a corduroy road. Rural Normandy and Brittany still make pilgrimages to the shrine of the Archangel St. Michel, but even the pious pilgrims make their obeisance to the famous omelette as well as to the worthy saint, and the motor parties from Trouville know more about omelette than shrine. They are not profoundly pious, ces gens là, but they see the beauty of the sacred mountain where it towers between sea and sky, and they appreciate the omelette which Madame, with due ceremony, makes in a great casserole over the glowing logs in her cavernous fireplace.

And then there is Dives, with its ancient hostellerie Guillaume le Conquerant, whose praises have been sung so often and so eloquently that even a mere mention of its charms seems rank plagiarism. All the Trouville crowd motors over to Dives for luncheon or for dinner, and divides the tables with other motor parties from Paris and from all the country round; for it is famous, this inn of William the Conqueror, the most picturesque and popular of the provincial taverns of France.

The great William himself saw to the building of the inn when he chose Dives as the most convenient place in which to build the boats needed for his little excursion to England; and since that far day a multitude of famous personages has found shelter there, though the place has not always been used for an inn. Kings and queens of France have slept under the low roof, Madame de Sévigné and other great ladies of her day dined in the feudal dining-room and chatted in the Salle des Marmousets.

But the rooms were not, in Madame de Sévigné's time, what they are now. Monsieur Paul has made of his old Norman inn a treasure-house. He is artist, antiquary, and inn-keeper, this quiet M. Le Remois, and his inn is his hobby as collecting is his passion. He has ransacked the hidden places of Europe for rare and wonderful things that would add beauty and interest to the three low-raftered rooms in which he serves private dinners and luncheons and suppers, and his collection has overflowed into every corner of the inn. Fourteenth-century glass gleams like jewel mosaic in some of the windows; marvellous old tapestries, rare antique carvings, embroideries, brasses, ivories, laces, porcelains are everywhere, yet all are disposed with an eye to artistic effect and the result is a harmonious interior, not a museum jumble of curios. Even in the kitchen, antiquity holds sway; the carved cupboards and walls are rich in old Normandy brasses and in porcelains and pottery that would drive a collector wild with covetousness. Up in the sleeping-rooms that open from a vine-embowered gallery are old carved bedsteads and presses and dressing-tables, quaint chintzes, ewers and basins and bric-à-brac and candelabra of a far-away time. They are named for illustrious visitors who have slept in them, these chambers along the rambling galleries. One, with seventeenth-century coquetry, is sacred to Madame de Sévigné. Another bears the name of Dumas; for Dumas and all the other famous writers, artists, bohemians of France have at one time or another frequented the inn at Dives. From the galleries one looks down upon a courtyard surrounded by the timbered, gable-roofed, many-winged old building. It is all abloom with flowers, this court. Doves flutter and coo about the low eaves and the niches in which stand queer, stiff, archaic images. Flamingoes and herons and peacocks pick their way over the cobblestones. Cockatoos swing from mullioned windows.

And into this place of mediæval memories come the worldly moderns of Trouville and Paris. They flutter about the courtyard scattering the doves, and rivalling the peacocks and flamingoes in brilliance of plumage. They make their toilettes in the low-ceilinged rooms off the vine-draped galleries, they lunch and dine in the Salle des Marmousets, or the Chambre de la Pucelle, among the marvellous carvings and tapestries and bibelots.

An American millionaire once offered M. Paul five hundred thousand dollars for the feudal dining-room just as it stood, woodwork, fireplace, glass, furnishings and all. Doubtless he had visions of sensational New York dinners framed in such setting, but the dream was a vain one. Sell a part of the inn? M. Paul would sell as readily his head or heart, but millionaires do not always understand the artist temperament.

The meals served in the treasure rooms are worthy of their setting, for the artist is a prince of inn-keepers as well as a connoisseur of parts; and some of his dishes have long been the joy of Parisian epicures and the despair of Parisian chefs. There, for example, is his poulet vallée d'Auge. One sees the name upon Parisian menus now, but one tastes the real thing only in the dining-rooms of the old inn at Dives. Here is a luncheon menu prepared for a motor party from Trouville, a menu not too long, but calculated to call up to the gourmet who has lunched in the Salle des Marmousets memories of past delights.

Potage Dives.
Melon.
Sole à la Normande.
Poulets à la vallée d'Auge.
Aloyau Hastings.
Pêches flambées à la Guillaume le Conquerant.
Gallette.
Fruits.

Oh, that fish sauce, those little chickens cooked in fresh cream, those peaches flavoured with other fruits and dropped in raspberry syrup and brandy—all eaten from a genuine fifteenth-century carved table in a room that might serve for a curio collector's dream of heaven! Verily the epicureans of Trouville and Paris should mention M. Le Remois in their prayers.