The cottage had an old wooden gallery under the upper windows, and an outside staircase gone to decay; the porch was covered with rambler roses; on the apex of the red-tiled roof pigeons white as pearls sat in strings, fluttering now to the ground, and now circling in the blue above the trees like a ring of smoke.
It was a place wherein to taste the beauty of summer to the very dregs. Dawn, coming down the pine-set drive, touching the branches with her fingers and setting the woods a-shiver, peeped into Fauchard's cottage as she never peeped into the Tuileries. Noon sat with folded hands before the rose-strewn porch, singing to herself a song which mortals heard in the croonings of the pigeons. Dusk set glow-worms, like little lamps, amidst the roses of the porch.
When we arrived, Fauchard was out, but his wife was in and received us. Madame Fauchard was over seventy; a woman as clean and bright as a new pin, active as a cat; a woman who had brought twelve children into the world, yet had worked all her life as hard as a man.
Oh, yes! she would be very glad to take a lodger, if he would be satisfied with their simple place. She showed us over the little house. It smelt sweet as lavender, and the spare room was so close to the trees that the pine-branches almost brushed the window.
"It will be lovely for him," said Eloise, when, having settled about terms with Fauchard's wife, we were taking our way back to the Pavilion. "But will he find it dull when he is not writing his music?"
"If he does," said I, "he can come over to the Pavilion and see you. Then he will love Etiolles, where he will, no doubt, find friends; and he has the woods, and Fauchard will take him out with him. Oh, no; he will not find it dull."
"Toto," said Eloise, as though suddenly remembering something, just as we reached the drawbridge.
"Yes."
"You remember the day before yesterday you said you would show me over the château the next time you came. Let us go over it now."
"Very well," I replied. "Wait for me here, and I will get the key."