And then they all began going up a winding staircase which started flush from the wall to the left.
First came Madame Poulain, carrying a candle, then Monsieur Poulain with his new English clients, and, last of all, the loutish lad carrying Nancy's trunk. They had but a little way to go up the shallow slippery stairs, for when they reached the first tiny landing Madame Poulain opened a curious, narrow slit of a door which seemed, when shut, to be actually part of the finely panelled walls.
"Here's my daughter's room," said the landlady proudly. "It is very comfortable and charming."
"What an extraordinary little room!" whispered Nancy.
And Dampier, looking round him with a good deal of curiosity, agreed.
In the days when the Hôtel Saint Ange belonged to the great soldier whose name it still bears, this strange little apartment had surely been, so the English artist told himself, a powdering closet. Even now the only outside light and air came from a small square window which had evidently only recently been cut through the thick wall. In front of this aperture fluttered a bright pink curtain.
Covering three of the walls as well as the low ceiling, was a paper simulating white satin powdered with rose-buds, and the bed, draped with virginal muslin curtains, was a child's rather than a woman's bed.
"What's that?" asked Dampier suddenly. "A cupboard?"
He had noticed that wide double doors, painted in the pale brownish grey called grisaille, formed the further side of the tiny apartment.
Madame Poulain, turning a key, revealed a large roomy space now fitted up as a cupboard. "It's a way through into our bedroom, monsieur," she said smiling. "We could not of course allow our daughter to be far from ourselves."