"But why?"
"Well," I replied, "because I have no family here."
"You have no domestic?"
I explained that I had a femme de ménage.
"Where is she?"
I said that at that moment she was probably at Couilly, but that ordinarily when she was not here, she was at her own home.
"Where is that?" was the next question.
So I took them out on to the terrace again, and showed them
Amélie's house.
They stared solemnly at it, as if they had never seen it before, and then one of them turned on me quickly, as if to startle me. "Vous êtes une femme de lettres?"
"It is so written down in my papers," I replied.