A small _salon_ opened out of the little verandah room in which our lunch was served, a sitting-room replete with photograph frames, crochet antimacassars, oil paintings, and green velvet furniture, and blocked in one corner by the altogether astonishing circumstances of a bed, whose sumptuous draperies suggested the proscenium of a puppet show. The window looked down into a precipitous street at the back of the hotel, and, craning out, the pointed arch of an old gateway was visible at the top of the hill between the crooked lines of houses, the Porte de la Cadène, so a little old-fashioned guide-book to St. Emilion informed us. There was a long explanation of the name, from which we gathered that it had something to say to the bar that once fastened the gate, but what exactly it was not given to our poor intelligence to discover. Whenever the guide-book felt that it was becoming unbefittingly lucid, it threw in a few words of patois, or early French in inverted commas, and went full speed ahead again, secure from pursuit. The photographs that thronged the room, like Ruskin’s pine trees elsewhere referred to, ‘on barren heights and inaccessible ledges, in quiet multitudes,’ proved a more attractive study than the guide-book, and we travelled slowly round the collection till we came upon a cabinet-sized head of a young lady with disordered hair, _pince-nez_, a swan-like length of throat, and an evening dress of which only a single row of Valenciennes trimming showed above the lower edge of the photograph. We sat down before it with a gasp, as we recognised in this ethereal being one of our late cooks, and at the same instant Madame A. made the discovery of a dwarf easel on the floor at the foot of the bed, on which a still larger portrait of a lady, in the dress of a Russian princess, with an inscription to the effect that she was Madame Dussaut herself, owner of the hotel, and mother of the two peeresses who had served for us our admirable _déjeuner_. We retired after this, and said that it would be better to go away and see the town before we found out that these people were closely related to the Bourbons, which seemed the next thing to expect.