"But what will you give us for dinner?" "Ah! that is my business." "How is it your business?" "Because, if I do not satisfy you, you will go elsewhere." "But there is nowhere else to go!" "Which is as good as to say that you will put up with what I have got, my good friend.... Come, off to your room!" I began to adapt myself to the manners of Mother Oseraie: it was what is called in the _morale en action_ and in collections of anecdotes "la franchise villageoise" (country frankness). I should much have preferred "l'urbanité parisienne" (Parisian urbanity); but Mother Oseraie was built on other lines, and I was obliged to take her as she was. I went up to my room: it was quadrilateral, with lime-washed walls, a deal floor, a walnut table, a wooden bed painted red, and a chimney-piece with a shaving-glass instead of a looking-glass, and, for ornament, two blue elaborately decorated glass vases; furthermore there was the spray of orange-blossom which Mother Oseraie had had when she was twenty years of age, as fresh as on the day it was plucked, owing to the shade, which kept it from contact with the air. Calico curtains to the window and linen sheets on the bed, both sheets and curtains as white as the snow, completed the furnishings. I went into the adjoining room; it was furnished on the same lines, and had, besides, a convex-shaped chest of drawers inlaid with different coloured woods which savoured of the bygone days of du Barry, and which, if restored, regilded, repaired, would have looked better in the studio of one of the three painters Mother Oseraie had just mentioned. The view from both windows was magnificent. From mine, the valley of the Touque could be seen sinking away towards Pont-l'Évêque, which is surrounded by two wooded hills; from my companion's, the sea, flecked with little fishing-boats, their sails white against the horizon, waiting to return with the tide. Chance had indeed favoured me in giving me the room which looked on to the valley: if I had had the sea, with its waves, and gulls, and boats, its horizon melting into the sky always before me, I should have found it impossible to work. I had completely forgotten the dinner when I heard Mother Oseraie calling me-- "I say, monsieur poet!" "Well! mother!" I replied. "Come! dinner is ready."