The August of 1872 found Browning and his sister once more in France. This time, however, not at Croisic but Saint Aubin--the primitive hamlet on the Norman coast to which he had again been drawn by his attachment to Joseph Milsand. At a neighbouring village was another old friend, Miss Thackeray, who has left a charming account of the place. They walked along a narrow cliff-path: "The sea-coast far below our feet, the dried, arid vegetation of the sandy way, the rank yellow snapdragon lining the paths.... We entered the Brownings' house. The sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond--a fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table." A misunderstanding, now through the good offices of Milsand happily removed, had clouded the friendship of Browning and Miss Thackeray; and his joyous revulsion of heart has left characteristic traces in the poem which he dedicated to his "fair friend." The very title is jest--an outflow of high spirits in an exuberantly hearty hand-shake--"British man with British maid"; the country of the "Red-cotton Night-cap" being in fact, of course, the country which her playful realism had already nicknamed "White-cotton Night-cap Country," from the white lawn head-dress of the Norman women. Nothing so typical and everyday could set Browning's imagination astir, and among the wilderness of white, innocent and flavourless, he caught at a story which promised to be "wrong and red and picturesque," and vary "by a splotch the righteous flat of insipidity."