Until to-night Lemois and I have dined in the kitchen. You would too could you see it. Not by any manner of means the sort of an interior the name suggests, but one all shining brass, rare pottery, copper braziers, and resplendent pewter, reflecting the dancing blaze of a huge open hearth with a spit turned by the weight of a cannon ball fired by the British, and on which--the spit, not the ball--are roasted the joints, chickens, and game for which the Inn is famous, Pierre, the sole remaining chef--there are three in the season--ineffectually cudgelling his French pate under his short-cropped, shoe-brush hair for some dish better than the last. Because, however, of the immediate gathering of the clan, I have abandoned the kitchen and have shifted my quarters to the Marmouset. Over it up a steep, twisted staircase with a dangling rope for banisters is my bedroom, the Chambre de Cure, next to the Chambre de Officier--where the gluttonous king tossed on his royal bed (a true story, I am told, with all the details set forth in the State Archives of France). Mine has a high-poster with a half lambrequin, or bed curtain, that being all Lemois could find, and he being too honest an antiquary to piece it out with modern calico or chintz. My guests, of course, will take their pick of the adjoining rooms--Madame Sévigné's, Grèvin's, the Chambre du Roi, and the others--and may thank their stars that it is not a month back. Then, even if they had written ten days ahead, they would have been received with a shrug--one of Lemois' most engaging shrugs tinged with grief--at his inability to provide better accommodation for their comfort, under which one could have seen a slight trace of suppressed glee at the prosperity of the season. They would then doubtless have been presented with a massive key unlocking the door of a box of a bedroom over the cake-shop, or above the apothecary's, or next to the man who mends furniture--all in the village of Dives itself. And now a word about the Inn itself--even before I tell you of the Arm-Chair or the man who sat in it or the others of the clan who listened and talked back. Not the low-pitched, smothered-in-ivy Kings Arms you knew on the Thames, with its swinging sign, horse-block, and the rest of it; nor the queer sixteenth-century tavern in that Dutch town on the Maas, with its high wainscoting, leaded window-panes, and porcelain stove set out with pewter flagons--not that kind of an inn at all. This one bolsters up one corner of a quaint little town in Normandy; is faced by walls of sombre gray stone loop-holed with slits of windows, topped by a row of dormers, with here and there a chimney, and covers an area as large as a city block, the only break in its monotony being an arched gate-way in which swing a pair of big iron-bound doors. These are always open, giving the passer-by a glimpse of the court within.