We got here (Caudebec) yesterday soon after four.  Our inn looks right on to the Seine, and is as old nearly as the one at Vernon, but fortunately beautifully clean.  Only you have to get at your room through somebody else’s.  Mine is beyond the Baronne’s and Madame de Vermandoise gets at hers through the Comtesse de Tournelle’s.  Hers is the most ridiculous place, with a red curtain hanging across so that sometimes it can be turned into two; and such a thing happened last night.  “Antoine” went in with the Comte de Tournelle to help him to shut the window, as Madame de Tournelle couldn’t, when a gust of wind blew the door shut, and whether there was a spring lock or not I don’t know, but any way nothing would induce it to open again.  So there they were.  We had stayed up rather late; the landlord and the servants were in bed.  They rattled and shook and pushed, but to no purpose.

[Sidenote:  A Misadventure]

There was only a board partition between my room and Madame de Vermandoise’s, so I could hear everything, and Tournelle said there was nothing for it but that “Antoine” would have to sleep in the other bed in her room.  She screamed a great deal, and they all laughed very much, and all talked at once, so I suppose that was why I could not understand quite everything they were saying.  At last the Baronne rushed into my room to discover what the noise was.  She looks perfectly odd when going to bed; a good deal seemed to have come off; she is as thin as a lath; and on the dressing table was such a sweet lace nightcap, with lovely baby curls sewed to its edge, and when she put that on she did look sweet.  It isn’t that she has no hair herself, it’s thick and brown; but she explained that having to wear a nightcap because of ear-ache, she found it more becoming with the curls.  I suppose it is on account of the waiters coming in with the breakfast that they have to be so particular in France how they look in bed.

But to go on about the door.  We sent the Baronne’s maid and Agnes to try and find the landlord; but, after exploring untold depths below and above, they only succeeded in unearthing Hippolyte.  He came up from his bed looking just like that very clever Missing Link that was at Barnum’s, do you remember?—­the one that sometimes was an Irishwoman, and could do housework in a cage by itself.  I don’t know exactly what Hippolyte had on, but it ended up with a petticoat of red and black plaid, and a pair of grey linen trousers over his shoulders; his whiskers and hair were standing straight on end, and his shaved bits were bluer than ever at night.  He said a good deal of the French equivalent of, “Here’s a pretty kettle of fish,” and shrugged so that I was afraid the petticoat would slip off; and finally, when all the pushing and pulling had no effect on the door, he said people must resign themselves to the accidents of travel, and as there were four beds, he did not see that they had too much to complain of.