“So, in wandering through the same country where we, are this year, I came to the little village of Benouville, on the cliff between Yport and Etretat.  I came from Fecamp, following the coast, a high coast as straight as a wall, with its projecting chalk cliffs descending perpendicularly into the sea.  I had walked since early morning on the short grass, smooth and yielding as a carpet, that grows on the edge of the cliff.  And, singing lustily, I walked with long strides, looking sometimes at the slow circling flight of a gull with its white curved wings outlined on the blue sky, sometimes at the brown sails of a fishing bark on the green sea.  In short, I had passed a happy day, a day of liberty and of freedom from care.

“A little farmhouse where travellers were lodged was pointed out to me, a kind of inn, kept by a peasant woman, which stood in the centre of a Norman courtyard surrounded by a double row of beeches.

“Leaving the coast, I reached the hamlet, which was hemmed in by great trees, and I presented myself at the house of Mother Lecacheur.

“She was an old, wrinkled and stern peasant woman, who seemed always to receive customers under protest, with a kind of defiance.

“It was the month of May.  The spreading apple trees covered the court with a shower of blossoms which rained unceasingly both upon people and upon the grass.

“I said:  ‘Well, Madame Lecacheur, have you a room for me?’

“Astonished to find that I knew her name, she answered: 

“’That depends; everything is let, but all the same I can find out.”

“In five minutes we had come to an agreement, and I deposited my bag upon the earthen floor of a rustic room, furnished with a bed, two chairs, a table and a washbowl.  The room looked into the large, smoky kitchen, where the lodgers took their meals with the people of the farm and the landlady, who was a widow.

“I washed my hands, after which I went out.  The old woman was making a chicken fricassee for dinner in the large fireplace in which hung the iron pot, black with smoke.

“‘You have travellers, then, at the present time?’ said I to her.

“She answered in an offended tone of voice: 

“’I have a lady, an English lady, who has reached years of maturity.  She occupies the other room.’

“I obtained, by means of an extra five sous a day, the privilege of dining alone out in the yard when the weather was fine.

“My place was set outside the door, and I was beginning to gnaw the lean limbs of the Normandy chicken, to drink the clear cider and to munch the hunk of white bread, which was four days old but excellent.

“Suddenly the wooden gate which gave on the highway was opened, and a strange lady directed her steps toward the house.  She was very thin, very tall, so tightly enveloped in a red Scotch plaid shawl that one might have supposed she had no arms, if one had not seen a long hand appear just above the hips, holding a white tourist umbrella.  Her face was like that of a mummy, surrounded with curls of gray hair, which tossed about at every step she took and made me think, I know not why, of a pickled herring in curl papers.  Lowering her eyes, she passed quickly in front of me and entered the house.