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… Yes, this is where I stayed pendant la guerre. It's the quietest hôtel I ever was in. I don't think tourists come at all. There are funny rules about not doing one's washing or fetching in one's cuisine from dehars which suggest a not rich an' grand clientèle. What is nice too is one can get a tray in the evening if one doesn't want to go out. Fearfully good what I imagine is provincial cooking —all in big bowls, piping hot, brought up by the garçon who is a v. nice fellow in a red veskit and white apron and a little grey cloth cap! I think some English traveller left it in a cupboard about 1879. The salt and pepper stand, by the way, is a little glass motor car. Salt is driver and Pepper Esquire is master in the back seat— the dark fiery one of the two, so different to plain old Salt… What a good fellow he is, though!

Yesterday the wind was nor' north by north by east by due east by due east-north-east. If you know a colder one, it was there, too. I had to thaw a one-franc piece to get the change out of it. (That is a joke for your Sunday paper only!)

I've just read you on Bozzy. You awe me very much by your familiarity with simply all those people. You've always such a vast choice of sticks in the hall-stand for when you want to go walking and even a vaster choice of umbrellas—while I go all unprotected and exposed with only a fearful sense of the heavens lowering.

Mary! There's a most beautiful magpie on my roof. Are magpies still wild? Ah me, how little one knows!