After which I hang up the keys, which are as big as the historic key of the Bastille, which you may remember to have seen at the Musee Carnavalet.  Then I close and bolt all the shutters downstairs.  I do it systematically every night—­because I promised not to be foolhardy.  I always grin, and feel as if it were a scene in a play.  It impresses me so much like a tremendous piece of business—­dramatic suspense—­which leads up to nothing except my going quietly upstairs to bed.

When it is all done I feel as I used to in my strenuous working days, when, after midnight, all the rest of the world—­my little world—­being calmly asleep, I cuddled down in the corner of my couch to read;—­the world is mine!

Never in my life—­anywhere, under any circumstances—­have I been so well taken care of.  I have a femme de menage—­a sort of cross between a housekeeper and a maid-of-all-work.  She is a married woman, the wife of a farmer whose house is three minutes away from mine.  My dressing-room window and my dining-room door look across a field of currant bushes to her house.  I have only to blow on the dog’s whistle and she can hear.  Her name is Amelie, and she is a character, a nice one, but not half as much of a character as her husband—­her second.  She is a Parisian.  Her first husband was a jockey, half Breton, half English.  He died years ago when she was young:  broke his neck in a big race at Auteuil.

She has had a checkered career, and lived in several smart families before, to assure her old age, she married this gentle, queer little farmer.  She is a great find for me.  But the thing balances up beautifully, as I am a blessing to her, a new interest in her monotonous life, and she never lets me forget how much happier she is since I came here to live.  She is very bright and gay, intelligent enough to be a companion when I need one, and well-bred enough to fall right into her proper place when I don’t.

Her husband’s name is Abelard.  Oh, yes, of course, I asked him about Heloise the first time I saw him, and I was staggered when the little old toothless chap giggled and said, “That was before my time.”  What do you think of that?  Every one calls him “Pere Abelard,” and about the house it is shortened down to “Pere.”  He is over twenty years older than Amelie—­well along in his seventies.  He is a native of the commune—­was born at Pont-aux-Dames, at the foot of the hill, right next to the old abbaye of that name.  He is a type familiar enough to those who know French provincial life.  His father was a well-to-do farmer.  His mother was the typical mother of her class.  She kept her sons under her thumb as long as she lived.  Pere Abelard worked on his father’s farm.  He had his living, but never a sou in his pocket.  The only diversion he ever had was playing the violin, which some passer in the commune taught him.  When his parents died, he and his brothers sold the old place at Pont-aux-Dames to Coquelin, who was preparing to turn the historic old convent into a maison de retraite for aged actors, and he came up here on the hill and bought his present farm in this hamlet, where almost every one is some sort of a cousin of his.