and take out the keys. Then I come into the salon and lock the door
after me, and push two of the biggest bolts you ever saw.

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