honeysuckle, vines and clematis.

The house itself stands in the middle of this highest garden, above a
vine-covered flight of steps, with an arched doorway beneath that
leads to vast cellars hollowed out in the rock. All about the dwelling
trellised vines and pomegranate-trees (the _grenadiers_, which give the
name to the little close) are growing out in the open air. The front
of the house consists of two large windows on either side of a very
rustic-looking house door, and three dormer windows in the roof--a
slate roof with two gables, prodigiously high-pitched in proportion to
the low ground-floor. The house walls are washed with yellow color;
and door, and first-floor shutters, all the Venetian shutters of the
attic windows, all are painted green.

Entering the house, you find yourself in a little lobby with a crooked
staircase straight in front of you. It is a crazy wooden structure,
the spiral balusters are brown with age, and the steps themselves
take a new angle at every turn. The great old-fashioned paneled
dining-room, floored with square white tiles from Chateau-Regnault, is
on your right; to the left is the sitting-room, equally large, but here
the walls are not paneled; they have been covered instead with a
saffron-colored paper, bordered with green. The walnut-wood rafters
are left visible, and the intervening spaces filled with a kind of
white plaster.

The first story consists of two large whitewashed bedrooms with stone
chimney-pieces, less elaborately carved than those in the rooms
beneath. Every door and window is on the south side of the house, save
a single door to the north, contrived behind the staircase to give
access to the vineyard. Against the western wall stands a