coach-house, with a billiard-room and cafe over them, and a long
balcony which runs round the building; and on the other side there
are kitchens and drinking-rooms, and over these the chamber for
meals and the bedrooms. All large, airy, and clean, though,
perhaps, not excellently well finished in their construction, and
furnished with but little pretence to French luxury. And behind the
inn there are gardens, by no means trim, and a dusty summer-house,
which serves, however, for the smoking of a cigar; and there is
generally space and plenty and goodwill. Either the linen, or the
air, or the ravine, or, as is more probable, the three combined,
have produced a business, so that the landlord of the Lion d'Or at
Granpere is a thriving man.

The reader shall at once be introduced to the landlord, and informed
at the same time that, in so far as he may be interested in this
story, he will have to take up his abode at the Lion d'Or till it be
concluded; not as a guest staying loosely at his inn, but as one who
is concerned with all the innermost affairs of the household. He
will not simply eat his plate of soup, and drink his glass of wine,
and pass on, knowing and caring more for the servant than for the
servant's master, but he must content himself to sit at the
landlord's table, to converse very frequently with the landlord's
wife, to become very intimate with the landlord's son--whether on
loving or on unloving terms shall be left entirely to himself--and
to throw himself, with the sympathy of old friendship, into all the
troubles and all the joys of the landlord's niece. If the reader be
one who cannot take such a journey, and pass a month or two without
the society of persons whom he would define as ladies and gentlemen,
he had better be warned at once, and move on, not setting foot
within the Lion d'Or at Granpere.