Crossword-Solution: SIRON 5 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 5

THOMAS STEVENSON [_Chez Siron_, _Barbizon_, _Seine et Marne_, _August_ 1875.] MY DEAR MOTHER,—I have been three days at a place called Grez, a pretty and very melancholy village on the plain.

The young men got accommodations at "Siron's." This was an inn for artists, artists of slender means--and the patrons at Siron's held that all genuine artists had slender means.

The rules were not strict, which prompted Robert Louis to write the great line, "When formal manners are laid aside, true courtesy is the more rigidly exacted." Siron's was an inn, but it was really much more like an exclusive club, for if the boarders objected to any particular arrival, two days was the outside limit of his stay.

And yet no artist was ever sent away from Siron's--no matter how bad his work or how threadbare his clothes--if he was a worker; if he really tried to express beauty, all of his eccentricities were pardoned and his pot-boiling granted absolution.

But the would-be Bohemian, or the man in search of a thrill, or if in any manner the party on probation suggested that Madame Siron was not a perfect cook and Monsieur Siron was not a genuine grand duke in disguise, he was interviewed by Bailley Bodmer, the local headsman of the clan, and plainly told that escape lay in flight.