“Are you aware, that my bathroom is papered with the poems of my father’s penultimate mistress, Louise de Vilmorin?”

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 107.  

At this point we rather surprisingly fast-forward to the summer of 2006 and to the unlikely location of Port Erin, Isle of Man. Port Erin is the scene of an annual arts festival, at which—for I think the third time—I had been invited to lecture. I was accommodated most comfortably in the Ocean Castle Hotel, in a beautiful room overlooking the bay. Its en suite bathroom was papered in a rather unattractive color of old parchment, with a grayish design of which I took no particular notice—until I started brushing my teeth before bed. I then realized to my utter astonishment, that the grayish design was in fact an alternation of two four-line poems by Louise in her own exquisite and very distinctive handwriting which I knew almost as well as my own. The next morning I went to see the proprietor, who happened to be French. “Are you aware,” I asked him, “that my bathroom is papered with the poems of my father’s penultimate mistress, Louise de Vilmorin?” He shook his head. The paper had been there longer than he had. So who put it there, and why? I should dearly love to know.