Armchair View of a Norman Conquest : A PLACE IN NORMANDY by Nicholas Kilmer; Henry Holt & Co. $22.50, 255 pages

The best way to read this book is by the fire on a cold, wet winter day. You may doze from time to time. It doesn’t matter. “A Place in Normandy” makes no particular demands on the reader.

It is, rather, a comfortable book, of considerable charm. Its theme is a well-worn one: If you can’t have your own house in picturesque Normandy (or Provence or Tuscany or the Cotswolds), read a book by someone who can.

Insofar as this one has a plot, that’s it. Can the author and his wife buy the old family home deep in the Normany countryside on what once was a farm? Should they?

The structure in question dates at least, they believe, to 1493, and perhaps much earlier.

Purchased in 1920 by author Nicholas Kilmer’s maternal grandfather, Frederick Frieseke, an American Impressionist painter, it is a substantial building, with three floors and two chimneys, a veritable maze of rooms and corridors and staircases in which this reader got quite lost.

Kilmer, a painter and mystery writer who lives in Cambridge, Mass., went to Normandy for a few days one recent May to inspect the house, which he and his family had visited since 1968.

It is, as you might expect, a bit fragile in its great age and in the grip of nature, which, in Normandy, is quite damp. It seems to rain more often than not.

The first night Kilmer is there, an owl flies down the chimney and into the house, where it knocks things over. Kilmer takes the thumping noises he hears in the next room as an occasion to talk about ghosts.

As the days go by, he uses similar digressions to write about his family, the Norman neighborhood, the history of this part of France, the nature of the French people.

His visit to a hardware store in a nearby town elicits a commentary on the conservative and ordered lives of the rural French. Kilmer wanted to buy some wire netting to stuff in the chimney to keep owls out.

But self-service has been an alien concept in France.

“ ‘Ah, well,’ M. Thouroude said, ‘there are persons who specialize in such things as chimneys. Do not take matters into your own hands, Monsieur, I beg you. What you want is a couvreur (roofer) who will install a grille of the correct size at the top of your chimney.’ ”

Kilmer finally got his wire, but it was a struggle. And he does point out that self-service is now gaining in France. He himself buys many of his provisions, including wine, at the Intermarche.

The farm is in a settlement called Mesnil. It is not far from Pont l’Eve^que, about 10 miles inland from Deauville and the Channel coast.

Throughout the centuries, history has marched across Mesnil.

William the Conqueror built its first church. “Edward III of England,” Kilmer writes, “swept through, looting and pillaging, on his way from the Cotentin [peninsula] to Crecy and Calais, which those Rodin burghers turned over to him in 1346.”

Edward was followed by the Black Plague and the Hundred Years War, during which Henry V arrived. In modern times, the Germans were the invaders, and the house at Mesnil became a home for refugees, who burned some of its furniture to keep warm.

Then came the Americans and the British, this time to liberate, and to leave their dead behind in the great cemeteries of Normandy. (Kilmer’s paternal grandfather, the poet Joyce Kilmer, was killed in World War I and lies buried in France.)

To all this history, Kilmer is a genial and undemanding guide. By the time we leave him, we have a feel for the damp and lush Norman countryside, for its fat cows from which come the butter in which the food of Normandy swims, for the breathtaking song of the nightingales, for the Calvados and apple cider, and most of all for the slightly exasperating but always enduring charm of the French.