the chapel

So now today early, Matthew and Theodore have set out, armed with a baguette and a bar of chocolate and a water bottle, up the road and up the hill  to the chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Anges, the chapel, to ring the bell so all can hear the arrival, armed also with a little hammer to knock of pieces of rock in case they are interesting-- they will perhaps come down by the Roman Road, very grown over in places, but all the same, historic -- our cabanon has a roman wall, and everywhere feels laden with tradition. Even our meals under the trees downstairs, and even our drinks upstairs overlooking the field -- all of it. And there's a lot of it!

tacking up

Right now, my son Mathew and his son Theodore are tacking up moustiquaire (you know, against the mostquitos) in the old window openings and it is very familial and usefully grand and grandly useful.
At our large party,  two nights ago, when it was pouring and we huddled inside, Matthew sang, and it was glorious. So  forgot we had lots of wine downstairs, rose from Aix in honor of Cezanne and white from Cassis in honor of all the Bloomsbury folk who stayed there: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Quentin Bell and the others -- in Cassis, staying once in the summer  at the Camargo Foundation,  I found, under an oilcloth table mat, a table painted by someone in the Omega workshop, all very delightful, and now it is in a bank somewhere. Discoveries are of all sorts, over, under, around...

Today, under the sun, glinting off the leaves, i am glad to have finished my piece for the Guardian on Matisse and Picasso and Montmartre and modernism, about Sue Roe's smashing book

Back to Pascal, whom I think I really never left, after Yale, where I loved 2 faces: that of Andre Breton (tbecause of which  I went "into" surrealism), and Pascal's death mask -- like that of Artaud, said my friend Lee Hallman..

off to meet a bunch of Scottish-British friends from , it would seem, always. Always is nice.