WHAT ROUVEYRE HAD NOT WRITTEN in his letter was that beyond the walls of Vence, the countryside was wild and beautiful. Villa Rêve itself was a plain, two-storey house: a pale yellow box with brown shutters, standing at the foot of the Baou mountain, covered in olive trees and wild holm oaks. It had thick walls and glass doors and windows reaching right up to the ceiling. Best of all, light spilled through those windows and everything it touched seemed glazed, varnished with gold.

Three huge hundred-year-old palm trees framed the villa and there was a garden at the front, lush with rosy-pink laurels, yuccas, cypresses, orange trees, purple irises, fire-red geraniums. The heat and the foliage seemed to press against the windows, the air laced with pine, thyme, rosemary, the perfume of grass and wild flowers.

I wanted everything to be perfect for Matisse’s arrival. I hung the red, openwork Moroccan curtains in the sitting room to filter the light and cast elaborate and lacy patterns on the floor. I hung the walls of his bedroom with Polynesian tapa cloths and Kasai textiles from the Belgian Congo. In his studio, I scraped and sanded his palette, rubbed it with linseed oil. I even set up a still life for him: half a dozen apricots, pinky-orange streaked with bronze, on a cloth so blue it might have been carved from the sky.

On one of his last days with us, André drove Patron, Sylvie and me along the coast, then north, up and up the curving roads and through pine and oak forests, past the pretty town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence perched on its hill, and finally to the walls of Vence. The gray stone walls seemed almost forbidding, hiding the town’s pleasant courtyards, seeming to discourage visitors. Matisse frowned and wriggled impatiently in his seat.

“Just around the corner,” I promised. “From the balcony you can see the town.”

He was not disappointed. As André and Sylvie carried in the last of our luggage and began unpacking, I handed Matisse his cane and walked him around his new home. He was delighted with everything, the curtains, the tapestries, all of his favourite objects—jugs and vases and china—that he painted again and again. A shallow spurt of a laugh came from his throat when he saw the easel I’d set up, the cleaned palette, an array of brushes and paints to hand.

“I see them, too,” he said, holding out his hand to me. “I see the paintings all at once, all that they can be.”

We stood together for a moment on the balcony, listening to the church bells rolling across the valley. On the horizon, just to the left of the panorama where the land met the sky, there was a small triangle visible of the now distant sea.