Rose-Yellow FaçadesRose-Yellow Façades

PLATE THIRTY — Atlantes, Pavillion de Vendôme

I COULD COUNT on two or three walks across the Old Town to see Anne and Mary as they got out of school at noon, and then in the late afternoon. We would go to the Deux Garçons or the Glacier together for an ice or sandwich: that would take two hours in almost every day.

Then coffee and reading in bed would use another half-hour or so each morning.

Slow roamings took another two hours or three . . . drifting along the streets to listen to the fountains and ruminate upon the proportions, of the rose-yellow façades, three-to-six-to-nine, and the cornices, and the corner Madonnas, and the caryatids turning breasts and backs, male and sometimes female, to my gaze; and the open markets in three squares and occasionally along the narrow streets; and the libraries and museums: all these accustomed me to my invisibility.

. . . Talk is as steady as the fountains themselves, in Aix. It goes on everywhere, sometimes noisy but seldom harsh . . .

PLATE THIRTY-ONE — Tête-á-Tête at the Market

PLATE THIRTY-TWO — Aix Food Market

A personal map, one like mine of Aix, has places on it which no printer could indicate, for they are clear only as a smell, or a sound, or a moment of light or dark . . .

There is the Aix smell, made up of the best air I have ever breathed, purified by all the fountains and the tall trees and the stalls piled with sweet fresh vegetables in the open markets. I feel quite sure that if I could be teleported, blind, to a dozen places I have known, that smell would be the truest one to my inner nose . . .

We seemed to grow like water-flowers under the growing buds of plane trees, in the flowing tides of the street.

PLATE THIRTY-THREE — By Café de l’Horloge

The Tour des Augustins is very worn now and the fine ironwork belfry is silent, but the color of it in the sunset is deathless.

PLATE THIRTY-FOUR — Tour des Augustins