d distinguished women.

"But what one loves most amid all these varied adventures is the country,
the woods, the rising of the sun, the twilight, the moonlight. These are,
for the painter, honeymoon trips with Nature. One is alone with her in
that long and quiet association. You go to sleep in the fields, amid
marguerites and poppies, and when you open your eyes in the full glare of
the sunlight you descry in the distance the little village with its
pointed clock tower which sounds the hour of noon.

"You sit down by the side of a spring which gushes out at the foot of an
oak, amid a growth of tall, slender weeds, glistening with life. You go
down on your knees, bend forward and drink that cold, pellucid water
which wets your mustache and nose; you drink it with a physical pleasure,
as though you kissed the spring, lip to lip. Sometimes, when you find a
deep hole along the course of these tiny brooks, you plunge in quite
naked, and you feel on your skin, from head to foot, as it were, an icy
and delicious caress, the light and gentle quivering of the stream.

"You are gay on the hills, melancholy on the edge of ponds, inspired when
the sun is setting in an ocean of blood-red clouds and casts red
reflections or the river. And at night, under the moon, which passes
across the vault of heaven, you think of a thousand strange things which
would never have occurred to your mind under the brilliant light of day.

"So, in wandering through the same country where we, are this year, I
came to the little village of Benouville, on the cliff between Yport and
Etretat. I came from Fecamp, following the coast, a high coast as
straight as a wall, with its projecting chalk cliffs descending
perpendicularly into the sea. I had walked since early morning on the
short grass, smooth and yielding as a carpet, that grows on the edge of
the cliff. And, singing lustily, I walked with long strides, looking
sometimes at the slow circling flight of a gull with its white curved
wings outlined on the blue sky, sometimes at the brown sails of a fishing
bark on the green sea. In short, I had passed a happy day, a day of
liberty and of freedom from care.

"A little farmhouse where travellers were lodged was pointed out to me, a
kind of inn, kept by a peasant woman, which stood in the centre of a
Norman courtyard surrounded by a double row of beeches.

"Leaving the coast, I reached the hamlet, which was hemmed in by great
trees, and I presented my