Went out with my book and small paintbox to study these amazing cliffs. Mountains, whatever you choose to call them. Their sheer immensity, majesty, silence, power, overwhelm me. I fill page after page with colour notes and with the shapes of wondrous crags, pinnacles, sheer faces, cringing little trees which struggle in the fissures to survive. Like myself! I try to grab every shade on the amazing palette of colours with which every glowing hour of the day provides me. A hopeless task. The cliffs seem sometimes to smile, even beam at one, in the brilliance of noonday sun, and then scowl and threaten at sunset! The colours bewilder one: crimson, vermilion, cobalt, magenta through to deep violet. How to get these on to canvas? They change so swiftly. How did Turner paint his skies? Would that I knew the secret! I will take note after note and study this phenomenon of the light, I must catch it and set it down.

In the first flush of happiness in the village he filled a number of pages in this manner, but they were repetitive and provided nothing more than the ordinary joys, frustrations, excitements and sometimes mild triumphs of any painter. However, one entry a few weeks later provided firm information.

To Saint-Basile. A fair walk in brilliant sunshine. Nothing but woods and fallen stones. Ruined château very romantic, only the pigeonnier and a small house seem to have remained intact. Deserted, I thought, until I heard someone clanking a bucket about in the forlorn bit of ragged garden of the little house. Young woman, very good looking, cleaning windows. We spoke French, she very shy, but very pleasing, good eyes, well set, lithe figure. Said there was nowhere I could get a drink or meal nearer than back in the village. Had small car parked in the track but made no offer to give me a lift. So walked back, after making some rough sketches of the château tower and a curious length of crumbling walls, plus quite fantastic ravine splitting through the massif which looked as if the mountain had been cleft asunder, a small stream meandering, almost loitering, through great falls of rock and scree: very Salvatore Rosa, Italian Gothic. Attractive but in some way almost sinister. Am captivated and will go back again, but it is not my sort of landscape really. Perhaps I can adapt the strata and the brutality of this magnificent scar! No sign of the woman when I left, or her car. Got to the village about 2.30 p.m., too late for a meal but ate a hard-boiled egg and drank beer in the frowsty little bar.

His first meeting with Florence Prideaux, I assume. There were a few more pages dealing with colour and light and what he had or had not eaten and drunk. A very strong feeling of happiness and contentment which led, in the Agenda, to a long blank stretch.

Late August: