Another visitor to St. Paul de Mausole, Margaret from Maine, saw this scene of us and snapped it with her phone.  What a good eye and quick fingers she has, and how gracious of her to share the photo with me.

After a lazy French toast morning, we headed out. The day was heating up as we drove past waving wheat fields, into flowered towns, through tunnels of tall plane trees. The air shimmered hot under thick blue skies, swirly olive trees and a pulsing yellow sun, all churning together in short strokes by Vincent’s intense brushes.

In Saint-Remy-de-Provence we parked right outside the Romanesque monastery of Saint Paul de Mausole, then and still housing a psychiatric hospital where Vincent Van Gogh had himself admitted in 1889 for a year.

The serenity the troubled artist found at St. Paul still pervades the ancient buildings and grounds. Reproductions of some of his wondrous paintings are installed throughout and just outside of the site, some right where he would have painted them: the olive orchard, the wheat field, St. Paul’s gardens, the peak of the Alpilles that really does have two holes through it.

We lingered along the long entrance walkway. We paused at Vincent’s statue. We strolled around the elegant cloister.

We climbed a broad staircase to an exhibit on psychiatry in the 19th century…

Ward in the Hospital in Arles (Vincent Van Gogh)

…and the very room the artist lived in.  Overlooking a small wheat field, the monastery garden and the Arles mountains beyond, its window is still barred.

Behind the cool, thick-walled monastic buildings, the garden was hot and still.

The wheat field is fallow this year but long rows of lavender, just starting to bloom, were captivating with scent and hue.

The barred upper window in the center is Vincent’s room

Poppies gleamed in cheery clusters.

More reproductions of Vincent’s paintings lined a path. Maurice and I pulled our hats low and, braving the blazing noonday sun, walked around the garden admiring architecture and verdure from every angle. I examined every single art image on display, sighing that none of the originals lived anywhere in the vicinity. At the wall at the far end of the garden we found a bench in a strip of shade in front of a shed. Maurice sketched and I took pictures. The only motion in the sultry silence was little white butterflies flitting through the lavender.

We dawdled until the gift shop was open again, acquired a few remembrances, then meandered back out the way we had come. The street opposite the entrance was lined with trees and convenient slabs of stone, so we got out our lunch.

After almost two weeks we finally had a system for keeping the drinks cold–too good to be true in the 98-degree heat!–so you know it’s time to go home.