6
PARTISAN REVIEW
of course it could perfectly well be on the right. I might or might
not have a small table, or shelf, let down by ropes from the wall
just under the window, and by it a chair. I should like the ceiling
to be fairly high. The walls I have in mind are interestingly stained,
peeled, or otherwise disfigured; gray or whitewashed, blueish, yellow-
ish, even green-but
I only hope they are of no other color. The
prospect of unpainted boards with their possibilities of various grains,
can sometimes please me, or stone in slabs or irregular shapes. I run
the awful risk of a red brick cell; however, whitewashed or painted
bricks might be quite agreeable, particularly if they had not been
given a fresh coat for some time and here and there the paint had
fallen off, revealing, in an irregular but bevelled frame (made by
previous coats) the regularity of the brick-work beneath.
About the view from the window: I once went to see a room in
the
Asylum of the Mausoleum
where the painter V
had been
confined for a year, and what chiefly impressed me about this room,
and gave rise to my own thoughts on the subject, was the view. My
travelling companion and I reached the Asylum in the late afternoon
and were admitted to the grounds by a nun, but a family, living in
a small house of their own, seemed to be in charge. At our calls they
rushed out, four of them, eating their dinner and talking to us at
the same time with their mouths full. They stood in a row, and at the
end of it their little black and white kitten was busy scratching in the
dirt. It was "an animated scene." The daughter, age eight, and a
younger brother, each carrying and eating half a long loaf of bread,
were to show us around. We first went through several long, dark,
cellar-like halls, painted yellow, with the low blue doors of the cells
along one side. The floors were of stone; the paint was peeling every-
where, but the general effect was rather solemnly pretty. The room
we had come to see was on the ground floor. It might have been very
sad if it had not been for the two little children who rushed back
and forth, chewing their bites of white bread and trying to outdo each
other in telling us what everything was. But I am wandering from
my subject, which was the view from the window of this room: It
opened directly onto the kitchen-garden of the institution and beyond
it stretched the open fields. A row of cypresses stood at the right. It
was rapidly growing dark (and even as we stood there it grew too
dark to find our way out if it had not been for the children) but I can
still see as clearly as in a photograph the beautiful completeness of the
view from that window: the shaven fields, the black cypress, and the
group of swallows posed dipping in the gray sky,--only the fields
have retained their faded color.
As a view it may well have been ideal, but one must take all sorts of
