This afternoon I wandered into the Palais Royale.

Monumenta under the glass-roofed gallery of the Grand Palais

During a visit to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
I feasted on toiles from the 1930's.

My favorite room contained these portraits among others

from Fauve painter Kees van Dongen,

Edouard Vuillard,

and Pierre Bonnard.

One like this also hangs in my yellow bathroom where I pass time dreaming of a claw footed bathtub, like hers, filled with torrid water I can float in.

We drove through the Picardie forest to get there, little more than an hour to completely displace, city to countryside. Riders were out wearing french horns draped across their chests, horses in gallop with a pack of hunting dogs trailing behind. They tipped their tall hats as we rolled past the storybook scene.

Gothic flourishes introduce nightmarish creatures to keep guard of Chateau Pierrefonds.

The rooms were intricately painted with animals, dancing goddesses and plants in a rainbow of contrasting colors and stripes, though the castle was nearly bare of furniture or other embellishment.

Admission is free until August 2008 while the French government monitors attendance so visit before then.

Green leaves cling to skelleton trees as another season turns.

On a rare sunny day when the Versailles fountains are erupting into rainbows and the sky is painted with fluffy white clouds, opera music wafts through the air.

Water streams like icing on a tiered wedding cake from the Bassin de Latone

and the King's garden is in full bloom.

From his somber rented chamber at Ravoux Inn in the Paris suburb of Auvers sur Oise, Vincent Van Gough ended his life in suicide with a shotgun bullet to the chest.

Inside the cemetary's stone walls he lies alongside his beloved brother Theo, surrounded by countryside blanketed in wheat.