I've been wanting to write to you for days, but this morning is really my first free time and the first time that I have been anything like settled since leaving England. page 35 M. went back to London yesterday. Perhaps that will tell you a little what kind of a time we have had. I could write books about it until I died and then not finish the telling. It has been so funny and so tragic and so utterly unlike what we expected or imagined.

Marseilles became colder and colder. I got really very ill there with fever,¹ and spent my time drinking hot milk with sugar and orange flower water in the cafés and then keeping up my strength (!) with little glasses of brandy. Both of us got poisoned, I think from eating mussels and pistachio ices at the same time. The red stone floors started my rheumatism again. And everybody cheated Murry at sight. Even before he bought anything they put up the price.

So we decided to go to Cassis-sur-mer for at least a couple of months. We found there a very comfortable-looking hotel kept by a fat woman called ‘Tante’ and two nieces. We had a huge room with four windows to get the lovely sun and read with great satisfaction in every single guide-book that Cassis was the first “station d'hiver sur la côte d'azur.”

The day we arrived the mistral was blowing. I put my head out of the train window and it blew the trimming off my hat….