Accordingly, I bid a hasty farewell to my students and to the Boston winter and booked passage on a steamer to Morocco, where I passed the winter and early spring. By mid-April I was anxious to get back to writing, yet in no particular hurry to return to the U.S. One of my songs was having some popular success, and my agent had written several times, asking me to send him a tape as soon as possible. During the three months in Morocco, I had had a fine time but hadn’t written a note, so I decided to settle somewhere for the summer and to devote the time to work.

On April 19, I flew from Casablanca to Lyon, France, where a woman I knew had been spending the winter. After looking for several days, we came across an ad in the International Herald Tribune that looked ideal: a summer home, surrounded by oaks and vineyards, with a brook and arbor, near Valence, which is about halfway between Lyon and Marseilles.

I took the train the next day and walked out to the address, a little more than a mile from town. It was an old white adobe house, not too large, and extremely well kept. The owner was a Madame Giraud-Neuilly, a woman nearing seventy whose family, she said, had lived in the house for nearly a century. We spent the afternoon talking and drinking beer. I found her delightful.

Every one of my friends had warned me to beware of the French-that they were a haughty lot, supercilious, and unfriendly. But if Madame Giraud-Neuilly were any example, my friends had been wrong. I spoke French passably well, and that certainly didn’t hurt our relationship. At about 5:00, her husband, Jacques Neuilly, came home, and they invited me to stay for dinner. He showed me the wine cellar, which they hadn’t used since le père had died in the ’30s, saying I was welcome to use it for storage if I cared to clean it up. We worked out the details after dinner, and by the time I returned to Lyon the next day, I had a house. Ten days later I moved in.