With a bit of falling snow, the Seine looks exactly like a winter scene by Albert Marquet. But it didn’t snow for very long in Paris when I was there this past February, temperatures were good enough for aimless strolling, and the sky was as marvelously changeable as in May, going in a moment from oyster gray to delicate smoky blue.

I arrived in Paris a week after “Le Dernier Picasso” had opened at the Pompidou Center, and went over to the museum on my first evening—it stays open until ten. A good-sized crowd was moving slowly through the big show of work from Picasso’s last twenty years, and there was drama to the occasion. Only now, fifteen years after Picasso’s death, has his late work finally arrived in strength in the city he came to nearly ninety years ago. I was glad to be in Paris for the occasion. I’d been in Europe in the summer of 1970, when the late Picasso paintings were first shown at the Palais des Papes in Avignon, but had been too immersed in an eighteen-year-old’s opaque misery to know or care. It was a decade before I got back to France—older and, I trust, better able to seize what came my way. There were still opportunities for contact with the generations that had made Paris the first city of twentieth-century art. My wife, the painter Deborah Rosenthal, admires André Masson’s work enormously, and in 1980 she managed to arrange a visit