The library, of course, has the priceless treasure of Guillaume's Messe de nostre Dame, both score and CD recording; but where (oh where?) shall I find his many lovely part-songs which so captivated me even back in the remoteness of my youth when my French was small and I could understand them, if at all, only by a kind of instinctual heart-felt sympathy which, if it had been colder and more cerebral, might have been called intuition? Looks like I'm going to have to do some research. And like most of my researches, this has the feeling of leading directly back into, not away from, myself, as the many-headed suppose of all intellection. Something there is about Guillaume de Machaut, the poet and the composer, that speaks right to my heart. No wonder that John XXII (the J. Edgar Hoover of the first decades of the fourteenth century), that great hater of liberal philosophy and the dolce stil nuovo, so hated and did his best to spoil Guillaume's work.

Meanwhile, what's come in of books on reserve are: a couple of new-to-me Nero Wolfe novels, one with a copyright of 1937, which excites me (all are good, but so far the very best, I think, are the earliest); three of Gregory Maguire's, Lost, Confessions of an ugly Step-Sister, and Mirror, Mirror. I'm happy to think that I won't have time for much else: "The prospect," as Dr. Burney said as he rode over the rise into Naples, "of Pleasure."