Once through the gates, any idea of dutifully seeing the catalogue of priceless museum pieces crumbles. Alberto Giacometti's Cat is sometimes stalking along the edge of the grass; MirA?'s Egg smiles above a pond and his totemed Fork is outlined against the sky. It's hard not to be bewitched by the Calder mobile swinging over watery tiles, by LA©ger's Flowers, Birds and a Bench on a sunlit rough stone wall, by Zadkine's and Arp's metallic forms hovering between the pine trunks, or by the clanking tubular fountain by Pol Bury. The building itself is a superb piece of architecture: multi-levelled and flooded with daylight, making inside and outside hard to distinguish, and the collection it houses of works by Braque, MirA?, Chagall, LA©ger and Matisse, along with more recent artists and the young up-and-comings, is fabulous. Not all the works are exhibited at any one time, and during the summer, when the main annual exhibition is mounted, none are on show, apart from those that make up the decoration of the building.

The other famous sight in this extremely busy tourist village is the hotel-restaurant La Colombe d'Or on place du GA©nA©ral-de-Gaulle (tel 04.93.32.80.02, fax 04.93.32.77.78; over 800F/122; closed Nov-Christmas), where if you are prepared to splash out 400F/61 for a mediocre meal or more than 1300F/198 for a room, you can enjoy the Braques, Picassos, Matisses and Bonnards that hang from the walls, most of which were acquired by the establishment in the lean post-World War I years in lieu of the artists' unpaid bills.