The first months spent at the Villa were almost as bleak as Debussy claimed in his letters to Henri Vasnier. Nevertheless, five of his friends went to pick him up at Mount Rotondo, north of Rome. No doubt he found little comfort in the welcome given to him by the director, Louis Cabat, a landscape painter who had been running the institution for eight years and who was not involved with the boarders “except in an administrative way.” This second-rate artist, in fragile health, was at the end of his tenure and left a rather dilapidated Villa; there were scandals of mismanagement in addition to the well-known mediocrity of the boarders’ work. As for Mme Cabat, she viewed the boarders as “excessively arrogant, ungrateful, unfair, and at times belligerent.” Achille was of nearly the same opinion: they were stiff, convinced of their own importance, self-centered, and exchanged only catty remarks, he wrote to Vasnier.

One might at first suspect that, knowing Marie would also be reading his letters, Achille deliberately exaggerated his dark state of mind. But Vidal likewise denounced the “cliques that divide the boarders,” and his first impression there had also been that of an “enormous sadness.” In a letter to Henriette Fuchs from 16 February, Vidal confirmed that, two weeks after arriving, Debussy “was terribly bored” and “dreamed only of returning to Paris,” adding that “I'm as pleasant as my work and my taste for solitude permit me to be, but, in the end, I cannot interest myself much in such a self-absorbed person. […] I don't refuse anything that he asks of me, but I don't go out of my way to create distractions in order to entertain him.”

To his “dear parents,” Achille sent the family photo of the boarders, grouped around Cabat on the staircase that led to the Villa gardens. In this photo, Achille is seated at the top on a railing, near Marty and Vidal. He carefully marked the names of the residents and, under his own image, he wrote “the prodigal son.”