RIVIERA: The Rise and Rise of the Cote d’Azur
by Jim RingJ Murray £17.99 pp255 THE FRENCH RIVIERA: A Literary Guide for Travellers
by Ted Jones
I B Tauris £17.95 pp244
“One can’t live solely on sunshine and the blue of the Mediterranean,” grumbled James Joyce’s wife, Nora, missing the subtler nuances of life in Paris. But brilliant skies, a balmy climate and a sparkling sea had already made the French Riviera a favourite winter resort for the English in the 19th century. Many of these visitors were consumptives, who had yet to learn that the bracing alpine air was better for their health; others welcomed the chance to escape from damp and drizzle to a coastline that was still unfashionable enough to be cheap and where French need never be spoken.
Today, it is hard to imagine that the Riviera was ever cheap, or that the English were so entrenched there that foreign residents of all nationalities were lumped together by the bemused natives as “les Anglais”. Languid Menton was the top spot for the genteel and the sick; Nice, favoured by royalty and aristocrats, became Brighton abroad, a city for socialising, gossip and lovemaking. Monte Carlo, still isolated in the 1860s, was transformed 10 years later when a brilliant entrepreneur, François Blanc, capitalised on a long-overdue improvement to the coast road and turned a tiny principality into a tax-haven fed by tourism and gambling. In 1863, the casino had only one winter visitor; when Blanc died in 1877, more than 300,000 people were queuing up to risk their fortunes at the most successful casino in Europe. Monte Carlo has never looked back.
Americans discovered the Riviera in the early 1920s and, following Coco Chanel’s latest look — a face burnt brown as a sailor’s — sailed, swam and toasted themselves to crisps while providing a market for an increasing number of overblown hotels. Here, the Riviera’s former reputation for a grimly English cuisine of boiled beef and milk puddings was swiftly replaced by highballs and the best cooking that imported Parisian chefs could supply — at a price. Looking up to the skyline of the opulent new Negresco hotel, newcomers admired the white cupolas that had been modelled, they were told, on the breasts of a celebrated courtesan, La Belle Otero.
Believe that, and you’ll believe anything. Henri Negresco was a shrewd operator who knew just how to garner publicity. Jim Ring, unfortunately, is ready to believe not only this but every hoary tale that is repeated in each new book about the Riviera. Ring has already written two excellent books; this time he seems to be on autopilot and without much editorial input from the once glorious house of John Murray. Sinclair Lewis, for example, gets a look-in as the author of those two well-known novels, Babbit and Dodswell (sic). Scott Fitzgerald was writing, we are assured, “without irony” when he lamented that there was no one at Antibes, “except me, Zelda, the Valentinos, the Murphys, Mistinguett, Rex Ingram, Dos Passos, Alice Terry, the Macleishes, Charlie Brackett, Maude Kahn, Esther Murphy, Marguerite Namara, E Phillips Oppenheim, Mannes the violinist, Floyd Dell, Max and Crystal Eastman, former premier Orlando, Etienne de Beaumont — just a real place to rough it, an escape from all the world”.
Without irony? Etienne de Beaumont was the most celebrated party-giver of the time. Mistinguett was France’s favourite home-grown music-hall star. E Phillipps Oppenheim was one of the biggest bestsellers of the era. And Rudolph Valentino, whose sadly premature death in 1926 would attract 100,000 mourners? No one at Antibes? Fitzgerald was, of course, joking.
Ring’s inability to register the humour in Fitzgerald’s swanky letter comes as no surprise in a book that reads like a hastily executed synthesis of familiar material, written with no great affection for the Riviera and with no hint that its author has spent more time there than was strictly necessary. Happily, Ted Jones has written a very different guide to the area.
Thoughtful, entertaining and vivid, Jones’s The French Riviera sweeps us along the coast as elegantly as one of the magnificent automobiles in which pioneer drivers tested the nerves of their passengers as they twisted along the heights of the splendid road built for Napoleon. Jones has spent time talking to local archivists and historians, trekking in the footsteps of his literary heroes, visiting their former homes. Through his inquisitive eyes, we see Hyeres as it was in the days of Edith Wharton (whose garden there is still lovingly maintained) and Robert Louis Stevenson, who said that he was never happier than when he lived there at the Chalet de la Solitude, still ravishing despite its view of a busy airport. Cap Ferrat comes to life as Jones describes Nietzsche strolling along its old donkey track before he climbed the cliff to the eyrie of Eze, pondering how to conclude And Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Ugly and built-up though much of the Riviera has become, a carefully picked view can still take you back to the days when the Romans built their summer villas on cliffs overlooking a sunlit sea. Jones’s book is sad only because it reminds us of how much of the Riviera’s tranquil beauty has been sacrificed in the cause of bringing in tourists. “Sun, roses, fruit, warmth. We bathe and bask,” wrote Aldous Huxley during his happy years at the sleepy and sweetly misspelt Villa Huley. He spoke for a multitude of writers who had discovered that work need not be all drudgery.
“It is hot, the sun is shining, the windows of my bedroom are wide open — and those of my soul,” strikes a more Russian note. Chekhov wrote this when he was living in Nice and finishing The Three Sisters. Virginia Woolf, staying with her sister at Cassis, found inspiration for one of her finest works, The Moths, as she watched them fluttering around an oil-lamp at dusk. Kipling, less elegantly, penned a limerick about the young ladies of Nice, while Harpo Marx enjoyed George Bernard Shaw’s company so much that he offered his services as a regular chauffeur during Shaw’s Riviera visit in 1928.
Connolly, Fitzgerald, Conrad, Colette, Cocteau, D H Lawrence, Maugham, Maupassant, Merimée, Nabokov: the list of literary lovers of the Riviera almost beggars belief. It is delightful to have their eloquent, acerbic, lyrical responses collected here, in a book that deserves to become a favourite with all travellers to France’s most lovely, most ravaged and most avaricious resorts. Perhaps Henri Negresco was shrewder than even he knew when he claimed that the hotel’s domes represented the breasts of one of France’s most expensive whores.
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