Once Upon a Time World E-Book

Jonathan Miles

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'Phenomenal... Utterly absorbing' Sunday Times, 'Book of the Week' '[A] fabulous romp of a book'***** Mail on Sunday A Financial Times 'Book to Read in 2023' In 1835, Lord Brougham founded Cannes, introducing bathing and the manicured lawn to the wilds of the Mediterranean coast. Today, much of that shore has become a concrete mass from which escape is an exclusive dream. In the intervening years, the stretch of seaboard from the red mountains of the Esterel to the Italian border hosted a cultural phenomenon well in excess of its tiny size. A mere handful of towns and resorts created by foreign visitors - notably English, Russian and American - attracted the talented, rich and famous as well as those who wanted to be. For nearly two centuries of creativity, luxury, excess, scandal, war and corruption, the dark and sparkling world of the Riviera was a temptation for everybody who was anybody. Often frivolous, it was also a potent cultural matrix that inspired the likes of Picasso, Matisse, Coco Chanel, Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, James Baldwin, Katherine Mansfield, the Rolling Stones, Sartre and Stravinsky. In Once Upon a Time World, Jonathan Miles presents the remarkable story of the small strip of French coast that lured the world to its shores. It is a wild and unforgettable tale that follows the Riviera's transformation from paradise and wilderness to a pollution imperilled concrete jungle.

Leseprobe

Once Upon A Time World

Also by Jonathan Miles

St Petersburg: Three Centuries of Murderous Desire

Medusa: The Shipwreck, the Scandal and the Masterpiece

The Nine Lives of Otto Katz

Try the Wilderness First

The Maker Unmade

Backgrounds to David Jones

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2023 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Jonathan Miles, 2023

The moral right of Jonathan Miles to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback endpaper image: Detail from map of the French Riviera, 1890s. (duncan1890/Getty Images)

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-83895-341-6

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-83895-926-5

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-342-3

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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26–27 Boswell Street

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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Katiu

Following St Petersburg: Three Centuries of Murderous Desire, I offer the second volume of an informal trilogy dedicated to phenomenal places created by strangers.

Contents

The Voices of Paradise

1  Jagged, Tormented and Tiny

2  This ‘Wild and Tremendous Region of the Globe’

3  ‘Bathing in Sunshine’, 1835–60

4  A Welcome to the World, 1860–90

5  The Belle Époque, 1890–1914

6  Painting the Warmth of the Sun

7  The First World War, 1914–18

8  ‘The British-American Riviera Colony’, 1922–9

9  Losing Paradise, 1930–9

10  Refugees and Resistance, 1939–45

11  Glitz, 1945–60

12  Sunny But Shady, 1960–90

13  White, Concrete Coast, 1990–2023

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Index

The Voices of Paradise

A secret for centuries, the south-eastern coast of France became the Riviera. It brazenly created and recreated itself in the image of successive visitors attracted by its sun, sea and fragrant air. To become so famous, so desired, and yet prove incapable of satisfying everybody’s dreams, is a tough destiny. Paradise was threatened – but there was much passion, wit, intrigue and splendour along the way. This strip of land hosted cultural phenomena well in excess of its tiny size. A mere handful of towns and villages transformed by foreigners enticed the talented, rich and famous – as well as those who wanted to be. For two centuries of opulence, scandal, war and corruption, the Riviera was a temptation.

Nineteenth-century visitors came south to keep themselves alive or to die on a temperate coast that one Belle Époque writer called ‘an outdoor hospital’. These winter residents were often overbearing. Foreigners with spending power, they imposed their will and their languages. There was palpable xenophobia on all fronts. The English mocked their hosts, while the French were amused by English self-importance, German pedanticism and Russian bombast. By 1870, Nice – a medium-sized town of 50,000 plus – hosted consulates and therefore visitors from countries as widespread as Turkey, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay. The list grew.1 The early quest for self-preservation was succeeded by a drive for dangerous living that reverberated through the first decades of the twentieth century. High-octane, the Riviera was spurred by hedonism and cultural frenzy as the English and American impact on the region made waves across the world.

The territory had been frequently contested. The French and Italians had been bickering over the frontier for centuries. When Antonio de Beatis visited in 1517, he recorded the prevailing wisdom that Nice, being on the border, was so-called because it was ‘neither here nor there’ – ‘ni ici, ni là’. The claim has been questioned, but it is significant that, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Nice coat of arms displayed an eagle whose raised claws seemed undecided about what to clutch.2

The area’s motley and squabble-ridden past is echoed by its medley of voices. Before the French Revolution, the astronomer Jérôme Lalande observed Nice’s linguistic indecision. Polite society spoke French, the laws were in Italian, and the ordinary people spoke a verbal salmagundi. The larger Provençal dialect has been described as ‘French rubbed with garlic’,3 whereas the local lingo – Nissart – derives from almost any language but French. If ‘laundry’ is lessive in French, in Nissart it is bugada – as it is in Catalan. The Niçois use cabossa for ‘head’ – close to the Spanish cabeza. Spanish agua for ‘water’ is corrupted into daigua, and so it goes on.4 The philosopher and art critic John Ruskin, visiting briefly in 1845, heard the Greek ara for ‘now’ and Aspai ma picciota? – ‘Where are you going, my little girl?’– in which he considered aspai to be a corruption of aperçevoir, and picciota from the Italian picciola.5 There were also borrowings from Arabic, the Provençal langue d’oc and a slow corruption of Latin.6 As foreigners came south, the babble of sounds became even more diverse. Travelling to Genoa in 1878, the French writer Laurent Germain’s train stopped in Nice to pick up gamblers bound for Monte Carlo. His compartment was invaded by a gaggle of aristocratic gentlemen who rattled away in English, German, Russian, Spanish – even French. No matter which language they used, their discourse was predictable. ‘Did you win yesterday?’ ‘No, I lost a lot of money.’7

In autumn 1922, James Joyce – about to have leeches applied to drain the pressure of his glaucoma – took a room at Nice’s Hôtel Suisse and began to assemble ideas for what became his huge and forbidding multilingual pun, Finnegans Wake. He took inspiration from a polyglot city which, throughout its chequered history, hosted languages that came and went according to political circumstance. Russian diminished after the 1917 Revolution only to reappear on restaurant menus in the 1990s. German vanished after the Second World War and came back in the early 1970s, as hordes of West Germans came south to grill themselves lobster orange.

Earlier ages largely ignored the potential of the southern French coast. It took the British desire for a sympathetic climate for bronchitis and the Romantic attraction to untamed nature to make the Riviera a destination. The British saw paradise in a wilderness and created a pleasure ground. Over the decades, other nations followed and turned this thin strip of Shangri-La – snow-capped mountains towering on one side, the azure Mediterranean on the other – into a singular treasure. The Aga Khan spoke of meeting members of the aristocracy and plutocracy ‘over and over again’ in London, Rome, Berlin, Monte Carlo, Cannes and Nice8 – three capitals widely separated and three resorts only miles apart.

There was an Anglo-Saxon land grab aided and abetted by the Russians, Germans, Belgians, Americans and a scatter of Scandinavians. The Parisian French also colonized the coast – seeking either commercial opportunity or enjoyment in resorts that boasted a wonderful winter climate and an international reputation. They found no indigenous high-cultural tradition – just a convivial lifestyle and a landscape in which to create a modern paradise; one full of temptations in which those who fell were rarely doomed to expulsion. As entrepreneurs recognized the commercial scope of the Riviera, they built restaurants and hotels in the grand French style while cunningly making strategic concessions to foreign tastes. Later, American improvisations on the themes of Gallic style and bohemianism modified the character of the coast. Later still, all levels of the French population grew to love and hate the Côte d’Azur.

As the ‘outdoor hospital’ became a pleasure ground, it grew famous for its frivolity. The Riviera was a world of indolent aristocracy and Noël Coward’s poor little rich girls. It was also an attractive destination, where important decisions could be taken by powerful people relaxing at a remove and out of context – Winston Churchill was addicted. The Riviera provided a haven where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor went to escape reality. The landscape and the influx of international visitors made for a potent cultural cocktail that worked its magic on the likes of Hector Berlioz, Friedrich Nietzsche, Pablo Picasso, Coco Chanel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin, Katherine Mansfield, Jean-Paul Sartre, Igor Stravinsky and the Rolling Stones – to name but a few. Colours and forms cut by the strong Mediterranean light were inspirational to modern painters. The Riviera hosted the exceptional. ‘Out of time’s monotone’, recorded the American writer Allen Tate in a poem honouring a picnic at which 16 adults – in an act of intoxicated inversion – downed 61 bottles of wine.9 Tate and friends put into a small cove full of ‘amethyst fishes and octopuses darting, like closed parasols’. Over a driftwood fire, they started to cook a bouillabaisse – its ingredients lately caught. Lurching down the craggy goat track of the red cliff came an eighty-two-year-old peasant on a horse carrying all those bottles.10

Drink has always been a feature of this festive enclave. Celebrated lush F. Scott Fitzgerald arrived hours late for a dinner with the writer Michael Arlen. The delay had been caused by Fitzgerald’s inability to pull himself away from a bottle. He sat down and declared, ‘This is how I want to live… This is how I want to live,’ laid his head on the table and fell asleep.11

This wayward coast – once a temptation for pirates and brigands – has attracted profiteers, corrupt politicians and the mafia – Italian and Russian. David Dodge’s book To Catch a Thief, which inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name, demonstrated that wealth lavishly displayed provided great opportunities for crime. The coast, wrote Dodge elsewhere, was ‘lousy with situations and characters’.12 Among these were notable crooks, from the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo to the famously corrupt mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin, and the underworld that sustained him. Somerset Maugham’s celebrated quip ‘a sunny place for shady people’, believed to have targeted Monte Carlo but perhaps provoked by the unsavoury quarters of wartime Marseille – or by his disreputable lover Gerald Haxton – has become the motto for a dark yet sparkling coast.

The locals were swept up into the international scene that engulfed them. The 1960s École de Nice was a group of artists inhabiting the worlds of Pop Art and Conceptualism. In one of Nice’s most surprising hotels, some rooms are decorated by local artists. I remember standing in the foyer, listening to an American guest despair about the room she had been given. In true Pop style, the walls were covered with American license plates. ‘That’s what I came away to escape,’ the guest groaned. ‘Perhaps the Louis XIV room would suit Madame better?’ Indeed. I also overheard a couple of travelling companions suggest that having the bathroom facilities creatively exposed in the middle of their room was a teensy bit too ‘modern’.

This sunny coast lifts the spirit. Picasso found that Antibes and Golfe-Juan rekindled his delight in the joyous visual pun which had lain largely dormant during the years of the Second World War. Marc Chagall let his antic spirit loose in the installations he made for the Musée National Message Biblique. Yves Klein of the École de Nice signed the air above the Mediterranean, calling it a work of art.

Verbal wit has also embellished most aspects of life on the Côte d’Azur. Charlotte Dempster, who lived near Cannes in the second half of the nineteenth century, mocked the energetic attempts of Protestants to establish their own churches: ‘At Nice and Monte Carlo I dare say there are not many persons as devout as the Praying Mantis’.13 Even when they were ill, visitors could be witty. The ailing author of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote to an old friend from Hyères in March 1884: ‘Dover sounds somewhat shiveringly in my ears. You should see the weather I have – cloudless, clear as crystal… aromatic air, all pine and gum tree. You would be ashamed of Dover; you would scruple to refer, sir, to a spot so paltry… pray, how do you warm yourself?’14 Comparisons of southern sun and northern chilliness are legion. Vita Sackville-West suggested that ‘her lover, Violet Trefusis, was the Mediterranean while her husband, Harold Nicolson, was Kent’. Ford Madox Ford thought the south of France was Eden whereas the north meant Brussels sprouts.15

Social observation was spiked. The French writer and archaeologist Prosper Mérimée spoke of the arrival in Nice of a certain Madame de Vogué, ‘who left her husband somewhere en route but who has replaced him with impressive specimens from here or there’.16 Etiquette often gave rise to risible situations. A shabbily dressed, socially diffident and absent-minded Englishman attempted to enter the Casino in Monte Carlo. He was asked for his passport. ‘A passport? I’m sorry but I haven’t got one.’ ‘No passport! Then you cannot enter.’ ‘You see, I am the man who issues them.’ ‘You! That’s a good one.’ The Englishman left. When it was discovered that the thwarted visitor was Lord Salisbury, thrice prime minister and – at the time of the incident – Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the fear of bad publicity sent a frock-coated, top-hatted deputation from the Casino administration to Salisbury’s villa in nearby Beaulieu to apologize.17 The Foreign Secretary had merely been amused by the rebuff.

As performers began to adorn the coast in the 1920s and ’30s, the homosexual contingent – often fleeing from the stringent laws that pertained in England – prompted the actress Maxine Elliott to refer to the coast as an ‘Adamless Eden’. She sometimes found it refreshing to invite heterosexuals like Douglas Fairbanks Sr or Johnny ‘Tarzan’ Weissmuller. True to character, Tarzan dived from her top terrace, over the dining patio, into her huge pool.

A legend about the lemon-scented border town of Menton claimed that its citrus trees were a gift from Eve. Expelled from paradise for eating the forbidden apple, the mother of us all grabbed a lemon and – wandering over the earth – threw it down in the countryside near Menton, where it created a new Eden.18 Unlike Eve, many later visitors arrived not with lemons, but with oodles of their own forbidden fruit.

1

Jagged, Tormented and Tiny

In 1902, a French writer suggested that it was ‘cruel to use barbaric scientific terms’ to describe the dazzling landscape of the Côte d’Azur.1 Yet such description helps to explain how a shy strip of coast, inaccessible for millennia, possesses qualities to attract both the ailing and the pleasure-seeking. This difficult terrain was made alluring by the way philosophers, artists and writers helped people to look at landscapes differently. It was chosen for its life-giving properties by doctors seeking a cure for consumption, their efforts aided by improvements in transport. For the first rich visitors, the very seclusion of the Riviera made it a privileged ‘space apart’ – a place where people could recover their health or misbehave. Once a wilderness, this coast became a place where people could go wild.

This secluded paradise was created just over five million years ago – at the outset of the Pliocene epoch – when the flooding of the Mediterranean started. Our ancestors had already begun to separate from the chimpanzee, and modern mammals and bird families had developed into species recognizable today. The creation and mutation of the Alps had been ongoing for hundreds of millions of years. In the western part of that range, towering above the coast from Nice to Menton, there was tremendous volcanic activity. This created a geological mash-up, a crush of different rocks, resulting in a region of powerful beauty. Folds and faults made for a jagged, tormented and tiny coastal shelf, the drama of which is diminished to the east beyond the Italian frontier, and hardly exists to the west, beyond Cannes. It is a hectic stretch of coastline, an exciting space for hedonistic, frenzied eruptions.

The physique of modern Europe became recognizable in the Pliocene, during which Alpine regions became glaciated and formed an imposing frontier between the creatures and vegetation of the north and the south. In the twentieth century, holiday-makers who visited the Riviera would delight in this climatic confrontation, which permitted skiing on the slopes of the Alps and water-skiing on the adjacent Mediterranean. Orogeny sculpted paradise – it was only left for man to discover, enjoy, exploit and ruin.

One of the earliest indications of human habitation in Europe was found in a small cave at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, towards the eastern end of the Riviera. Dating from about one million years ago, when the level of the Mediterranean was a hundred metres higher than it is today, the cave contained – along with the rudimentary tools of scavenging humans – remains of panthers, sabre-toothed tigers and jaguars.

Another ancient site is now buried beneath a 1960s apartment block in central Nice. Terra Amata – hastily excavated so as not to delay the construction of the modern building – dates from about 400,000 years ago. By then, hunters had established homes and summer camps. Round cabins were assembled with branches dragged onto the shore – only thirty metres higher than today’s pebble beach. The denizens hunted rhinoceros, deer and elephants.

In the hills at Tourrettes-sur-Loup, there are remains dating from the end of the Neolithic period – about 3000 BC. These include evidence of burials, suggesting ceremony. Other Bronze and then Iron Age sites reveal the beginnings of a tribal society – the Ligurians, who were land-dwellers. They stretched along the coast from south-eastern Gaul to south-western Italy. Among their tribes, occupying what is now the Riviera, were the Oxybii and Deciates to the west of Nice and the Vediantii east of the Var, a river which would act, for many centuries, as the natural barrier between Italy and France.2 The Ligurians left clear signs of ‘Man the Maker’. They were the first artists to work on the Côte d’Azur, carving horned animals, geometrical figures and rare human forms on rocks. When Picasso sketched his head of a faun in Antibes in the aftermath of the Second World War, he was the heir to Prehistoric stylization, but his subject matter drew on the mythology of the region’s invaders from the eastern Mediterranean.

After founding Carthage in 814 BC, the Phoenicians – who generally hugged the North African coast to trade with Iberia – appear to have settled in several well-chosen havens along the Riviera. At Monaco and Villefranche they built temples to Melkarth, protector of the universe, god of the underworld and lord of their richest city-state, Tyre. At Antibes, where much pottery originating in the eastern Mediterranean has been found, Astarte – the Phoenician goddess of fertility, sexuality and war – guarded the port.3 Most significantly, the discovery in Marseille of coins and medals from Tyre and Carthage, along with an acropolis and stone shrines in a pre-Greek style, confirm a Phoenician presence predating the Greek founding of Massalia – the ancient name for Marseille – around 600 bc.4 The Phocaeans – Ionian Greeks from Asia Minor – created a settlement in Massalia and smaller ports at Nice and Antibes, planting olive trees and vines along the coast.5 They called their settlement at Nice niki, which means ‘victory’. It proved an ironic choice for a city that stood close to a shifting frontier and was frequently invaded or crushed.

As a busy trading port, Massalia absorbed foreign pleasures and vices. It fell into a moral decadence witnessed by the Romans called upon to help the Greeks after Antibes and Nice were harassed by the Oxybii and Deciates in 144 BC. When the Ligurians threatened Massalia itself nineteen years later, Rome provided further assistance and established a greater presence. Although subsequently robbed of its political role, the old Phocaean city remained a thriving port, and its school of philosophy and rhetoric tutored young Romans from patrician families.6 The hectic pace of life and racy morality persisted down through the ages. In 1786, the English botanist James Edward Smith noted that nothing struck a visitor to the city as much as the omnipresence of business – ‘In this respect, Marseilles resembles Amsterdam’.7 Sounding a rare note of approval for the city, an American businessman, visiting in 1869, wrote that the ‘women are handsomer, houses taller, streets wider and people look more like New-Yorkers than I have seen elsewhere’.8 Its port and frenetic commercial activity ensured that Marseille would remain beyond the bounds of the serene appeal of the Riviera. However, given its importance in opening up the south coast to foreigners – and given the proximity of Bandol, Sanary and Hyères – it is reasonable to claim Marseille as the original gateway to what we call the Riviera. In 1938, the Compagnie des Chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée, the railway company that did so much to make the region accessible, defined the Riviera as extending from Marseille to the Italian border.9

The Romans consolidated their presence along the south coast in order to improve communications between their capital and the recently conquered Iberian Peninsula. The first Roman province in Gaul was created in an area blessed by a coast where they were happy to build villas and could enjoy a climate that was milder than Rome’s in the winter and less harsh in the summer. They drove two important roads across the province to complement time-honoured transport by boat. The Via Aurelia ran through Menton, La Turbie and Cimiez to Antibes and Fréjus. It then struck out across country to Aix and Arles. Their second major road, the Via Julia Augusta, started at La Turbie and ran through Vence, reconnecting with the Via Aurelia at Fréjus or Forum Julii – an impressive port established by Julius Caesar. The splendour of Roman times was a far cry from the ruined state in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visitors found the town. Aubin-Louis Millin, the French antiquary and naturalist, described its best inn as ‘disgusting’, serving ‘putrid water from badly rinsed flasks’. Millin had a miserable stay and – with the silting of the River Argens – found a sandy plain instead of a port. As for the ruins – they looked ruined.10

Two decades before the birth of Christ, the emperor Augustus had imposed Roman authority on the peoples of the western Alps from the Mediterranean to Lake Geneva. That considerable achievement on difficult terrain was commemorated at La Turbie with a huge monument commissioned by the Roman Senate. Originally fifty metres high, it was capped by a statue of the warring emperor who had brought peace to the Roman world. Over the centuries, this monument was plundered by Vandals and Visigoths, and then desecrated by a group opposed to any kind of tribute to pagan gods – the monks from the Île Saint-Honorat, off Cannes. The ruins – fortified by locals in the late Middle Ages – were then shelled by Louis XIV’s troops when war broke out between France and Savoy in 1705. Partially restored by an American financier in the 1920s, the stunted monument is upstaged by the spectacular coastline beyond.

While this ‘Trophy of the Alps’ was being constructed, the Romans created the military province of Alpes Maritimae and made its capital at Cemenelum – later Cimiez, above Nice. There, during the first century ad, they built a modest amphitheatre, and in the third century, public baths. It was at that time that the obscure and gory origins of Christianity took root in the region. St Bassus is believed by some to be the first Bishop of Nice. More likely, he was Bishop of Cimiez, as Nice was not, at that time, a civitas. Martyred in 253, Bassus was burned with red-hot blades and transpierced from head to foot by large shipbuilding nails. These atrocities were followed, only four years later, by the torture of St Pontius, who proved difficult to kill. He was placed on a rack and the rack broke. Next, he was thrown to the lions, but they licked and caressed his feet. Bound on a funeral pyre, the flames danced safely around him in a circle. This was too much for his oppressors, so they chopped off his head, which was swept down Nice’s River Paillon and out to sea – where it drifted, for some reason best known to legend, to Marseille. Such an awful fuss and fate when, only fifty-six years later, in 313, the emperor Constantine declared toleration and freedom for Christians.11

In the centuries following the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the south was assailed by Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Lombards, who pillaged and destroyed. Nothing remains along the southern coast to compare with the magnificent Roman structures at Arles, Nîmes, or elsewhere in the former empire. The region remained a wilderness for many centuries. Attacked, sacked and traversed by armies, it never established a grand centre of culture.

The marauders from the north were followed by the Moors from Spain, who harassed the southern French coastline, wasting the small fishing village of Cannes and murdering – in around 732 – the abbot and 500 monks in the monastery on Île Saint-Honorat.12 Inspired by Egyptian monasticism, the monks there had followed a solitary style of obedience and prayer. Among them a most important scholar, who had been born in Britain, had studied on the continent and who – after purging the Île Saint-Honorat of snakes – would go on to found the Celtic Church in Ireland and become St Patrick. The Moors established their stronghold at the fort of La Garde-Freinet above the Gulf of Saint-Tropez in the Maures – hills most probably named to mark their occupation or deriving from the Provençal mauro – the dark trunks of pine trees.13 Few records survive this period, suggesting that, as the invaders sallied forth to plunder, the destruction throughout the region was wanton.

If those years are obscure, the succeeding centuries are a tangle of largely local conflicts contributing to the development of mongrel customs. In 973, Guillaume the Liberator rid the area of its Arab invaders. In recompense, he was made Comte de Provence, a position thereafter occupied – as a result of royal marriages – by Catalans and distant Angevins. Along the Riviera, these rulers of Provence exercised little influence on the persistent local struggles between the Republic of Genoa and the Duchy of Savoy.

Blessed with a magnificent port, the Genoese were a seafaring people who occupied trading posts westward along the coast as far as Nice, while Savoy grew from its humble origins south of Lake Geneva during the early years of the thirteenth century. Genoa and Savoy – and the later Kingdom of Sardinia – were shapeshifting states whose fortunes ebbed and flowed in response to territorial ambition, conflict, or betrayal. By 1562, Turin had become the capital of a much-enlarged Duchy of Savoy that included the Aosta Valley, the strategic Mont-Cenis pass over the Alps, Piedmont and the Comté de Nice. Its frontier with Provence – absorbed into France in 1481 – was established on the River Var.

The Habsburg Charles V – son of Philip the Handsome and Joanna the Mad of Spain – inherited great swathes of Europe and territories in the Americas. It is hardly surprising that he was a Holy Roman Emperor obsessed by the concept of universal monarchy. Conflict between Charles and François I brought Habsburg armies into France and took French troops into Italy – the route passing through Nice. In 1524, the treacherous Constable de Bourbon led 25,000 Habsburg soldiers into Provence, pillaging as he went. When he failed to capture Marseille, the French hounded his retreat and cut off his supplies. Twelve years later, the Habsburgs again attempted to invade France via its Mediterranean coast, marching through a countryside which they found to be a ‘vast solitude’. As before, their army was beaten at Marseille and suffered another slow and painful retreat, losing many men to ambushes in the Esterel, the range of hills between Fréjus and the Bay of Cannes.14

Barbarossa’s Ottoman fleet help the French besiege Savoyard Nice in August 1543.

Ridding Nice of the Savoyards became strategically important for François I. In 1543, he organized a coordinated attack with a surprising ally. The Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent was no friend to the Habsburgs, and allowed his Grand Admiral, Barbarossa, to participate in the Siege of Nice. On 12 August, the French commenced their bombardment from cannon sited on the hill of Cimiez and amid the pines and olive trees on the heights of Mont Boron. Meanwhile, the Ottoman fleet fired from the sea and stormed the fort. The heaviest fighting was seen on the 15th, when the defenders – outnumbered – stood horrified as the invaders began to scale their walls. As a Turk surmounted the parapet to plant his standard, Catherine Ségurane entered the fray, armed with a washerwoman’s wooden beater. Nicknamed Donna Maufacia – Nissart for a ‘poorly made’ or even ‘deformed’ woman15 – Ségurane struck the head of the Ottoman standard-bearer, snatched his flag and screamed, ‘Victory!’ It was a legendary intervention. In its most fanciful telling, the laundress bared her backside to the enemy and scared them off. Ségurane’s bravery inspired the defenders to fight on, until the army of the Duke of Savoy arrived to repel the French.16

After 1559, when the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis ended the French European wars and split the Habsburg Empire in two, the relative stability and prosperity of the Comté de Nice endured for nearly 150 years. Not that the region was totally free of panic and strife. In the year following the treaty, 500 pirates burned Roquebrune, in the hills north-east of Monaco. Algerian raiders frequently plundered coastal villages, carrying off inhabitants to be sold as slaves.17

After the House of Savoy entered into a coalition against Louis XIV in the War of the Grand Alliance, Louis later wreaked his revenge by sending troops to attack the fort at Nice. During the second and third week of December 1705, the bombardment by sixty cannon and twenty-four mortars was intense. In early January 1706, the commander defending Nice capitulated, and the citadel was – according to the wishes of Louis XIV – wiped from the face of the earth. No longer a fortified town, Nice slowly began to develop a new double identity: that of sanatorium and resort.18

Military insignificance, however, did not stop Victor Amadeus II of Savoy from retaking Nice. By the time of his death in 1732, Victor Amadeus had become ruler of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia and done much to embellish its capital at Turin and consolidate his presence in the western Alps. Both Genoa and Turin grew into administrative and cultural centres. There was no such splendid city along the Riviera. The impact of invading troops and marauders had textured the region, as Greeks, Romans, Moors, Italians, Spanish, French and Savoyards each left their footprint. Through it all, the locals got on with their lives as best they could, their roots reaching deep beneath the topsoil of political brinkmanship.

While the area had little to offer the cultured visitor, like all back of beyonds it was thick with folklore. In the first century, Torpes – a steward at Nero’s palace in Pisa – refused to renounce his Christian beliefs. He was decapitated – the head tossed into the River Arno. The rest of the body was set to sea in a boat with a dog, a pig, a viper and a cock. It floated all the way to the little port to which the body in the boat gave its name – Saint-Tropez. Equally firm in her Christian convictions, Maxima, sister of Torpes, was also martyred. Her boat – either by amazing coincidence or sibling solidarity – was carried to what is now Sainte-Maxime, across the small gulf from where her brother’s body blew ashore.

There were also legends of figures from the gospels who fetched up in the south of France. Mary and Martha, who welcomed Christ into their home, were said to have arrived on the shores near Marseille in 37 ad. Balthazar, after visiting the baby Jesus, left his two fellow Wise Men and kept following the star – which, curiously, took him all the way to Les Baux in Provence. Lazarus, raised from the dead, came west to ‘present the truths of immortality’ to the heathen of the southern littoral. When the Jews of Palestine became irked because a new religion was beginning to take hold, they rounded up Mary Magdalene and Joseph of Arimathea and set them adrift in the Mediterranean, until ‘under divine protection’ they landed in the south of France. Mary Magdalene came ashore close to where former convent girl Coco Chanel’s villa La Pausa would be sited; the name commemorated the rest stop made by Mary.19 Sailing from Marseille to Genoa in 1699, the English essayist Joseph Addison was shown the deserts made famous ‘by the penance of Mary Magdalene, who… is said to have wept away the rest of her life among these solitary rocks and mountains’.20

In the mid-sixth century, a chained penitent and healer who lived on a diet of dry bread and dates inhabited an ancient, unused signal tower at Pointe Saint-Hospice on Cap Ferrat. When the Lombards invaded and one of the attackers prepared to decapitate the hermit, his arms became suddenly paralysed. Astonished, a number of the intruders became disciples of the man who had been miraculously saved.21 Nice espoused the cult of the Umbrian St Rita. A contemporary of Jeanne d’Arc and patroness of lost causes – her own life had been miserable – she was praying in a church when one of the thorns of Christ’s crown fell and pierced her forehead. The stench emanating from the wound led to her solitary confinement until, one day, the odour of roses filled the convent and Rita was discovered dead, her face restored to its former beauty.22

In the mid-eighteenth century, the Scottish writer Tobias Smollett remarked on the glut of superstition in Nice, which revealed ‘the darkest shades of ignorance and prejudice’.23 Well-funded establishments in and around the town – Smollett counted ten convents and three nunneries – were evidence of a superstitious peasantry who gave what they could ill afford for masses, processions and benedictions in desperate attempts to secure good harvests.24 Peasants thought miracles highly probable. In Notre-Dame des Oiseaux at Hyères, Adolphe Smith found hundreds of ‘abominably painted’ images testifying to the miraculous powers of this church. There was a man ‘whose gun burst while shooting wild ducks on Dec 2nd 1773’, who ‘owed his life solely to his devotion to the shrine’. A mason who fell through five storeys of a house – having first dropped the heavy cask that made the hole into which he tumbled – was saved. A man’s arm, gnawed by ‘an infuriated mule’, was healed. A carriage full of people skidded off a bridge without fatality. There were a host of other road accidents and more exploding guns – all incidents in which, miraculously, no one was hurt.25

The traditional origin for the name of Nice’s Baie des Anges was the legend of a peasant girl who was sculling on the water when a storm blew up and her boat was overturned. Angels appeared to waft her to dry land before disappearing into the clouds. The following day, she became a Christian.26 A more plausible explanation is that the bay is named after the huge, repulsive and inedible angel shark – lou pei-ange in Nissart.27 The walkway along the bay at Nice was called the Camin dei Anges by the locals. This mutated into the Camin dei Anglès – which, in French, became the Promenade des Anglais.

However, the legend that has most excited the imagination is the imprisonment of the ‘man in the iron mask’, who died in the fortress on the Île Sainte-Marguerite off Cannes in 1703. The mystery has inspired rumours, novels, silent films, colour films, a TV movie, three TV series, a Russian musical film and a song by Billy Bragg. Few elements of the story are certain, except that the ‘iron mask’ was made from black velvet.

Late in April 1687, the new governor of the fort and prison on Sainte-Marguerite arrived with a masked prisoner who had been moved from gaol to gaol while his rebellious instincts were tamed by torture. Upon arrival in his new dungeon – with walls three metres thick, one triple-barred opening, and an adjacent corridor where he could exercise unobserved – the prisoner fell sick and took to his bed. It was noted that he spoke French with a foreign accent, and sang. Beyond that, we encounter an increasingly elaborate tissue of theories – or, at least, we did until 2015, when documents previously thought to have been destroyed by the Paris Commune in 1871 surfaced in the Archives Nationales in Paris.

Walls three metres thick, a triple-barred opening.

The elusive man ‘in the iron mask’.

Voltaire was responsible for converting the black velvet covering to an iron mask, thereby pricking people’s curiosity. He claimed the prisoner was the illegitimate half-brother of Louis XIV – the son of Anne of Austria and the Italian cardinal Mazarin. That would explain the foreign accent. Alexandre Dumas, in The Man in the Iron Mask – the third part of The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later – claimed the prisoner was none other than an identical twin of Louis XIV, fathered by Louis XIII and Anne of Austria: a wild idea that would spark the imagination of filmmakers. Yet another explanation was that the man in the iron mask was the issue of Anne of Austria after an illicit affair with the English ambassador, the Duke of Buckingham.

The mystery of the prisoner became mired in the shifting sands of fiction. Not only identified as the ‘improbable’ twin brother of Louis XIV, he was also held to be the son of the king. Some thought him ‘the Duke of Monmouth, son of Charles II’ – though Monmouth was hanged in 1685, when the man in the velvet mask was still alive. Another candidate was the Armenian patriarch Avédic, captured by the French and taken to Marseille, but he was seen alive and living in Turkey three years after the death of the elusive prisoner. Perhaps the fantasy that caps the lot is a rumour stating that the man in the iron mask was the father of a little boy whose mother, Julie de Bonpart, was the daughter of one of the officials in the fortress. Their child ‘was sent over to Corsica… the only message transmitted to his new guardians was, “Il fanciullo vi viene da buona parte”’ – ‘This youngster is from a good family’. Thus the man in the iron mask – perhaps a member of the French royal family – would have originated the Napoleonic dynasty.28

There have been countless different identities assigned to the prisoner – some more credible than others. Suspicion fell on Ercole Antonio Mattioli, an agent of the Duke of Mantua. But this figure was well known across Europe, and there was no secrecy about his imprisonment and punishment. A more plausible candidate was Monsieur de Marchiel, an agent involved in a conspiracy to poison Louis XIV. Marchiel – a man with many aliases and identities – was captured at the end of March 1673 and taken to the Bastille. Yet his positive identification as the man in the iron mask remained impossible, because of the lack of documentation. Then, the papers rediscovered in 2015 disclosed that the gaoler, Saint-Mars – who guarded the prisoner in isolation for over thirty years – had siphoned off funds provided by the king, and allowed his captive to languish in a spartan if sizeable cell. The prisoner was named as Eustache Dauger. There are many variations including Daugier, Dogiers, d’Auger, d’Oger – making identification even more difficult. The Eustache Dauger incarcerated on Sainte-Marguerite was most probably a valet to someone in a high position – perhaps Cardinal Mazarin. As such, he would have known too many secrets, having witnessed debauchery, black masses and poisonings in court circles. Such knowledge combined with a proclivity for political muckraking would have taken him to gaol.

But the truth remains in the shadows. A story as slippery as Mary Magdalene’s rest at La Pausa or Joseph of Arimathea’s journey break on his way to Glastonbury, the man in the iron mask is certainly the most sensational yarn spun before this stunning coast buzzed with society gossip.

2

This ‘Wild and Tremendous Region of the Globe’

In late November 1517, Don Antonio de Beatis gave a surprisingly modern response to the natural qualities of the Riviera – observations heralding the manner in which it would be appreciated by later travellers. Cannes, he wrote, ‘offers magnificent views… and is charming’. Antibes was ‘pretty’, and Nice ‘very beautiful and big’ and ‘full of pretty women whose skirts reach only to their knees’.1 More than a century later, the first English visitors began to pass through the region, en route to Italy. Among them was a young man escaping the rigours of the English Civil War – the diarist John Evelyn. His first impressions of the Mediterranean coast, recorded on 7 October 1644, were of a countryside ‘full of vineyards and olive-yards, orange trees, myrtles, pomegranates, and the like sweet plantations’.2

At Marseille, Evelyn was struck by the crocodile skins hanging in the chapel of Notre-Dame de la Garde, and noted that ‘the chief trade of the town’ was ‘in silks and drugs out of Africa, Syria and Egypt’. Evelyn was astonished by the number of slaves in the streets and by the ‘jingling of their huge chains’ as they dragged enormous loads about the town. He was received by the captain of a galley that was ‘richly carved and gilded’ and manned by ‘so many hundreds of miserably naked persons… doubly chained about their middle and legs’.

With unchecked marauders preying on small craft, Evelyn could not find a galley bound for Genoa, and his party was obliged to continue on muleback as far as Fréjus and ‘the small port’ of Cannes – where they found a boatman who was willing to carry them on along the coast, past Antibes, Nice, Monaco and Menton.3

The appreciation of untouched nature that would engage the Romantic traveller was still over a century away, but contemplative visitors were starting to signal their attraction for a region through which they could access Italy without crossing the Alps. At the time, mountains were considered a treacherous barrier rather than a scenic beauty. Italy, with its classical culture, Renaissance treasures and new architectural wonders, was the destination of those on the ‘Grand Tour’. From the early years of the eighteenth century, this coming-of-age journey for British gentlemen was undertaken not only for the chance to whore, but also to enrich the mind and improve judgement – neither of which could be done in the underdeveloped and war-torn region of southern France. To the Grand Tourist, such as the ‘Person of Quality’ who passed through the region in 1691, the mountains between Marseille and Toulon appeared ‘dismal as well as barbarous’.4 It was a landscape that placed the traveller in the vastness of nature. Far from cities or ruins of earlier civilizations, the sensation was bewildering and destabilizing.

During his 1699 voyage past ‘these solitary rocks and mountains’ where Mary Magdalene wept, Joseph Addison began to appreciate the sea in a manner that would help to shape the Romantic response to the dangerous yet inspiring ocean. He claimed that he could not look upon the sea ‘without a very pleasing astonishment’.5 To Addison, the ocean was no longer just a medium through which he travelled; it had begun to engage his emotions. Yet for most travellers in the south of France from the eighteenth century until the arrival of the railway in the mid-nineteenth, water remained largely a convenience. Journeys along the coast were often easiest by a ten-oared felucca, which was sizeable enough to transport an English travelling carriage.

In 1763, Giacomo Casanova – a pathfinder in this paradise made for pleasure – visited the region during his endless search for sexual gratification. Having found the women of Marseille ‘undoubtedly the most profligate in France’, he took up with a local girl called Rosalie – who first was not, then claimed to be, and then again declared she was no virgin. It was of no consequence to Casanova, as she allowed him ‘to gaze on all those charms’ of which his ‘hands and lips disputed the possession’. Rosalie ‘was only fifteen, but with her figure, her well-formed breasts… would have been taken for twenty’. Casanova fitted her with a wardrobe, took her for a mistress, and told her that his servants would respect her as if she were his wife. Moving on to Antibes, they found a felucca to transport them to Genoa. The journey would take 2–3 days, and the passengers were grouped aft under a protective awning while the oarsmen – packed in the prow under hot skies – powered the craft.

With the journey under way, the sea became rough. ‘Rosalie being mortally afraid’, Casanova had the felucca put into Villefranche where the bad weather delayed them for three days. A carriage then drove them to Nice, which Casanova found ‘a terribly dull place’. The couple played faro in a café and – aided by Casanova’s experience as a gambler – Rosalie won a little money. She would, Casanova hoped, be the one with whom he could spend his days, so that he should not ‘be forced to fly from one lady to another’. But, as he recounts this episode in the early chapters of volume four of his six-volume memoir, ‘inexorable fate’ obviously ‘ordained it otherwise’. In Genoa, Casanova met Veronique…6

In 1745, the French art critic l’Abbé Le Blanc explained the burgeoning English passion for going abroad – they ‘look on their isle as a prison; and the first use they make of their love of liberty is to get out of it’.7 Their unlikely trailblazer in the south of France was the Scotsman Tobias Smollett. Maligned for having waved his wand of woe over Nice, Smollett actually delighted in the natural qualities of the region. While the swelling catalogue of Grand Tour tales publicized the treasures of Italy, Smollett promoted the south of France. Among sickly Britons, there was a grand appetite for his enthusiasm for a potentially life-saving destination. Smollett’s Travels Through France and Italy was an instant success – its 1766 first edition swiftly sold out. There were several reprintings, the inevitable pirated Irish editions, extracts in English periodicals, a German translation, and an abridged Swedish edition.8 In the wake of such success, it was the jocular Laurence Sterne who, in 1768, nicknamed Smollett ‘Smelfungus’ and – in an act of self-promotion – accented Smollett’s misanthropy. ‘The learned SMELFUNGUS travelled from Boulogne to Paris – from Paris to Rome – and so on – but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he pass’d by was discoloured or distorted – He wrote an account of them, but ’twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings.’9

In the same year, Philip Thicknesse likewise suggested that Smollett’s Travels should rather be called ‘QUARRELS through France and Italy’.10 A decade later, Thicknesse relented. ‘Poor man! He was ill; and meeting with, what every stranger must expect to meet, at most French inns, want of cleanliness, imposition and incivility, he was so much disturbed.’11

Smollett was not only ill but feeling ill-used. ‘Traduced by malice, persecuted by faction, abandoned by false patrons and overwhelmed’ by the death of his beloved and only daughter, he set out for the south of France, where he ‘hoped the mildness of the climate would prove favourable to the weak state’ of his lungs. Early on in his Travels, it is clear that Smollett had no especial argument with the French. Indeed, even before crossing the Channel, he imagined that everyone, from publicans to port officials, was out to fleece him.12 There were, almost inevitably, frequent upsets en route. Smollett’s travelling library – detained by customs – took a good six weeks to be recovered. He caught a cold soon after his arrival in France and ‘was seized with a violent cough’ and fever. He then faced the difficult choice of the best method of transportation south, and the problem of obtaining the fairest rates. At times, he had better fortune than many. Crossing the Esterel, ‘formerly frequented by… desperate banditti’, he found the route ‘very good’.13 Thomas Nugent, in The Grand Tour, had described the atrocious roads between Antibes and Nice ‘through rugged mountains bordered with precipices’.14 Instead, Smollett found a gentle coastal road with ‘neither precipice nor mountain’. He speculated that if only there were a bridge across the River Var and a post road from Nice to Genoa, then visitors to Italy would forsake the difficult trip across the Alps in favour of this ‘infinitely more safe, commodious, and agreeable’ route. Once arrived, Smollett had much good to say about Nice and its environs.15 Why else would he have stayed two years? How else would he have persuaded so many ailing Englishmen to follow in his footsteps?

Smollett found Nice to be a ‘little town, hardly a mile in circumference’.16 Despite the extortionate rates, he rented the ‘large, lofty, and commodious’ ground floor of a house with two small gardens offering an abundance of salad and citrus fruit.17 He delighted in the countryside with its modest traces of antiquity. Standing on the ramparts and surveying the scene, Smollett was enchanted. The ‘plain presents nothing but gardens, full of green trees, loaded with oranges, lemons, citrons and bergamots… The hills are shaded to the tops with olive-trees, which are always green; and those hills are over-topped by more distant mountains, covered with snow. When I turn myself towards the sea, the view is bounded by the horizon…’. Such ‘is the serenity of the air, that you see nothing above your head… but a charming blue expanse’.18 Smollett listed the many fish available and celebrated a veritable cornucopia of fruits and vegetables. He discovered ‘sorbettes’ – an ‘iced froth made with juice of oranges, apricots or peaches; very agreeable to the palette, and so extremely cold’ that he was ‘afraid to swallow them in this hot country’, until he found ‘from information and experience, that they may be taken in moderation, without any bad consequence’.19 A long-time advocate of hydrotherapy, Smollett bathed in the sea and helped establish the custom.20 When ‘it was perceived that I grew better in consequence of the bath, some… Swiss officers tried the same experiment’. Within a matter of days, ‘our example was followed by several inhabitants of Nice’.21

Describing the poorer locals, Smollett despaired. Their diet was basic – unsold leftovers from the garden, coarse bread and polenta. Their animals fared worse, being ‘so meagre, as to excite compassion’. Overall, he found the population ‘quiet and orderly’ and drunkenness all but unknown. He did, however, lament the quality of the artisans – ‘very lazy, very needy, very awkward and void of all ingenuity’.22 There was, it seems, a want of those very talents that nourished Italian art and architecture. In response to a question on ‘the state of the arts and sciences at Nice’, Smollett replied, ‘almost a total blank’. The town seemed to be ‘consecrated to the reign of dullness’; it was ‘very surprising, to see a people established between two enlightened nations, so devoid of taste and literature… the very ornaments of the churches are wretchedly conceived, and worse executed’.23 Sentiments echoed by the Swiss scientist Johann Georg Sulzer, who a decade later confirmed that Nice ‘has no public edifice worth mentioning’.24

Bugbears for Smollett included lizards, scorpions, ‘flies, fleas and… gnats’ – all intolerable. It was ‘impossible to keep the flies out of your mouth, nostrils, eyes and ears. They crowd into your milk, tea, chocolate, soup, wine and water; they soil your sugar, contaminate your victuals, and devour your fruit.’25 But any climate, however blissful, carries with it disadvantages. Taken all in all, Smollett made no more complaints or negative observations than the average traveller who rails against dirt and cost. Eighteenth-century visitors in France found porters a rough and rowdy lot. They were often served watered-down wine, overcharged for accommodation, and were cheated in the way that modern tourists imagine they might be in more exotic places.

About two years after Smollett left the south coast, love or lust sped the twenty-eight-year-old Duke of York – brother of George III – to a liaison in Genoa. In August 1767, a ball was given in his honour at Toulon, where the duke danced so much that he sweated heavily. The following night, he returned from the theatre with a chill. Deciding to proceed to Genoa on land, he stopped in Monaco, where Prince Honoré III invited him to rest before continuing on his journey. Stood out in the hot sun during a welcome salute, York became feverish and took to his bed. Two days later, he was dead. George III rewarded Honoré handsomely for his kindnesses towards the extravagant brother for whom he had shown little care. He sent Honoré two of the duke’s racehorses and invited him to visit England. Sadly for Monaco, none of the diplomatic possibilities that such an invitation promised would materialize.26

Nice was also beginning to find favour with royalty. In 1775, the Duke of Gloucester – another brother of George III – came south with his wife, Maria, the illegitimate daughter of Sir Edward Walpole. After the death of Maria’s first husband, Lord Waldegrave, in 1763, Gloucester – scarcely twenty years old, short-sighted and awkward – started to court her. Although decorum required that she rebuff him, he persisted. In September 1766, three and a half years after Waldegrave’s death, Maria and Gloucester were married by her private chaplain at her house in Pall Mall. The match was supposed to remain secret, but it became common knowledge and an embarrassment to the court. Frequently snubbed, Gloucester became ill and decided to take Maria and their two children to the south of France. Although one child died of smallpox before they set off in July 1775, the rest of the family travelled south in four handsomely appointed carriages. Gloucester spent two winters in Nice, ‘astonishing the people with the splendour of his mode of living and contributing materially to the gaiety of the place’.27

While Savoy acknowledged the growing importance of Nice, the dominant city on the south coast remained – as it had been since antiquity – Marseille. Travelling on the eve of the French Revolution, Jean-Pierre Bérenger, professor of eloquence at the Collège Royal at Orléans, commented that ‘Marseille is for Provence and its neighbouring provinces what Paris is for France… it attracts youth, distracts the bored and is a trap for the imprudent’. As Bérenger describes it, Marseille is abuzz with big-city life, attractive to those who ‘are fed up with the calm and uniformity’ of the provinces. There are over 15 million transactions a month. The port is a forest of masts, and the odour of alluring drugs and elixirs emanates from the shops. Products from all corners of the earth and exotic clothes dazzle the eye. Nonetheless, Bérenger also delves into the dark side of a city in which great numbers perished in obscurity and misery. Unlike so many writers of the day, who delighted in the easy virtue of the southern women, there is no voyeurism in his vision of Marseille, which, ‘like a rotting corpse teeming with worms’, is a place that exploits and devours ‘lost girls’.28

Bérenger advises the traveller to expect no kindness in the nearby countryside. The peasants will allow a stranger to follow a dangerous path, then laugh at his idiocy. If a traveller snatches a grape of theirs which is overhanging the road, they take a shot at him or unleash their hounds.29 At the same time, Bérenger is not impervious to the charms of rural tradition, and writes with affection about the Provençal celebration of Christmas, when people would feast on the local delicacies that are still prized by tourists today: ‘Figs, raisins – fresh or dried – Brignoles prunes covered in laced paper, pyramids of oranges at times crowned by a bouquet from the same tree… nougat with hazel nuts, pine nuts, pistachios and Narbonne honey.’ The festive dining room he describes is fragrant with the scent of fruits and flowers, and ‘neither carcases of animals nor those irritating drugs that are served in the middle of a meal to revive the satiated palette’ are to be seen.30

One of the first Americans to visit the south of France was Thomas Jefferson, who became the third president of the United States. He travelled along the Riviera in the spring of 1787, during the time that he was a minister to the court of Louis XVI. Interested by the shallow ponds for refining salt on the shore at Hyères, he found, in the countryside around, ‘delicious and extensive plains’. The people, ‘generally well clothed’ and with plenty to eat, were perhaps overworked – ‘the excess of the rent required by the landlord obliging them to too many hours of labour’. Jefferson conducted his research thoroughly: ‘You must be absolutely incognito, you must ferret the people out of their hovels as I have done, look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll on their beds under the pretence of resting yourself, but in fact to find if they are soft.’31 From Hyères, Jefferson travelled along the coast to Fréjus, Antibes, Nice, Monaco, Menton, and on into Italy. Interestingly, as a visitor coming from a country that had freed itself from the British yoke, he described the ‘gay and dissipated’ Nice as an ‘English colony’.32

In the year of the Revolution, Arthur Young – an economist and England’s great authority on agricultural matters – travelled throughout the south. As Jefferson and Smollett had done, he found the lowlands near Hyères ‘richly cultivated, and planted with olives and vines’.33 Impinging on this rural idyll were the many villas being constructed to house winter residents.34 The proximity of Hyères to Marseille made it one of the first towns selected by those seeking a cure in the warmth of the south. When Arthur Young wanted to get to Nice so as to travel on into Italy, he found it incredible that, in 1789, for a journey from ‘Marseilles with 100,000 souls’ to Nice, there was no diligence. That lumbering long-distance stagecoach, seating six in its stifling interior and several more outside, fore and aft, was an uncomfortable but efficient mode of transport. The southern roads, however, were inadequate for such a vehicle, and Young concluded with that familiar observation: ‘the whole coast of Provence is nearly the same desert’.35 For the French and Sardinian locals, the coast provided ports for trade and fishing villages which fed the local population. There was some agriculture on the generally poor soil. Otherwise, there was nothing.