Land of sunlight and shadow
The French Riviera’s glamour attracted 19th century royalty and 20th century artists and writers seeking inspiration, writes Julia Carter
Even today, the very name of the Riviera evokes images of glamour and indulgence – minimally covered girls sip drinks on the decks of expensive yachts, while sun-tanned men park their sleek convertibles outside palm-framed casinos.
Ever since its establishment as a winter retreat for the crowned heads of Europe and their aristocracy, there has been an aura around the towns of Cannes and Nice with their grand hotels and palatial villas, the settings for society balls and concerts in the season.
Queen Victoria spent her winters here, as did her prime minister, Lord Salisbury, in his villa overlooking the sea at Beaulieu. At a time when the ever-present ghost of TB haunted every winter chill or cough, the allure of the sunlit, cloudless skies of the Cote d’azur was powerful. Walking amidst orange groves or under wisteria-clad pergolas, the grey reality of Northern Europe seemed worlds away.
For entertainment the Belgian king hunted boar and deer in the pinecovered hills around his palaces on Cap Ferrat; the Marquis of Salisbury brought his tricycle from England and rode around his estate, to the amusement of the local population. Many visitors built monuments: the Russians left an ornate Orthodox cathedral in Nice and a convent in Villefranche; Queen Victoria built a small dog drinking fountain for a thirsty dog she spotted pulling a cart on the road between her hotel at Cimiez and Lord Salisbury’s villa.
In the years before and after World War One, homecoming members of the British, French and Belgian colonial services, looked for somewhere sunnier and warmer than their home towns and settled in the South of France. Belle Epoque villas sprang up on the coast roads and hillsides between Menton and Cannes. English churches, libraries and doctors supported the growing population of British expats who met in English tea rooms and shopped in English pharmacies and were joined by less wealthy visitors, now able to take the much-improved train service for a short winter break in an area that did not feel too foreign.
Meanwhile the sun, or more specifically, the sunlight was bringing artists south. As new paints allowed artists to move out of their studios, they began to appreciate the importance of sunlight. Postimpressionists like Monet and Renoir came to the Riviera for the quality of light and were followed by generations of artists including Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne, Braque, Chagall, Van Gogh and Dufy. In their turn they attracted other creative spirits from post-war USA and postrevolutionary Russia. Designers, poets, writers, dancers, musicians and sculptors came south and made their homes along the Mediterranean coast or came for a summer of heat and beach living. When Jean Cocteau came to Villefranche to mourn the death of his lover, he sat in an opiuminduced daze rediscovering himself and what it meant to be an artist and a poet, gazing in the mirror of his hotel bedroom at The Welcome, which was for one or two summers the carnival centre of the artistic world. Joining forces with Diagilev and Nijinski at the Ballets Russes in Monaco, Cocteau created the ballet, Le Train Bleu, with a curtain painted by Picasso and costumes by Chanel.
At Antibes Scott Fitzgerald and his
His guests basked in the sunshine by his marble swimming pool
wife, Zelda, joined Hemingway, Cole Porter and their mutual friends the Murphys to create the first summer season, when they cleared the beach of seaweed to sunbathe, together with Picasso who brought his child and his black-clad mother.
Katherine Mansfield, fighting fatal TB, spent winters on the Mediterranean for her health, staying first in Bandol in the west and then in Menton, on the border with Italy, where, from her tiny studio, she defied death long enough to write her greatest work, Prelude, one of the very first examples of Modernist fiction. On the hillside of Cap Ferrat the internationally famous novelist and playwright, Somerset Maugham’s summer house parties attracted writers and celebrities, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Churchill and Beaverbrook. His guests basked in the sunshine by his marble swimming pool, waited on by a fleet of servants or took a boat ride into Villefranche for the less salubrious gay night life along the quayside.
The American novelist, Edith Wharton, entertained at her winter home in Hyeres near Toulon, where her guests including the eminent art critic, Bernard Berenson, spent Christmas enjoying her marvellous gardens and comfortable house. Aldous Huxley was a distant neighbour of Wharton’s, writing from his house in Sanary-sur-mer and enjoying the bright light which helped his very poor eyesight. In their letters and in their personal journals, the writers document the beauty and the sense of calm they have found on the Mediterranean, yet, with the notable exception of Fitzgerald, it does not feature in their novels. Mansfield’s Prelude is set in the New Zealand of her childhood; Wharton for her Pulitzer prize-winning The Age of Innocence revisits the old New York of her youth; Huxley looks to the scientific future for Brave New World and Maugham to Britain for Cakes and Ale while Cocteau resorts to a Modernist take on the ancient classics like Oedipus and Orpheus.
Unlike the artists, the writers did not detail what they saw but what they found within their imaginations. The sunlight for them was a source of peace and contentment which enabled them to craft their greatest works. For all of them there were also shadows: reasons for coming to the Riviera, fears and pasts that haunted them. Mansfield was fighting death and her short stories are revealing as she struggles to understand the co-existence of love and loss; happiness and pain and ultimately life and death. For Huxley, determined to write before blindness overcame him, time was precious and living in France was a way of gaining time, since the lower cost of living meant he no longer needed to earn money by writing magazine articles. This was equally true for Fitzgerald, who had left New York in part because of his drinking problems but in part to find a cheaper way of life which would liberate him from the writing which prevented him from being truly creative.
For them all then there was a sense of liberty and of establishing their identity which was involved in coming to the Riviera and we can feel it in their work. For writing was what they did, with a discipline and rigour which belies the sybaritic image of the place.
Sunlight and Shadows: Writers in the South of France by Julia Carter is published by Whitefox, £10.99 hardback, out now.