‘Oh the Mediterranean addiction, how we fall for it!’ So sighed Sybille Bedford, who spent the 1920s and 1930s in Sanary-sur-Mer. Aldous Huxley settled in the same fishing village in 1930, writing to his sister-in-law: ‘Here all is exquisitely lovely. Sun, roses, fruit, warmth. We bathe and bask.’ James Lees-Milne perched further along the coast at Roquebrune from 1950–61. In a reverie, he later recalled the smells of brioche, coffee, pine needles, ‘the senses heightened, expectant of lovely future days without end’.This illusion of limitless freedom had given to Bedford, too,
a large sense of living rationally, sensuously, well, of pleasure on many levels: now and before us and for years to come, as no other place in Europe, no other place in the world…
Half a century earlier, Robert Louis Stevenson had inhaled the herbal wind and turned his tubercular cheeks to what Bedford called ‘the unfudging sun’ — and felt a similar pull, remarking shortly before his death: ‘I was only happy once: that was at Hyères.’
Like Patagonia, there is no official boundary to the French Riviera. Synonymous with the Côte D’Azur, it stretches from Menton and Monte Carlo in the east to Cassis in the west. Made popular by foreigners — according to Bedford, no Frenchman born north of Valence would have dreamt of exposing his womenfolk and children to the heat — its reputation as a sunny place for shady people continues to be enhanced by the likes of (Sir) Philip Green. Today’s Riviera is, in Mary Lovell’s phrase, ‘a place where money is everything’, and five-bedroom houses cost up to £18 million. Yet Lovell’s survey is less a history of this coastline than the potted biography of one particular villa, the Château de l’Horizon, its expatriate American owner, Maxine Elliott, and her imported guests.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in