Menton: The garden of France

A hundred years ago, travel writers commented, there was something peculiarly depressing about Menton — or Mentone as the British would say, recalling the days when the town situated on the Mediterranean border between France and Italy was an independent Italian-leaning state. It was depressing because wherever you looked there were people tottering palely along the promenade past the statue of Queen Victoria (who used to stay in a discreetly grand villa tucked among the hills) or lurking in the numerous hotels with Anglophone names. Since Dr James Bennet in the 1870s had declared that the town’s microclimate and its almost unfailingly good weather offered a hope of recovery for those suffering from lung problems, a foreign colony of the ailing had sprung up. Predominantly British but also German, Swedish, Russian, many settled in the generous villas that spread through the olive groves on the luxuriant slopes above the town’s two bays, although such commentators as Augustus Hare who had known the earlier town felt that a once-lovely place had been wrecked.

The principal beneficiary of this nostrum for consumption was Dr Bennet, who opened a clinic and became very rich. The patients were less fortunate: the climate of Menton did not heal tuberculosis, and the patients often died. The cemetery that rises in picturesque tiers above the Old Town holds the graves of such seekers for health as Aubrey Beardsley, the historian J.R. Green, and William Webb Ellis who is credited with having as a Rugbeian thrown the first ball to a footballing teammate to create the game of rugby. They lie in the Protestant section of the cemetery beside the massive (and now often rotting) family mausolea of the Catholic Mentonnais, equipped with enamelled photographs of the dear departed. Katherine Mansfield, also in search of recovery, spent months in Menton before dying young elsewhere.