With the Sun on Your Back
The Côte d’Azur has its friends and its foes. Countless people in England, France, and northern Europe dream of settling down along this coast. Quite a number of celebrities live there. However, there are also those who don’t like the place, who prefer Biarritz, Normandy, or Brittany. If I may be allowed to voice an opinion on such an important issue, I would say I occupy the middle ground.
You become nostalgic for the Mediterranean. Once you have tasted its poor, spare ribbon of coast, it’s hard to forget. It is a sea that seems purpose-built for contemplation — a sea tailor-made for humans. It is a sea that doesn’t disturb or arouse the monsters of the imagination, but rather lulls them to sleep with its drowsy presence.
When you have lived four or five years in northern Europe without a break, a moment comes when you want to come back to life, to see your body’s shadow once again, to feel a gentle breeze on your skin and the sun caress your flesh. When you are in that state of mind a trip to the Côte d’Azur seems a pleasant prospect. If you want to appreciate this stretch of country, you must come out of necessity, not on holidays, whether paid or not.
The Côte d’Azur makes a huge impact if you come from northern Europe. If you come from our country, I think it’s much less. I have realized by now that everything in this world is relative, especially the consequences of human geography. Apparently nothing could be more set in stone than the south and the north. In practice, nevertheless, it is much harder to draw out precise consequences about the nature of things and people simply from their geographical location! For a Swede from Stockholm, a Swede from Malmö is very similar to how a Parisian sees someone from Marseille, a Milanese, a Neapolitan or a Sicilian, a Scotsman, a Londoner or a Welshman, a Barcelonan, someone from Malaga or Seville. Northerners, so they say, are hardworking, persistent, positive, and practical, have a sense of humor, aren’t flowery and go straight to the point. And southerners are quite the opposite: lazy, mercurial, frivolous, verbose, sad, sentimental, and in a daze; they spend the day playing the guitar. But when we speak in this fashion, which north and which south do we mean? Do we speak about them inasmuch as these terms are geographical absolutes or suggest national relativities? For if we affirm that they play the mandolin too much in Malmö, speak in a singsong manner, and are very easy-going, where does the south really begin? In this case, what level of picturesque, musical life must we lead who are really geographically in the south?
Yes, all this is so obvious. No matter, I will repeat what I was saying: the Côte d’Azur makes a huge impact if you come from the north, when you can feel physically that you are landing in a southern country: a southerliness that hits you in your eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. When you come from a country like ours that is even further south, the impact isn’t so striking, it feels different, even though you appreciate the country for other reasons that remain worthy of consideration.
This first discrepancy is evident in Marseille. When a visitor from the north reaches Marseille he thinks he has arrived in a land of milk and honey. It is a disorderly, chaotic mess. I have never been able to see Marseille like that. I’ve always thought the city showed remarkable tenacity. Have you seen Marseille from the sea? — a gray earthy stew of a city against a backdrop of bare, inhospitable, chalky mountains. The horrible, completely charmless landscape around Marseille brings out its authentic character, points to the city’s wealth of energy.
The countryside around Marseille is so nondescript. Those elephantine-backed mountains, covered in scrub and gorse, are repulsive and dull. They constitute an enormous blot on the delightful, diverse landscape of Provence. But a moment comes, traveling towards Toulon, when Provence resurfaces. This valley of vineyards and olive groves belongs to Cassis. Cassis today is universally renowned. It is a small town of fishermen and country folk with no special features — like so many in France! It has a small delightful port where one or two yachts are always moored. It has a wonderful little restaurant where one eats in a civilized fashion. There is a stretch of level ground, protected from the wind, shaded by plane trees that the sun reaches in the winter, where boxing matches are staged. What a wonderful way to spend the early evening! And the surrounding country crisscrossed by rural paths and dry streambeds, red roofs under foliage, and wonderfully well-kept gardens. Cézanne country.
Bandol and Sanary are towns very similar to Cassis: small sleepy ports in front of a valley. They are small valleys enclosed by hills that trace gentle, graceful lines across the sky. Vines are the main crop, agave grows along the borders, branches of old fig trees sway sensually in the air, olive trees flash myriad silvery smiles, carob trees dot the land, the waves’ whitecaps glint, shimmer, and dazzle beyond the sleepy pines, lulled by their deep music. It is a heavy, sumptuous, mature landscape with a dense leaven, despite the light touch brought by human hands. Coming from the north, where everything seems vaporized and liquid, it is a landscape with a terrestrial presence. What most strikes you is the ease with which the different forms of life express themselves in the presence of such an ancient, such a young sea. A pine branch, the incline of a hill, the flight of a thrush or starling, the trunk of a fig tree possess a keen desire to find almost impertinent, concrete expression. Their plasticity, life’s urge to become form, their passion to exist, is like a ingenuous form of exhibitionism, showing off in ways that can be wise and profound yet surly, adolescent, and unnerving. Provence’s astonishing landscape hungers, yearns for plasticity! Our landscape is more delicate, more Gothic, and more flirtatious; it never attains this distilled, exuberant ripeness.
Hyères is a most elegant town with a large number of huge eucalyptus trees that are hundreds of years old. Such amazing trees! Nevertheless, its entangled plant life, like a good part of the city’s architecture from the heyday of the bourgeoisie, is rather out-of-fashion.
The best policy in Hyères is to abandon the direct Marseille-Nice route — that goes inland, via Draguignan — and go to L’Esterel at the leisurely pace allowed by the local rail line.
L’Esterel, also known as the Coast of the Moors, is wild, mountainous terrain, crossed by very few roads, with a solitary coast of middling high, reddish cliffs that cradles the charming small town of Saint-Tropez in one of its curves. It is a country of cork oaks with the pale grayness these trees bring. The resemblance to our Les Gavarres range is striking. It is a remote, sparsely populated area, like Les Gavarres, crisscrossed by deep ravines with a wintry, very twilight existence. In the summer, it is a land of cicadas that sing furiously in the heat of the dry, bitter cork-oak groves.
L’Esterel isn’t the Côte d’Azur. The coast has left Provence, it is lighter, airier country, and that’s why its name is so well chosen. The Coast of the Moors is reddish rather than blue, and its granite cliffs aren’t gray or its basalt deep brown: these cliffs are a warm, fiery deep ocher. There is another difference: on the Côte d’Azur, the mountains provide a backdrop; in L’Esterel the mountains plunge precipitously down to the sea, occupy the frontline. The villages must hide in small coves.