The usual means of transport is the narrow gauge railway, a provincial operation that winds through valleys and mountains gasping like a dolphin and whistling to give you goose bumps. It has a vague, agreeable timetable. One of the most noteworthy and curious features of the line are the splendid, large hats worn by the station masters. The journey from Hyères to Saint-Tropez is inordinately long. You watch the trains make all manner of maneuvers and as the time spent there accumulates, your affection for those white hats increases.
It is a wonderful railway: the best of feelings — of sociability — are nurtured in its small carriages with upholstery that is now beginning to look threadbare; conversations spring up, friends are made, and you learn strange things about the places you are passing through. This rather shabby means of transport carries a kind of traveler that has completely vanished from the big railway network. Apart from the fact that if there is some sort of disaster, it is never on such a grand scale! Whenever I go to Saint-Tropez, I never fail to visit the friends this railway has so generously given me. We uncork a good bottle of local wine and are genuinely happy to meet up again. I don’t think a form of travel exists in Europe today that can offer such boons.
The line doesn’t always follow the coast. Sometimes it has a stroke of genius and impetuously takes the shortest route across the peninsula. It follows an almost straight line from Hyères to Le Lavandou, and when it reaches Cavalaire bids farewell to the sea and heads inland, leaving the Saint-Tropez peninsula grievously incommunicado. Almost the entire journey is through deserted territory, with very few villages, to the extent that you sometimes think you aren’t in France. The coast is as empty as the hinterland, if not more so: you feel you have moved to an isolated corner of the Mediterranean. Well, in my view, the most intense expanses of sea are the most empty, the most deserted.
The first time I went to Saint-Tropez I did think it was a faraway place. A walled town with ancient dark stone that took on a coppery hue at dusk. Mounted in an old mansion with huge rooms, my hotel looked over the mirror of the small port. An anachronistic hoteclass="underline" a table d’hôte with petulant, fussy commercial travelers as in Stendhal’s times. From the balcony I could see a small ketch anchored by the breakwater and the flickering reddish glow of its harbor light, I imagined it was Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami. In the pearly light of dawn, the town’s old houses and blackened walls were reflected in the pale pink, celluloid waters. Two or three small coastal packets, with light, airy rigging, bobbed like toys. On the other side of the gulf, beyond the glistening green pine groves, the white walls of Saint-Maxime floated and shimmered above a white sea.
Life was quiet and tranquil, with no nasty surprises. The port was reasonably active. The harbor master caulked boats and boiled a pot of tar that perfumed the air. A labyrinth of bare narrow streets hustled and bustled within the walls and it seemed Italian from our latitudes, rather than French. On these hot, sticky streets you sometimes caught a glimpse of a girl with a complexion the color of potato purée and dark, dilated eyes. The quay was overlooked by the statue of Admiral Suffren, the famous mariner from Provence (a local), from the era of Louis XV. It is a remarkable bronze work, with a veneer of verdigris, grandiose, emphatic but empty, as if styled by a swanky hairdresser. Statues seem to create zones of silence. That statue, which was so demonstrative, deepened the silence in Saint-Tropez. A sparrow sometimes perched on its stentorian hat and left a derisory dropping. The small church bell chimed. The train whistled shrilly. The crickets’ frenzied cries from the cork-oak groves to the south drifted faintly on the summer air. Everything was silent and remote: oblivion.
The small Saint-Tropez local train comes to an end in Saint-Raphaël where you rejoin the general transport network. You reach Antibes in a numbered seat on a grand express.
The origins of tourism on the Côte d’Azur are to be found in Hyères and Cannes. Their urban splendor is the creation of doctors. At a given moment, the medical powers-that-be decided that the most suitable climate for tuberculosis patients was a maritime one. They in fact prescribed Cannes, Hyères … There wasn’t a wealthy tuberculosis patient on the continent (Russia still included) who didn’t heed that prescription throughout the second half of the last century and the first years of this. People thought eucalyptus trees killed microbes, so large numbers were planted. If one day you feel curious and visit the cemeteries in these towns, etched on marble pantheons, amid a splendid array of symbolic bronze and stone the passage of time has dimmed, you will see the most prestigious names of the European nobility and bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. And so many tombs of young people! That was how the first stone came to be laid on the Côte d’Azur.
Then doctors changed their criteria. The most suitable climate for tuberculosis patients was no longer by the seaside. They now prescribed high mountains: Davos, Saint-Moritz, and Zermatt, which made much more sense, as far as you could make out. This discovery was a setback for this area, but by the time the re-routing took place, the Côte d’Azur was by and large constructed.
Antibes, a town neighboring on Cannes, benefited from this initial kernel of tourism. In Antibes tourism soon begins to be gray-bearded below its already longstanding wrinkles, everything is rather decrepit. The small port of Antibes is perhaps unique in the world. It is a perfectly circular saucepan surrounded by walls so high I don’t think any other port can rival them. Almost all ports have a similar system of defenses. The port of Antibes is enclosed by a screen that creates strange effects. Well, that brings all kinds of advantages: the waters are still, yachts can relax, there are no sudden gusts, and people relish a pulse of life in the fresh air as if they were in their own homes. The port of Antibes is immensely hospitable.
The population of Nice is descended from Italians. One the other hand, can one say Nice is an Italian city? I think not. The traces of Italy in Nice comprise the finest elements in the old town; they are so subterranean, however, they seem almost surreptitious and never loom large; they are buried under the Negresco-style paraphernalia of grand hotel architecture, fashioned by professional architects. The town has been the preserve of young architects for over half a century, the youngest, most dynamic, most handsome and best-connected architects in France. It is the Mecca of bourgeois architects. The results have been sensational everywhere, but in Nice the city proliferated like mushrooms, and is incomparably visuaclass="underline" it’s as if the real architects were the bourgeois and the bourgeois were the architects. In an era when sensitivity was prized, the city might have shown the way to the future. In the event, they have made it the capital of a permanent universal exhibition.
The spirit of its external detail belongs to that kind of festive spectacle. Nice’s internationalism cannot simply be explained by its benign climate. One senses that the city has mounted a universal exhibition that never closes and attracts people from all around. The most popular stands are the casinos. The grand hotels seem to have been purpose-built to this end. The leisured, well-dressed, Sunday-morning-style people favor exactly matches that of individuals going to or from an exhibition. That’s particularly visible on the Promenade des Anglais, because the international exhibition has clearly been mounted at the end of this magnificent avenue. Whatever the music, and whatever its quality, music in Nice becomes music for an exhibition. The theater performed there is for exhibition audiences. Churches seem built to be part of the exhibition. One sees this in the tendency things in Nice have to emphasize tinsel, a kind of glittery, shiny foil people think more genuine than reality itself. Everything tends to take on a second nature that replaces their true one.