On the Shores of the Mediterranean (53 page)

And now the Capataces of all three
pasos
, La Muerte, La Urna and El Duelo, banged with their gavels on the metal plaques, and once more the Costaleros, who had profited by this long halt to rush off and relieve themselves in a hard-to-find lavatory in a sacristy on the south side, raised themselves up, some of them bleeding from deep wounds beneath their neck pads, and to the shouts of
‘Adalante! Marcha!’
surged forward yet again as they had done innumerable times in the last two hours and a half.

It was now 9.05 p.m. The
pasos
of the Santo Entierro were once more back on time and they had only another hour and ten minutes before re-entering the Convent at 10.15 p.m., for this is a very short procession and all the processions of Holy Saturday have to be back in their temples before Resurrection Sunday begins at midnight.

I went forward with them, the Nazarenos, the
aguador
, the man
who walks behind each float with a ladder in case a sudden puff of wind snuffs out the candles, the Penitentes with their crosses causing them real discomfort now, as they intended they should, some of them deliberately carrying them with the lower part of the cross, instead of the point of balance, on their shoulders.

Then we went through the Puerto de los Palos at the east end of the Cathedral into the Plaza de la Virgen de los Reyes with its Christian and Moorish monuments, where the crowds were waiting in the soft night air, leaving behind us nothing but the wax we had spilled on the stone slabs, as had every other Nazareno here and throughout the city in the last seven days and nights. Tomorrow or the day after, no doubt it would be scraped away. Tomorrow afternoon, the afternoon of Easter Sunday, the bullfights would begin, and with them another celebration, the Feria, with dancing and music and feasting and pretty girls carried sidesaddle behind their men on horseback. And it would be as if we and our procession, and all the other processions, like the Muslims, had never existed.

Summer was over on the Côte d’Azur. Day after day a Force 7 wind blew from the west out of a clear sky. It moaned around the vandalized telephone booths on the long treeless roads outside the marinas in which the yachts, battened down in their thousands until the spring, bucketed at their moorings. It filled the air with flying paper, some of it with
confiture
on it, where the dustmen were ridding the foreshore and
les campings
of the last of the season’s
ordures
. All but the hardiest swimmers had goose-pimples. The wind-surfers in wet suits were still out in force but they were locals, not what they called
pingouins
(tourists). The plane trees were peeling. The palms looked awful. The last of the forest fires that had destroyed the usual quota of forest in the Maures and the coverts of the Esterel
massif, advancing on anything up to a six-mile front at between two and three miles an hour and rising up to a hundred feet in the air, had burnt themselves out, leaving deserts of white ash punctuated by the blackened skeletons of sea pines and other trees. The bars down on the waterfronts now had only their habitués, caretakers of yachts. Bacon, the restaurant at Antibes which specialized in
bouillabaisse
, had taken it off the menu until the sea, which was cobalt flecked with white, became less rough, as it was impossible to catch the large variety of fish necessary to make it, which have to be absolutely fresh. The museums were already on winter-time opening hours and in some places it was beginning to be difficult to buy English and other foreign newspapers.

The wind was so strong that, falling asleep on the beach at Juan-les-Pins after a delicious, inexpensive luncheon in l’Auberge de I’Esterel, a little restaurant at the back of the town which happened that day to be serving its last dishes of the season,
salade tiède de lotte aux écrevisses
(monkfish salad with freshwater crayfish),
lapin en papillote au beurre de basilic
(rabbit baked in greased paper with basil-flavoured butter), things like that for 75 francs a head (with the exchange at around 12 francs to the pound or 17 to the dollar), we woke to find ourselves buried under mounds of sand, like dead prospectors.

And when, towards evening, we arrived in Nice, it howled down the grey, canyon-like streets behind the Promenade des Anglais. These streets, into which tourists rarely penetrate, reserving their efforts for the old town below the chateau, are as sad and spooky as the back streets of almost any other large resort on the Côte d’Azur, the Italian Riviera or in Atlantic City or Brighton and Hove. It threatened to bowl over the pensioners and the
rentiers
, dressed in their spanking new Burberry trench coats, all ready for
l’hiver
, out for an airing in the gloaming, some of them with a rude-looking little dog in tow.

Nice is the only resort on the Côte d’Azur with a substantial back to its seafront, because it is a city of 350,000 inhabitants, the fifth largest in France, which makes Cannes with 70,000 seem like a village, and the 24,000 inhabitants of Monte Carlo, the Monegasques, a collector’s item. This area is filled with workers engaged on a massive scale in pressing olive oil, extruding macaroni, crystallizing fruit, moulding bars of soap, encapsulating scents, exporting carnations, marguerites and stocks and, if all this sounds a little too arcadian, also deeply involved in the tobacco, textile, furniture and garment industries. It also conceals the Músee des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, a villa in the Genoese style begun by a Russian, the Prince Kotschouby and finished by an American, the entomologist James Thomson, which contains, besides works by Boudin, Sisley, Renoir, Monet, Degas, Dufy and Van Dongen, the singularly horrible pictures of the Symbolist Gustav-Adolf Mossa (1883–1971), its first curator, whom I would not liked to have met after dark on the Promenade des Anglais or anywhere else.

We had come to stay in an
hôtel-palais
, the Negresco, the only one still in existence at Nice. An
hôtel-palais
is the sort that the
Guide Michelin
used to describe as offering ‘
un confort princier
’ but now describes, in deference presumably to those who disapprove of princes, as
‘grand luxe et tradition’
. Here, on the Côte d’Azur, the lights are going out on them, inexorably, one by one, which was one reason why we had decided to stay in this one before it was too late. The other reason was that we had been living rough in the back of a van for what seemed a long time now.

Far into the thirties there were so many
hôtels-palais
. One man, Henri Ruhl, alone built nearly thirty, of which the Carlton at Cannes with its 288 rooms and its 30 suites is the most famous survivor. Of the seven listed in
Michelin
in 1939, only the Carlton and the Majestic remain. At Monte Carlo there are only two, the Paris and the Hermitage.

At Nice the Excelsior-Regina, Queen Victoria’s favourite hotel, is now an old people’s home, and the Hermitage, the Winter Palace and the Riviera Palace, all four of them on the heights of Cimiez and Carabacel inland from the sea, are gone. Gone, too, is the Ruhl et Anglais at No. 1 Promenade des Anglais, opposite what used to be the Casino de la Jetée – also gone, a casino on what was a sort of mini-pier in the Mediterranean – and also the Plaza et France at 12 Avenue Verdun, opposite the Jardin Albert I
^er
. And today there is no longer a single casino in Nice.

Only nine
hôtels-palais
are left on the entire Côte d’Azur between Monte Carlo and St Tropez: the Paris and Hermitage at Monte Carlo, La Réserve and the Métropole at Beaulieusur-Mer, the Negresco at Nice, the du Cap d’Antibes at Cap d’Antibes, the Carlton and Majestic at Cannes and the Byblos at St Tropez.

The Negresco was the creation of Henri Negresco, a Rumanian émigré with a big black moustache which commended him to his women guests, who had been a violinist in a gypsy orchestra before becoming a renowned
maître d’hôtel
.

It opened in 1912 having been built by Edouard Niermans, described, by whom is a mystery, as ‘a Parisian born in Holland by an error of nature’. Architect and embellisher of innumerable casinos, restaurants, theatres, which included the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergères, as well as other
hôtels-palais
, Niermans designed it for the same purpose as all the other
hôtels-palais
on the Riviera were designed: for the reception of royalty, which included whole squads of grand dukes (sightings of a dozen at a time were not uncommon; they used to come for the weekend from St Petersburg in special trains),
¹
noblemen, statesmen and
millionaires who were also sometimes noble. All these, in various states of decrepitude, used to come to the Riviera in the winter months – those few hotels which remained open all the year used to give low season discounts from May to October – to play at the casinos and be given the kiss of life by such
grandes horizontales
as La Belle Otéro, Gaby Deslys, Liane de Pouget, Cléo de Mérode and, for those who could not afford the astral fees demanded by such high-class operators, a supporting cast of thousands of willing extras. And to show their appreciation of this monumental knocking shop, built on the site of a convent at a cost of 6,000,000 gold francs, eight kings and innumerable millionaires were present at the inaugural revels, in the same year as the Grand Duke Michael of Russia laid the foundation stone of a similar edifice, the Carlton at Cannes, having performed the same office for the Casino there six years previously.

For the period of less than two years before 1914, the Negresco was a tremendous success. In its first year it cleaned up 800,000 gold francs. It then became a military hospital for the duration of the war, as did the Carlton, and in 1910 Negresco died, ruined. It was the end of an epoch. There were no more grand dukes, and kings and queens were on ration. In 1922 two wealthy and sophisticated Americans, Gerald and Sara Murphy, on whom Fitzgerald partly based the Divers in
Tender is the Night
(another wilder part was based on himself and Zelda his wife), discovered a small sandy beach, La Garoupe, while staying at Cole Porter’s villa on Cap d’Antibes. ‘At that time,’ as Murphy said, ‘no one ever went near the Riviera in summer. The English and the Germans – there were no longer any Russians – who came down for the short spring season closed their villas as soon as it began to get warm [in May]. None of them ever went in the water, you see. When we went to visit Cole, it was hot, hot summer, but the air was dry, and it was cool in the evening, and the water was that wonderful
jade-and-amethyst color. Right out on the end of the Cap there was a tiny beach – the Garoupe – only about forty yards long and covered with a bed of seaweed that must have been about four feet thick. We dug out a corner of the beach and bathed there and sat in the sun, and we decided that this was where we wanted to be. Oddly, Cole never came back. But from the beginning we knew we were going to.’

Without realizing it, they had invented a new way of life, or one which if it ever existed had not done so since pre-Christian times, and the clothes to go with it. Shorts made of white duck, horizontally-striped matelots’ jerseys and white work caps bought from sailors’ slop shops, became a uniform. (A photograph of this period taken on the beach at La Garoupe shows Picasso wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and what looks like a cod-piece of seaweed, festively arranged.)

From now on the rich, and ultimately everyone else in the northern hemisphere, wanted unlimited sun, the sea, sandy beaches or rocks to dive into it from and the opportunity to eat al fresco. Friends of Hemingway and his wife – he introduced them to bullfighting at Pamplona – the Murphys, equally unwittingly, set the scene for him, too. So that, years later, Cyril Connolly could write, without exaggeration, that ‘the greatness of Hemingway is that he alone of living writers has saturated his books with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love, and with the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.’

It was the latest in a series of metamorphoses on a coast that before the coming of the grand dukes had attracted well-to-do sufferers from tuberculosis, many of whom died on it, scaring the healthy away, a coast inhabited by a hybrid mixture of peoples: descendants of Ligurians who came to it around 1000 BC, preferring it to their own Italian Riviera; Phoenicians and
Phocaeans,
²
Greeks from the Ionian shores of Asia Minor who colonized Massilia (the present Marseilles) in 600 BC, established trading posts at Nice, Antibes and other places in the fourth century BC, introduced olive, fig and cherry trees, the cultivated vine and the idea of money as opposed to barter, one still firmly implanted in the hard heads of the present-day inhabitants. Their territory, in the second century BC, was invaded by the Celts and then, at their own invitation (to rid themselves of the Celts) by the Romans, who eventually established Transalpine Gaul, which included Provence and its sea coast from Massilia to the Alpes-Maritimes and secured their lines of communication with Spain. And they were followed by Vandals, Burgundians, Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Franks, all of whom invaded Provence in the fifth and sixth centuries; by Saracens who sacked its seaboard in the first half of the eighth century and in the ninth terrorized the whole of the mountain area (the Maures) behind St Tropez. Subsequently, in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was at the mercy of any of the foreign mercenary armies which happened to be passing through. Well into the nineteenth century it was a source of women and more durable spoils for Barbary pirates. (The Mission of Lord Exmouth to the heads of the Barbary States – the Bey of Tunis, the Dey of Algiers and the Bashaw of Tripoli – in the spring of 1816 secured, in theory, the abolition of Christian slavery.)

This quest for the sea and sun was not good news for Nice which, like Brighton, has an extremely-uncomfortable-to-lie-on shingle beach, and in 1957, after thirty-seven years which had seen the demise of most of the other palace-hotels, the Negresco, having doddered on under the auspices of a Belgian syndicate, was bought by Jean Mesnage, an immensely wealthy property
developer who began life as a charcutier’s assistant and made a fortune out of that, too.

The hotel occupies an entire block of seaside Nice. The front of it looks out over a murderous four-lane highway to the Promenade des Anglais, constructed by the local peasantry at the behest of the English colony when the orange crop failed in a great frost in 1822 in order to give them employment, now forming a great arc along the shore of the Baie des Anges. Large, but not as large as it was (the present owners decided to reduce the number of rooms from 400 to 150, leaving the back half of the hotel in disuse), it certainly looks like a
hôtel-palais:
painted a gleaming white like its rival the Carlton – the last time it was done, a couple of years before we arrived on its doorstep, it cost a million new francs to do it – with the railings of its balconies embellished with 24-carat gold leaf, its pink and green cupola of the same shape as two similar protuberances that sprout from the rooftops of the Carlton, which inspired what must have been a very over-excited Frenchman to describe them as
‘les boîtes à lait de la Belle Otéro’
(‘the milk cans of the Belle Otéro’).

We arrived at the Negresco in our Volkswagen van, loaded with battered but good luggage, as good a way as any of determining whether staff can tell sausages by their overcoats, and drew up under a great glass canopy with the name of the hotel spelt out in lights. There we were met by a
voiturier
, what we would call a commissionaire. He was dressed in an extraordinary uniform said by the management to be a facsimile of that of a
pontonnier de l’Empire
– a military pontoon engineer of the Empire – it was difficult to tell which empire by looking at it: top hat with a huge red plume sprouting from it, caped great coat in royal blue, lined in scarlet, and long black boots, all of which initially they had had some difficulty in getting him to wear even though it had been put together by the couturier of Françoise Sagan, but now he
loved it and could scarcely be persuaded to take it off. He asked for the keys and parked our not exactly sumptuous machine outside the front door – there is no garage accommodation – where it remained next to a Rolls with Monegasque number plates during our entire stay. Meanwhile
chasseurs
(porters), dressed in riding coats, knee breeches and stockings embodying the same colour scheme and presumably also from the same stable, zoomed our luggage into the building.