CENTRE POINT
With a little help from the Nazis, St Tropez remains the only point of civilisation on the Cote d'Azur
SIMON JENKINS
Normally' hate going back. I last visited the little port of St Tropez 20 years ago and decided then it could take no more punish- ment. The quays, the fish market, the nar- row streets, the boules in the market-place were under mass attack. The natives were fleeing to the hill villages of the interior, like their ancestors from the invading Saracens. The place would soon capitulate to ham- burgers and high rise as had every other coastal town from Hyeres to Monaco.
I was wrong. St Tropez has retained its physical appearance largely unblemished. It is still the small port which every writer since Augustus Hare in 1890 has declared faces imminent ruin from tourism. Maupas- sant, Colette and Sagan came and went, assuring their friends that the place had lost its soul. In the past two decades, a monstrous tide of building sweeping down the Cote d'Azur submerged Ste Maxime and threw up Port Grimaud and Port Gassin, yet left the St Tropez promontory undisturbed. Today a cordon insanitaire of congealed traffic keeps out most visitors after 10 o'clock in the morning.
The key to the physical survival of St Tropez lies in a simple fact of economic history, that fashion discovered it before and not after the hoteliers. Its patrons in the 1960s and 70s — the Vadims, the Bar- dots and their hangers-on — bought their estates and froze further development by getting successive mayors to ban one scheme after another. It was the fiercest nimbyism this side of Gloucestershire. One block of flats on the outskirts of town and the Byblos hotel, more suited to Marbella, were all that slipped through the net.
Some credit should also go to the Ger- mans. This month the town celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Allied landings, which took place along the coast from St Tropez to Frejus. It was on 15 August 1944 that the German commander, realising that the American First Airborne was on its way, blew up the harbour. He retreated to the citadel and promptly surrendered. The famous quayside, first built by Genoese immigrants in the 16th century, was left a heap of rubble.
The Tropeziens did what the Poles did in Warsaw. They rebuilt their harbour area as it had been before. They thus obviated the need to modernise the town centre 20 or 30 years later, when most Mediterranean fish- ing ports were being demolished for tourist development. The former architectural demeanour was retained. As with Portofino in Italy, St Tropez kept its intimacy and its dignity, drawing crowds but also drawing the loyalty that preserved it.
The tourists may not have taken St Tropez by bombardment and destruction. Instead they adopted the Wooden Horse approach. Each summer they pour from their cars and coaches, a daily army of occupation. In St Tropez thousands man- age to cram into the quayside cafés, where they are described by Archibald Lyall in his Companion Guide as like caged animals in a zoo. They gaze out at the backsides of Maxwellian motor yachts, which lie arm-in- arm at anchor like fat tycoons, their engines burping with indigestion. The yachts occasionally grow restless and roar out into the bay to test their martini-shak- ers. They return to pay homage (and pay dear) to the only men they fear, the fash- ionable restaurateurs who run St Tropez as the sea captains did of old.
In the 1970s the tourists were young and the quay was the catwalk of world taste. Today they are older, the tans more wrin- kled, the fashion accessories gold. rather than leather. It now takes two hours to crawl the three miles from the Ste Maxime road. No longer are Buffet, Sagan, Vadim, Moreau and Bardot 'sharing a joke over a bottle of wine' in La Ponche, as the guide- books believe they once did. They are either dead or living behind electronic gates amid the umbrella pines. There they discuss the horrors of the tourism that they drew to the town. They pledge themselves to leave. But they are over 50. It is too late to found new colonies.
Fleeing St Tropez is not easy. Colette tried in the 1920s, when the port was already drawing well-heeled English and American yachtsmen. She escaped to the neighbouring countryside from 'streets filled with hovering scents of sea urchins, of nougat and of disembowelled melons'. In her oleander-draped cottage she continued to write incessantly, to eat 'steaks the size of my thighs' and to find lovers well into her fifties. 'Another nice kettle of fish I am in,' she wrote to her friend. 'These quiet ones have the very devil in them.' The escapees reached Ramatuelle and Gassin, Grimaud and Cogolin. In the Sixties, Tony Richardson bought his ménage an entire village in the cork woods near La Garde- Freinet. But St Tropez was still the magnet.
The high point of my return was the dis- covery of Paul Signac. Here at least is a prophet honoured in his own country. The paintings of the pointillists seem frigid and academic on the gallery walls of northern Europe. When Seurat died at the age of 32 in 1891, his friend and follower Signac sailed his yacht down the Canal du Midi, crossed to St Tropez and immediately pitched camp. There he wrote his 'poems of light .. . light drowning . . light invading everything'. In 1897 he bought himself a small farmhouse just outside the town, 'lost in pines and roses ... above the golden shores of the gulf where blue waves come to die on the beach'. He could look out over a little bay, where he moored his beloved Olympia. In the distance rose the blue-mauve silhouettes of the Mau- res and Esterel mountains. 'I bathe in joy,' he wrote to his mother.
The house is still there behind its walls and in its original gardens (privately owned by Signac's grand-daughter). Hex, poplar and umbrella pine shade its vineyard and the little beach still shelters boats from the mistral. The view is Signac's view. The frac- tured light on water, the dappled reds and oranges of sunset, the blues, purples and mauves of receding hills are as Signac recreated them with his tiny spots of paint. The friends he commanded to St Tropez are now hanging in the little Annonciade gallery at the end of the port: Matisse, Seu- rat, Bonnard, Vuillard and Dufy. The light shimmering on the harbour seems to rush into this charming gallery and leap unaided onto the canvases. This is landscape speak- ing direct to art, pointillism in practice.
Signac was the most cerebral of artists. He affirmed that subject matter was immaterial, that the artist should convey meaning through colour and that colour could only be captured by deconstructing it. His Esterel hills were 'the colour of a peacock's throat'. He found blues, yellows and greys in the slightest shadow of a pine tree. To apply such stern principles to so sensuous a land- scape and never dissemble was Signac's art.
The key to St Tropez has lain in its retaining its genius loci. Tourists are mere passing shadows. The fabric is secure, the profile on the horizon, the streets, the out- look. Signac is still alive, in the yellows of the Place des Lices, the reds of the quay, the mauves of the woods and, above all, the blues and purples of the Gulf. He is doing fine. St Tropez will survive.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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