Naughty, but Nice
Theo Fennell
COTE D’AZUR
The words of Sandy Wilson’s song from his incomparably camp musical, The Boyfriend, don’t do justice to the archness of the place. Throw down the lexicon of louche and you can bet a sou to a euro that the page it opens on will have the South of France, the Riviera, the C6te d’Azur, or any of the other wonderfully evocative soubriquets of the place, written somewhere on it.
From the boulevardiers of the Promenade des Anglais to the flâneurs of Cannes the place reeks of naughtiness and indolence. It is, though, not quite decadent. The French cannot do rock’n’roll, even with a small pair of r’s, and shouts of ‘Eez Parditime’ at the Voile Rouge don’t ring true. The mood on the C6te d’Azur is deeply vain and solipsistic and doesn’t allow for dirtiness.
But this naughtiness is what gives it such perennial charm and gaiety. It is just a very pleasant place to be. I have been there penniless with only youth, some feeble French chat-up lines and three chords on the guitar at my side; and latterly middleaged, but with rich and generous friends; and both extremes have been equally agreeable. However, it would be a savage place to be broke with just the three chords and not in the first flush of youth, for it is a place that worships daily at the altars of Venus and Mammon, if I may mix myths. And down there they do.
The splendour of the yachts and the beauty of the bathing lovelies are celebrated shamelessly. There is no place less envious in the world. Once any idea of the real world has been suspended it is the best al fresco theatre in the world. Where once the English milords sauntered, mad old nannies forbade their wards from bathing for an hour after eating (what was that about?) and sterling held sway, the boaters and spats have disappeared and the rouble and dollar have muscled in. But that is part of the whole Riviera game. Its venality and willingness to serve the current captain of the financial castle have kept it alive, but the money is taken with such panache that it is worth having your pockets picked. What is so extraordinary about the place is that despite the endless influx of foreigners over so long and the assimilation of their words, habits and fashions, the local culture and patois has remained resolutely and unequivocally French.
In the hills above St Paul de Vence, a spot as delightful as any you could find, I drank hot chocolate and dunked croissants on a Sunday morning while watching a bum of bicyclists (a collective noun coined by my father) in absurd kit, despite their age, ride through the little village square. Some stopped and had a drink or a wonderfully inappropriate smoke and some rode through waving to the others. There was the toc of boules and the occasional Gallic expletive, and the smell of France was in the air. The memory of every French trip I have had since I was a boy assaulted my senses. At moments like these I love the place.
This scene, played out so close to the absurdity of the beach, not that far below, was absolutely as removed from it as it was possible to be and would have been the same from time immemorial. I sensed the ghost of some stray baronet with loud Franglais asking his way back to Nice in the Bentley. Their answer to what they make of these excesses so close by would, I suspect, be a Provençal shrug. No goldenegg-laying goose has ever been made into foie gras down here.
Despite its political vacillations over the years there is something very permanent about the Riviera. Its ethos is unashamedly self-serving but it needs to be. It is, after all, their country and we are just transient interlopers helping to keep them all going through the rest of the year outside the big shuttered-up houses that few locals can afford so that they can keep it fluffed for the new season.
Alors, while the French cannot do rock’n’roll, they can do summer chic like no one else and watching the parade by the backs of the boats in St Tropez harbour or the wrinkled old prunes in shameful thongs flicking their fingers to order some fabulous young creature to their table at Club 55, they outglamour all other nations effortlessly. The autumn-summer relationships, however obviously fiscal, are unremarkable here; sensuality and just, well, sex fizzle in the suncream-scented air. Laissez-faire is a French thing. In England McGill would have painted a postcard of the pert breasts nestling either side of their date’s hearing aid and the locals would have turned the beaches into golf links.
Still, golf is at least an English word that they use. I am shocked, though, on rereading this to see how many French words I have had to use to describe the place. Is there no word in our language for, ’ow you say, le goodtime, as the French have it? And they do... a lot.
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