Regret, guilt and exhilaration
Miranda Seymour
HIGH SEASON IN NICE by Robert Kanigel Little, Brown, £17.99. pp. 316, ISBN 0316854956 EDITH WHARTON'S FRENCH RIVIERA by Philippe Co!las and Eric Villedary Flammarion, £22.50, pp. 149. ISBN 2080107224 London, even in normal years, is rained on for 150 days to Nice's 60; it receives a paltry 1,500 hours of sunlight in comparison to Nice's enviable 2,700. And yet, despite the town's proud boast of having 1,000 hotels and 3,000 restaurants, most passengers arriving on the 170 flights which land daily at Nice airport are head
ing for another part of the Cote d'Azur. The charm of the Matisse and Chagall museums are insufficient compensation for a hideous flyover, an overpriced antiques market and the polluted ugliness of Nice's famous Promenade des Anglais. The town which Alexander Herzen, visiting it in the 1850s, called 'warm, sweetsmelling Nice, quiet and completely empty' is unimaginable.
The railway, brought down to Nice in 1865, began the transformation of a sleepy, overgrown fishing resort into a fashionable winter haven, a town dominated by gigantic hotels and elegant villas built on the heights of Cimiez. Queen Victoria, arriving on the royal train with 60 servants, stayed at the Excelsior Regina; with places such as the Hotel des Anglais, the Hotel d'Angleterre and the Hotel de la Grande Bretagne to stay in. and London House and Garden House to lunch at, the English visitors of the 1880s felt entirely at home.
All this changed radically after the war. The transformers were the Americans who discovered that the grand villas could be rented for almost nothing out of season, during the summer months. Cole Porter, the Fitzgeralds and their friends, the Murphys, along with almost every famous American you can care to think of, discovered the charms of sunbathing, beach games, driving at speed along the High Corniche and dancing until the sun came up. Coco Chanel was seen looking famously 'brown as a cabin-boy'; beach pyjamas and large hats gave way to tight tiny shorts and sun-bleached crops. For the stuffier residents, among whom Edith Wharton can be placed, the change was not an improvement.
Kanigel makes a chattily informal guide to the development of Nice as a tourist resort. He is at his best when he turns serious, describing what it was like to live in Nice between 1939, when the first Cannes film festival was abruptly cancelled. and 1944. when the Allies freed it from German control.
Nice became a refugee haven in 1941, following the German occupation of Paris. The Fascists, taking control in November 1942, took a lenient view of the city's newly arrived Jewish population; things took a rapid turn for the worse when the city was placed under German government in the autumn of 1943. This is a part of the town's history which has been prudently erased; it's not hard to see why. The next few months saw 3.000 Jewish residents being rounded up, some on as slight a suspicion as a name (a Roman Catholic nurse called Esther was among those arrested) and taken to the infamous Drancy camp outside Paris. They were snatched from hotels, from the markets, from the streets; some, spotted lying on the beach, were taken straight to the Drancy train in their swimming trunks. Nicois who were ready to deliver information to the headquarters at the Hotel Excelsior were paid up to 5.000 francs a head for every Jew they located. An official bulletin was soon able to offer Aryan strollers on the Promenade des Anglais 'numerous chairs which, up to now, were occupied by Jews'.
But Nice was eventually destroyed by a different kind of corruption. Desperate to attract tourists during the postwar years, the town planners gave the nod to every scheme that promised better access until, with every inch of its limited space built on and overshadowed by flyovers, Nice transformed itself into the largely undesirable resort it is today.
Kanigel is not an elegant writer, but he is a master of style when compared to the authors of Edith Wharton 'c Riviera. The photographs are delightful; the text is bad enough to become cult reading. Edith, we learn in one memorable passage, became good friends with Aldous Huxley, with whom she shared 'a good touch of humour'. Proof is given; Huxley apparently made the elderly novelist march down her entrance hall 'while he pinched her buttocks all the way'. You will also learn that the story of Edith Piaf was 'truly incredible', that the Riviera inspired Ernest Hemingway with 'a blend of carnal desire, regret, guilt and exhilaration', and that Matisse found scenery in Nice which corresponded 'to the shape of his dreams'.
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