CHAPTER 21

ON THE FRENCH RIVIERA

Renoir, Colette, Picasso, Fitzgerald and Hemingway enjoy the flavors of the Côte d’Azur

Few events had so far-reaching an influence on French cultural life as the development of the Mediterranean Riviera. Throughout the 19th century, the towns of Nice, Cannes, Antibes, Hyères, Saint-Tropez, Menton and Monte Carlo were largely inaccessible except by sea. Russian aristocrats, who spoke French among themselves and regarded France as their spiritual home, flocked to the Côte d’Azur as soon as the northern rivers froze in October and remained there until May, often joined by members of the British and German nobility, with whom they shared a blood relationship. As Guy de Maupassant, visiting Cannes, noted in 1888, “Princes, princes, everywhere princes! Those who love princes are indeed happy. No sooner had I set foot yesterday morning on the promenade of the Croisette than I met three, one after another.”

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Queen Victoria at breakfast with princesses in Nice, 1895

Many visitors to the Riviera were invalids, hoping the hot dry climate would relieve the symptoms of their diseases, in particular tuberculosis. In 1907, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, almost paralyzed by arthritis, bought Les Collettes, a hilltop farm at Cagnes-sur-Mer. Amid its giant olive trees and orange groves, and bathed in near-tropical heat, he was able to continue painting for another 20 years. Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse followed, Pierre Bonnard made his home at Le Cannet, while an artists’ colony sprang up in Saint-Tropez around Paul Signac.

Traditionally, foreigners returned home in May, leaving the coast to fishermen and a handful of artists attracted by the Mediterranean light and heat. Composer Cole Porter and his wife, Linda, were the first Americans to ignore the “season” and spend all summer on the Riviera. In 1921 and 1922, they rented a villa near Antibes. Gerald Murphy, proprietor of the Mark Cross luxury leather goods stores and Porter’s best friend at university, visited them with his wife, Sara, and subsequently bought a house in Antibes, which they called Villa America. Their guests over the next decade included Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Jean Cocteau, and Ernest and Hadley Hemingway—followed not long after by Hadley’s successor, Pauline Pfeiffer.

The Murphys and their way of life inspired Scott Fitzgerald’s last completed novel, Tender Is the Night. Though the book describes dinner conversation among these privileged individuals, the clothes they wore and, naturally, the booze they drank—generally Veuve Clicquot champagne—it seldom mentions food. Whatever the reason for Anglo-Saxons visiting the Côte d’Azur, it wasn’t to eat.

How to Be Happy on the Riviera, a British guide of 1927, devotes most of its chapters on food to warnings about larcenous restaurateurs who padded l’addition and served dishes that were never ordered. If food is mentioned, it’s usually to disparage it. “Too much butter is used,” it says of Provençal cuisine in general. “Too many dishes which would otherwise be palatable [are] spoiled by highly flavored sauces.” Beef is “on the tough side,” mutton is “awful,” white asparagus “bitter” and other boiled vegetables “a ghastly job.” As for seafood, it calls fried fresh sardines “rather a disappointment. There can be no doubt that Providence intended sardines to be tinned.” While cautiously approving local wines, particularly rosé, it warns that the Anglo-Saxon palate may find them “acidic,” in which case “an excellent corrective is to add a little hot water, a tablespoon to a glass being sufficient.”

The French reaction could not have been more different. The novelist Colette, who lived in Saint-Tropez for many years and was described by the correspondent of The New Yorker magazine, Janet Flanner, as “an artistic gourmet in a country where eating ranks as an art,” embraced the local cuisine, particularly its fiery garlic. (How to Be Happy on the Riviera fails even to mention this indispensable ingredient of Provençal food.) Most meals chez Colette began, according to her husband Maurice Goudeket, with

a crust of bread dipped in olive oil, lavishly rubbed in garlic and sprinkled with coarse salt. Cooked garlic seasoned every dish and in addition, throughout the whole meal, Colette ate raw cloves of it as if they had been almonds. Lunch consisted of Provençal dishes only: green melons, anchoiade [anchovies pounded with garlic, oil and vinegar, and served as a dip with raw vegetables], stuffed rascasse, rice with favouilles [small green crabs], bouillabaisse and aioli [garlic mayonnaise].

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Picking up olives in Alpes-Maritimes, c. 1900

Provençal produce was legendary. “There are gardens of beans, orchards with apples, pears and peaches,” wrote the poet Frédéric Mistral, “cherry trees that catch your eye, fig trees that offer you their ripe fruit, round-bellied melons that beg to be eaten, and beautiful vines with bunches of golden grapes.” With so much growing wild, one could eat for nothing. Mistral’s school friends habitually played truant, living off the land:

The night they spend in piles of straw or in haystacks. When hunger comes, they eat wild blackberries, wild plums, almonds left on the tree, or bunches of wild grapes. They eat the fruit of the elm—which they call ‘white bread’—onions that have sprouted again, wild beans, beechnuts, and acorns if necessary.

To celebrate religious or patriotic holidays, French villages often staged fetes featuring local produce. At some, they pelted one another with flowers or the oranges and lemons that grew in profusion on the slopes of the Alpes-Maritimes. More often, they staged the public feasts that had been a feature of medieval village life. Many of these were held to welcome pilgrims walking the long road to the shrines of Saint Joseph of Compostela in Spain. Tables were set up in the town square and a single dish prepared in sufficiently lavish quantities to serve all comers. In Provence, seafood predominated. For a sardiniarde, sardines were grilled over wood fires, while for an aïoli, slabs of steamed cod or merlu (hake) joined boiled potatoes and carrots in celebration of the garlic mayonnaise that gave the event its name.

Towns in Picardy and the north spit-roasted an entire cow or pig. A boeuf, roasted en broche, fed about 500 people, particularly when served with the traditional accompaniment of aligot, a puree of potatoes mixed with melted cheese in the proportions of two measures of potatoes to one of cheese, and further enriched with butter, cream and crushed garlic. Such events were a popular subject for painters, particularly artists like the wildly popular Jean-Charles Meissonier, who specialized in large and busy canvases for the annual salons. His Le Festival au village (The Village Festival) celebrates an innocent lifestyle known to few communities. Earlier artists, among them Peter Paul Rubens, added coded comments to such scenes, inserting, for example, the image of a pig, the symbol of bestial excess.

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The Village Festival (detail), Jean Charles Meissonier (1815–1891)

As new railway services increased the flow of newcomers into the Côte d’Azur, restaurateurs arrived from Italy, Sicily and Corsica to feed them. Their menus overwhelmed the more modest local cuisine, just as the demands of tourists debased the festivals of flowers and fruit, which degenerated into parades as hired peasantry perched on floats trundled through the streets of Nice and Cannes, pelting cheering crowds with flowers.

“Provençal” became shorthand for any dish of pasta or seafood with a sauce of tomato, garlic, onions and olive oil. The same ingredients, with a few olives, hard-boiled eggs and anchovies, constituted so-called salade Niçoise—salad in the style of Nice. These dishes frequently relied for flavor on the mixture of dried aromatics known as herbes de Provence. No two manufacturers of this concoction, the curry powder of French cuisine, agreed on its contents. The traditional recipe called for oregano, savory, thyme and basil, but as rosemary replaced the rarer savory, a peppery thyme-like spice, the mixture came to depend on what the merchant had on the shelf: marjoram, tarragon, sage, bay, fennel seed, lavender, dill weed, chervil, even mint and orange zest—just so long as it assaulted the nose with a herbal tang so pungent that unscrupulous drug dealers passed off herbes de Provence to their more gullible clients as cannabis.

Culinary abuses didn’t dissuade tourists from visiting the Riviera. In the clothing she designed, Coco Chanel popularized the life lived in the sun and open air that had seduced Renoir, Matisse and Chagall. Pablo Picasso’s ceramics celebrated the Phoenician merchants who first brought culture to the Mediterranean. Jean Cocteau’s murals for its churches and villas drew on an even earlier source, the Dionysian myths of antiquity, while the Cannes Film Festival catered to the newest and most seductive of all hallucinations, those of movie stardom. The Côte d’Azur became the collective dreamland of France, a sunny playground where any fantasy might be made real.