THE RIVIERA SET
By Lita-Rose Betcherman
Author of the acclaimed Court Lady and Country Wife
Published by Bev Editions at Smashwords
ISBN: 978-0-9867287-4-7
Copyright 2010 Lita-Rose Betcherman
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Table of Contents
1. The Prince of Wales, King of the Riviera
2. Queen Victoria’s Love Affair with the Riviera
3. Mich-Mich and Other Russian Grand Dukes
4. The Winter Riviera at its Peak
5. The Murphys and the Scott Fitzgeralds Inaugurate the Summer Season
6. Jean Cocteau and His Squadron at Villefranche
7. Colette’s Band at Saint-Tropez
8. Wallis Simpson and Her Prince of Wales - The Cannes Chapter
9. Picasso and Friends at Mougins
11. Francoise Sagan, Brigitte Bardot and Their Band at Saint-Tropez
12. The Movie Star Princess of Monaco
Amanda: Whose yacht is that?
Elyot: The Duke of Westminster’s I expect, it always is.
Amanda and Elyot are standing on a hotel balcony overlooking the sea. From their clothes it is clearly the period between the two World Wars. The sophisticated dialogue, spoken with a clipped English accent, identifies them as members of the Mayfair Set -- upper-class Britons who lived in London’s West End and in country houses when they were not travelling abroad.
In 1929, when Noel Coward wrote this scene from "Private Lives," the Mayfair Set was flocking to the South of France. Leafing through old copies of The Illustrated London News or British Vogue, it seems that everyone who was anyone went to the Riviera and nearly everyone had a yacht (though not two yachts like the Duke of Westminster). This is only one slice of the upper crust that has holidayed on the Riviera. Before the First World War, the Riviera’s guest list read like Debrett’s and the Almanach de Gotha combined. After the Second World War, the Jet Set of oil millionaires, ex-kings, and stars of the entertainment world appropriated this earthly paradise.
And not only High Society but the artistic world too. The School of Paris drew so much inspiration from the Mediterranean light and color that it might just as well be called the Riviera School. Indeed, the window views of Matisse and Dufy encapsulate the region’s physical charms. The Riviera has drawn legions of writers to its shores. We think of Prosper Merimee nursing his asthma at Cannes, Guy de Maupassant restlessly cruising the coast in the Bel Ami, Arnold Bennett at the palace hotels, H.G. Wells in a love nest at Grasse. The list is endless: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Somerset Maugham, Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, Cyril Connolly, Graham Green, and on to Irwin Shaw and Harold Robbins. Appropriately, Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence - the first Amanda and Elyot - rehearsed some of Private Lives at a Cap d’Ail villa.
Riviera, Cote d’Azur, South of France, or le Midi as the French call it, by whatever name the Mediterranean coast between Saint-Tropez and Menton evokes images of glamorous people enjoying the sweetness of life against a stunning backdrop of palms, gleaming white villas, yachts, and the blue Mediterranean.
But that was not how it began.
In the nineteenth century, to go to the Riviera in the summer was thought to invite death from heat prostration or malaria. Originally, it was nothing more than a winter sanitarium for consumptives. Alexander Dumas, pere, whose son created the most famous consumptive of all in La Dame aux Camelias, observed in 1847 that “frail pale women come to Nice to die,” and he criticized the townsfolk for “living at the expense of the sick foreigners.” At mid-century, the French had not yet discovered the charms of their sun-drenched Mediterranean coast. It was the British invalid who pioneered the discovery of the most famous resort area in the history of travel. These ailing northerners were the first Riviera Set.
In the 1850s, British consumptives in search of winter sun had an arduous journey before them. They could go to Egypt above the cataracts where the climate was hot and dry, but that meant a grueling eight days by sea and then a slow houseboat up the Nile. It was not unknown for sufferers to go to Algiers, and some of the more adventurous sailed as far as the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. The island of Madeira had a small English winter colony. However, the usual destination of British travellers, both ailing and healthy, was Italy. The well-known London hostess, Lady Holland, had wintered at Naples for years, simply transferring her salon to a palazzo overlooking the famous bay. Florence and Venice were long-established winter resorts, particularly for art lovers, in spite of damp, dreary weather that was barely an improvement over London. Nice, a provincial capital in the kingdom of Sardinia, offered better weather and a shorter journey -- British invalids, as well as Russians and other Europeans, had been wintering there for a century. However by the middle of the nineteenth century, Cannes, a small French port not far from Nice, was hosting a winter colony of upper-class Britons.
Cannes’ history as a resort began when a retired English statesman, Lord Henry Brougham, discovered the area. In the winter of 1834, en route to Nice with a consumptive daughter, the former Lord Chancellor found the weather at the little fishing village of Cannes “as mild as Cairo” and decided to go no further. On an uninhabited hillside covered with pine trees and an orange grove, he built a colonnaded Regency mansion that he named the Villa Eleonora after his daughter who died before it was completed. Other titled Britons followed the old lord and by the mid-1850s there were some forty or fifty families wintering there.
In Letters from Cannes and Nice (1857) Margaret Brewster, a genteel Scottish spinster with the observant eye of a Jane Austen, described Cannes society of the mid-nineteenth century as “simple and kindly, without formality or overdressing.” Like Margaret, many winter residents suffered from consumption, and the daily routine was a morning walk by the sea, the ladies sheltering from the sun under white parasols, thick veils, and wide-brimmed hats lined with white paper, afternoons in the garden, and early-to-bed evenings. Entertainment at the villas consisted of reading and discussing a portion of Scripture. Cannes was so prim and proper that Prosper Merimee, the author of Carmen and other naughty tales, was prompted to say that “only the frogs and crickets are eager to make love here.” Until his death in 1868 Lord Brougham, as Cannes’ “founder,” was the leader of this ailing and very moral society of Victorians abroad.
While the English were lording it at Cannes the Russians were the dominant foreigners at Nice. The visits of two tsarinas in the 1850s and 1860s brought a shoal of grand dukes and imperial officials in their wake. These in turn were followed by wealthy Russians who squandered the rents from their estates on European travel.
Tourism on the Riviera began in earnest with the coming of the railway in the 1860s. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 that led to the deposing of Napoleon III and the establishment of a republic in France only temporarily slowed the tourist trade. The railway, coupled with the opening of Monte Carlo – the elegant gambling casino at Monaco – transformed Nice from a sanitarium for sickly northerners into a pleasure resort like Baden-Baden and Biarritz.
While Nice with its “boulevards, clubs, theatres, and brilliantly lighted cafes” hospitably received the new middle class, by the 1880s Cannes had taken on all the snobbishness and exclusivity of a London club. Attracted by all things British the European elite made Cannes its winter headquarters, arriving by yacht, private railway carriage, and the deluxe Mediterranean Express newly equipped with sleeping cars.
The illustrious traveller who, more than any other, created the vogue for the Winter Riviera was Queen Victoria’s son and heir, Edward Albert, Prince of Wales.