Leading the Blind

CHAPTER TEN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE

Even as early as 1848 Murray had no illusions about the charms of the South of France, nor did he wish his readers to have any, and his comments are repeated in all later editions:

The Englishman who knows the S. of France only from books — who there finds Provence described as the cradle of Poetry and Romance, the paradise of the Troubadours, a land teeming with oil, wine, silk, and perfumes, has probably formed in his mind a picture of a region beautiful to behold, and charming to inhabit. Nothing, however, can differ more widely from reality. Nature has altogether an arid character; — in summer a sky of copper, an atmosphere loaded with dust, the earth scorched rather than parched by the unmitigated rays of the sun, which overspread every thing with a lurid glare. The hills rise above the surface in masses of bare rock, without any covering of soil, like the dry bones of a wasted skeleton. Only on the low grounds, which can be reached by irrigation, does any verdure appear. There is a sombre, melancholy sternness in the landscape of the South. The aching eye in vain seeks to repose on a patch of green, and the inhabitant of the North would not readily purchase the clear cloudless sky of Provence with the verdure of a misty England. Neither the bush-like vine nor the mop-headed mulberry, stripped of its leaves for a great part of the summer, nor the tawny green olive, whose foliage looks as though powdered with dust, will at all compensate in a picturesque point of view for forests of oak, ash, and beech.

After several hundred more words of this, he treats us to a disquisition on the character of the people. ‘Their fervid temperament knows no control or moderation; hasty and headstrong in disposition, they are led by very slight religious or political excitement, on sudden impulses, to the committal of acts of violence unknown in the North. They are rude in manner, coarse in aspect, and harsh in speech, their patois being unintelligible, even to the French themselves, not unlike the Spanish dialect of Catalonia. From loudness of tone, and energy of gesture, they appear always as though going to fight when merely carrying on an ordinary conversation. The traveller who happens to fall into the hands of the ruffianly porters at Avignon will be able to judge if this be an exaggerated picture.’

Murray goes on to say that anyone who thinks the climate of England is bad should try that of the South of France. ‘The variations between summer and winter are marked by the dead olive, and vine trees killed by the frost; and the torrid influence of summer by the naked beds of torrents left without water. In many years not a drop of rain falls in June, July, and August, and the quantity is commonly very small: the great heats occur between the middle of July and the end of September, yet even in summer scorching heat alternates with the most piercing cold; and the vicissitudes are so sudden and severe, that strong persons, much more invalids, should beware how they yield to the temptation of wearing thin clothing, and of abandoning cloaks and great coats.’

If this were the case (and having lived some years in the South of France I can say that there is at least some truth in Murray’s assessment), why did people go there in such numbers? Especially when they went on to read that another plague in that part of the world was that of

mosquitoes, which, to an inhabitant of the North, unaccustomed to their venomous bite, will alone suffice to destroy all pleasure in travelling. They appear in May, and last sometimes to November; and the only good which the mistral effects is that it modifies the intensely hot air of summer, and represses, momentarily, these pestilential insects. They are not idle by day, but it is at night that the worn-out traveller needing repose is most exposed to the excruciating torments inflicted by this cruel insect. Woe to him who for the sake of coolness leaves his window open for a minute; attracted by the light they will pour in by myriads. It is better to be stifled by the most oppressive heat than to go mad. Even closed shutters and a mosquito curtain, with which all beds in good inns are provided, are ineffectual in protecting the sleeper. A scrutiny of the walls, and a butchery of all that appear, may lessen the number of enemies; but a single one effecting an entry, after closing the curtains and tucking up the bed-clothes with the utmost care, does all the mischief. The sufferer awakes in the middle of the night in a state of fever, and adieu to all further prospect of rest. The pain inflicted by the bites is bad enough, but it is the air of triumph with which the enemy blows his trumpet, the tingling, agonising buzzing which fills the air, gradually advancing nearer and nearer, announcing the certainty of a fresh attack, which carries the irritation to the highest pitch.

I have never read a more perfect description of their tactics and torments, and Murray goes on to tell us that the pain and swellings last for several days, and that there is no remedy but patience. ‘The state of the blood at that time, however, considerably modifies or increases the amount and duration of suffering. It is said to be the female only which inflicts the sting.’

Another danger is from scorpions, which are sometimes brought into the house with the firewood, and might also be found ‘in the folds of the bed-curtains or sheets. Instances, however, of persons being bitten by this foul insect are very rare indeed: from its nature it is fearful, and, when discovered, endeavours to run away and hide itself.’

Having fed us the disadvantages first, in no uncertain terms, Murray brings out a somewhat sweeter pill: ‘There is one little corner of Provence which combines remarkable picturesque scenery with a climate so serene and warm, and well protected from the injurious blasts, that its productions are almost tropical in their nature. This is a narrow strip bordering on the blue Mediterranean, extending from Toulon to Nice. It is a favoured region, the true garden of Provence, the real paradise of the Troubadours, sheltered from the injurious mistral …’

In such early days the approach to the South of France was on steamboats down the Rhône, being ‘almost without exception managed by English engineers’, starting every morning from Lyons. The inn at Tain was classified as ‘middling’, and one downriver at Valence as ‘not at all bad, with some pretensions to English comforts, but rather dear. Try here the sparkling St. Peray, an excellent wine, but inferior to Champagne.’ There was also a boarding house, kept by two English Protestant ladies.

Later, one could go by railway, and in 1890 the inn at Tain was described as ‘a mere cabaret’. If one survived the rigours of the journey, there was, near Avignon, ‘a well-managed Hydropathic establishment and pleasant boarding house, in a handsome château. Part of it is of the 14th century. It is under the direction of Dr. Masson, and may be found a pleasant half-way house for invalids going to or returning from a more southern climate.’

In whatever town our traveller stops Murray never fails to inform him of the unpleasantnesses which took place during the French Revolution. At Avignon, Marshall Brune, though Lord Exmouth’s passport was in his pocket, ‘was murdered by an infuriated mob of Provençal royalists, who, on receiving news of the Battle of Waterloo, and instigated by hatred of Napoleon, rose upon their adversaries, and committed all sorts of atrocities’.

On another page we are treated to an account of the infamous Glacière: ‘The tower, so called from an ice-house in a garden near it, stands close to the tower of the Inquisition. Into its depths were hurled no less than 60 unfortunate and innocent persons, females as well as men, by a band of democrats in Oct. 1791. The prisoners were dragged from their cells, and poignarded or struck down; but some of the victims were precipitated from above before life was yet extinct; and to finish the deed, quick-lime in large quantities was thrown down upon the mangled heap of dead and dying.’

Romance, as if the opposite face of the coin to death, was always well represented in Victorian guidebooks: ‘Continuing along the Rue de Lices, we shall find the last relic of the Church of the Cordeliers, in which Petrarch’s Laura, a lady of the family of De Sade, was buried. The church, destroyed at the Revolution, is now reduced to a fragment of the tower and side walls.’

Arthur Young, at the end of the previous century, described Laura’s tomb as ‘nothing but a stone in the pavement, with a figure engraved on it, partly effaced, surrounded by an inscription in Gothic letters, and another on the wall adjoining, with the armorial bearings of the De Sade family’. Murray adds that this ‘has entirely disappeared, having been broken open, and the contents of the tomb scattered, by the Revolutionists’.

Vaucluse, where John Stuart Mill stayed, was the site of Petrarch’s retirement, and ‘the Hôtel de Petrarque et Laure is rather a café frequented by Sunday excursionists. Formerly the landlord was a good cook, and, judging from the Strangers’ Book, the fried trout and eels, soupe à la bisque, and coquille d’écrevisse, made a far deeper impression on some visitors than the souvenir of Laura; Petrarch himself has mentioned the fish of the Sorgues with praise.’

Going southwest into the Languedoc — then, as now, the ‘wrong’ side of the Rhône — we may refer to the impressions of Charlotte Eaton, the intrepid lady-traveller quoted earlier. She found that part of France looking dull, uninteresting and neglected: ‘… the want of wood, of corn, of pasture, of animals, and even of birds; its general desertion both by the proprietor and the peasant, and the absence of life and human habitation, have a most melancholy effect, and accord but too well with the heartless and discontented appearance of the people, who herd together in villages composed of long, narrow streets of miserable hovels, the filth and wretchedness of which I shall never forget. Not a single neat cottage by the way-side, or rural hamlet, or snug farm-house is to be seen; even the château is rare, and when it appears, it is in a state of dilapidation and decay, and the very abode of gloom; not surrounded with pleasure-grounds, or woods, or parks, or gardens, but with a filthy village appended to its formal court-yard. How often did the cheerful cottages, and happy country seats of our smiling country, recur to my mind as I journeyed through the bepraised, but dreary scenes of Languedoc and Provence!’

Nîmes was the birthplace of Nicot, Murray says, a physician who first introduced tobacco into France (called after him nicotiana, or nicotine); and of Guizot, the historian, ‘whose father, an advocate, was guillotined during the Reign of Terror’.

Montpellier is thought little enough of as regards climate since, though ‘it bears a name familiar as the type of salubrity and mildness of climate, the place will not in reality answer the expectations of those who seek either a soft air or a beautiful position. Indeed it is difficult to understand how it came to be chosen by the physicians of the North as a retreat for consumptive patients; since nothing is more trying to weak lungs than its variable climate … Though its sky be clear, its atmosphere is filled with dust, which must be hurtful to the lungs.’

The sad story is told of how Mrs Temple, the adopted daughter of Young, the poet (no relation of Arthur Young the gentleman farmer) died suddenly at Montpellier, ‘at a time when the laws which accompanied the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, backed by the superstition of a fanatic populace, denied Christian burial to Protestants. Narcissa was buried at Lyons, eventually.’ One can imagine the bereaved man travelling from place to place with his daughter’s body in the coach, searching for a decent grave for her interment.

Further down the road, the Hôtel du Nord at Béziers was declared by Murray in 1848 to be ‘filthy in the extreme and exorbitant’. At that place we are reminded of the fanaticism of the Middle Ages, ‘of the horrible slaughter of 1209, which followed the memorable siege by the Crusading army, raised at the call of the Church of Rome, to exterminate the heretical Albigenses, who were numerous in this devoted city. The inhabitants refusing to yield, the crusaders carried the city by storm, led by the Bishop Reginald of Montpellier and the Abbot of Citeaux, who had prepared a list of the proscribed victims. In the confusion of the assault, however, the soldiers were perplexed to distinguish the heretics from the orthodox, whereupon the abbot is said to have exclaimed: “Kill all! The Lord will know his own.” The number massacred amounted to 60,000 according to some historians, though the Abbot of Citeaux himself modestly avows that he could only slay 20,000.’

When Henry James visited the region (A Little Tour of France), carrying his ‘faithful Murray’, he slept in a bad bed at Carcassonne, but a worse one at Narbonne, where the hotel was ‘crowded from cellar to attic’, causing him to spend the night in a room at the local blacksmith’s. Breakfasting at the Hôtel de France next morning, ‘the dirty little inn and Narbonne at large seemed to me to have the infirmities of the south without its usual graces … At ten o’clock in the morning there was a table d’hôte for breakfast — a wonderful repast, which overflowed into every room and pervaded the whole establishment. I sat down with a hundred hungry marketers, fat, brown, greasy men, with a good deal of the rich soil of the Languedoc adhering to their hands and boots. I mention the latter articles because they almost put them on the table. It was very hot, and there were swarms of flies; the viands had the strongest odour … which my companions devoured in large quantities. A man opposite to me had the dirtiest fingers I ever saw; a collection of fingers which in England would have excluded him from a farmers’ ordinary.’

After a cursory visit to the cathedral and museum in Narbonne, James seems to like Montpellier rather better as a town. The Hôtel Nevet is ‘the model of a good proverbial inn; a big rambling, creaking establishment, with brown, labyrinthine corridors, a queer old open-air vestibule, into which the diligence used to penetrate, and an hospitality more expressive than that of the new caravanserais’.

He spent two days there, ‘mostly in the rain, and even under these circumstances I carried away a kindly impression. I think the Hôtel Nevet had something to do with it, and the sentiment of relief with which, in a quiet, even a luxurious room that looked out on a garden, I reflected that I had washed my hands of Narbonne.’ Then, as if to boast of his heartlessness, he goes on: ‘The phylloxera has destroyed the vines in the country that surround Montpellier, and at that moment I was capable of rejoicing in the thought that I should not breakfast with vintners.’ Perhaps he didn’t know, or maybe he would not have cared, but in the nearby villages people were hungry to the extent that they had only snails to eat from their ravaged vineyards.

Murray’s 1881 version of the Hôtel Nevet is quite different, for it is said to have ‘200 bed-rooms, dirty and bad smells’, whereas in 1848 it was ‘a splendid, new, and large edifice, 200 bed-rooms — one of the best hotels in France’. In the Baedeker of 1895 it is the first on the list, and without deleterious comment, while in the issue of 1914 there is no mention of it at all.

The business of hotels could fall off alarmingly after a few adverse remarks in guidebooks, and perhaps some landlords could be forgiven for suspecting that a certain solitary traveller might be an emissary of one of the publishing firms who had come to check his establishment. An unassuming British voyageur spotted in the hotel dining-room might cause the waiting maid to spill a tureen of soup at the table, the wine waiter to fall over with his carafe of local wine (‘the most one might say about it is that it could be called the best vinegar in France’). The proprietor in trying to be pleasant would be accused in the next edition of obsequiousness, and the early-morning chambermaid would be so rattled as to spill one of the overful pots she was carrying along the corridor — and thereby utterly spoil the reputation of a perfectly good hostelry for the next twenty years because a stray traveller had remarked that the smells were too odious to be endured.

It is fair to say that Murray recognized the possible volatility of his readers’ reports when he wrote in Southern Germany, 1858: ‘The number of good rooms in an inn, especially a country inn, is generally limited: if the traveller gets one of these, and the house is not too full to prevent his being well attended to, he gives it a good character, if it is crowded, and he gets an inferior room, he condemns it. I am sure I have been in the same inn, and during the same summer, under such different circumstances, that I could hardly believe it the same.’

The problem of hotel classification is commented on by Sabine Baring-Gould, a nineteenth-century novelist who also wrote travel books or, rather, what would be today called ‘companion guides’. In the preface to A Book of the Cévennes he modestly writes that his work is but ‘an introduction to the country, to be supplemented by guide-books. For inns, consult the annual volume of the French Touring Club; Baedeker and Joanne cannot always be relied on, as proprietors change, either for the better or for the worse. I have been landed in unsatisfactory quarters by relying on one or other of these guide-books, owing to the above-mentioned reason.’

In very plain prose Baring-Gould describes the scenery and gives some account of local history, as well as telling of such bizarre customs as the following about the Cévennes: ‘When the chestnuts have been gathered, then in November they are dried in sechoirs. These are small square structures with a door and window on one side, and on the other three or more long narrow loopholes that are never closed. A fire of coals is lighted and kept burning incessantly in the drying-house, and the smoke passes through shelves on which the chestnuts are laid, in stages, and escapes by loopholes. To any one unaccustomed to the atmosphere, in these sechoirs, it is hard to endure the smoke, and one stands the risk of being asphyxiated. Nevertheless the peasants spend two months in the year in these habitations, amidst cobwebs and soot, swarming with mice and rats, and the smoke at once acrid and moist, for in drying the chestnuts exude a greenish fluid that falls in a rain from the shelves. The natives do not seem to mind the dirt and smell of these horrible holes. Moreover, if there be in a village any one suffering from phthisis, at the end of autumn the patient is taken by the relations in his or her bed, and this is deposited in a corner of the sechoir. The sick person is not allowed to leave the drying-house, and it is a singular phenomenon that not infrequently, under the influence of the heat and the sulphurous smoke, the tuberculosis is arrested, and the sufferer lives on for many long years.’

Arles, says Murray, is famous for its beautiful women, ‘due to the Greek element which has never been lost. It is odd that not a trace of this should be found in the men.’ Augustus J. C. Hare recommends the Hôtel de Nord which, he says, is the best, being ‘very good and clean, with obliging landlady’. In 1848 Murray tells us that the man who keeps the Hôtel de Forum was once cook to Lord Salisbury; that the Hôtel du Nord was ‘improved, and tolerably comfortable’, and that the Hôtel du Commerce on the Quai was kept by the wife of one of the English engineers on the steamboats.

Hare also is not slow to comment on the women, who are perhaps ‘the most beautiful of any European city. With dark eyes and raven locks, they are generally majestic in carriage and figure. They are greatly adorned by the becoming costume of Arles — which is still, happily, almost universal — a black dress and shawl, with full white muslin stomacher, and a very small lace cap at the back of the hair, bound round with broad black velvet or ribbon, fastened with gold or jewelled pins.’ By 1930 the costume of the women was only seen on Sundays and holidays.

Henry James devotes two chapters to Arles. ‘There were two shabby inns, which compete closely for your custom. I mean by this that if you eject to go to the Hôtel du Forum, the Hotel du Nord, which is placed exactly beside it, watches your arrival with ill-concealed disapproval; and if you take the chances of its neighbour, the Hôtel du Forum seems to glare at you invidiously from all its windows and doors. I forget which of these establishments I selected; whichever it was, I wished very much that it had been the other.’

At a café the next afternoon, James observes that there sat ‘behind the counter a splendid mature Arlesienne, the handsomest person I had ever seen give change for a five-franc piece. She was a large quiet woman, who would never see forty again; of an intensely feminine type, yet wonderfully rich and robust, and full of a certain physical nobleness. Though she was not really old, she was antique; and she was very grave, even a little sad. She had the dignity of a Roman empress, and she handled coppers as if they had been stamped with the head of Caesar.’

The main reason why so many English went to the Mediterranean coast of France was that of health, and Marseilles was the gate through which they passed in order to get there. Dickens gave a graphic picture of its summer climate in Little Dorrit (1856), and Murray in 1848 was equally explicit: ‘From the margin of the old harbour, lined with quays, the ground rises on all sides, covered with houses, forming a basin or amphitheatre, terminating only with the encircling chain of hills. From this disposition of the ground, the port becomes the sewer of the city — the receptacle of all its filth, stagnating in a tideless sea and under a burning sun, until a S.E. wind produces that circulation in its waters which the tide would do on other seas. The stench emanating from it at times is consequently intolerable, except for natives …’

As a reminder of times past we are told: ‘The Lazaret owed its foundation to the fearful ravages of the plague at Marseilles in 1720, which carried off between 40,000 and 50,000 persons, half the population. Amidst the general despair, selfishness, and depravity which accompanied this dire calamity, many individuals distinguished themselves by their noble self-devotion. The streets soon became choked with dead, and of the galley-slaves, supplied at the rate of 80 a-week to conduct the dead-carts, none survived.’

Nor is one allowed to forget that at the Revolution, ‘which inflamed to madness the fiery spirits of the people of the south, Marseilles furnished, from the dregs of its own population and the outcasts of other countries, the bands of assassins who perpetrated the greater portion of the September massacres in Paris. The well-known hymn of Revolution, the Marseillaise, was so called because it was played by a body of troops from Marseilles marching into Paris in 1792.’

By 1880 Marseilles had become ‘a grand city in site and extent, and, excepting Paris, no town in France has been more improved since 1853, by the creation of streets, quarters, harbours, and public edifices etc.’ In spite of all that, the town did not merit the accolade of a stay of some time. Its climate was said to be delightful at certain seasons but, nevertheless, ‘in summer and autumn the heat is intense — the streets like an oven, so that it is scarcely possible to move abroad during the daytime, and all rest during the night is liable to be destroyed by mosquitoes.’

Going east along the coast, Murray found in 1848 that none of the hotels at Cannes were any good, though there was a comfortable one at Grasse, ‘where an invalid from Nice might put up with advantage during the months of March, as the place is well sheltered’. At Antibes, however, the hotels were so bad that travellers were advised to ‘stop outside the gates, and send in for horses; they will thus save time, and their carriage will escape the risk of accidents, in being twice dragged through the most odious streets.’

Hyères, the first place of importance beyond Toulon, became a desirable place to stay later in the century: ‘Pure water has been laid on to all parts of the town by a company. The authorities have become more careful in securing cleanliness and drainage. The mildness and dryness of its climate causes Hyères to be chosen as a winter residence for invalids, and renders it one of the best in Europe during the season.’ As for Cannes, for those who suffer from the sea-air, ‘producing often nervous irritability and want to sleep’, the villas on the north side of the town are recommended.

English doctors and bankers were as usual installed in the main towns to care for and cater to the many winter visitors. ‘Pattieson’s is a good shop for groceries and English stores.’ English and Scottish churches mushroomed as on a dank November dawn at home. Today, the condescending wrath towards fish-and-chip shops and Yorkshire-bitter bars set up for those who flock to places like Corfu and Benidorm — who cannot sleep well if the familiar wherewithal is not stowed in their bellies — is a snobbish response to the fact that the hoi-polloi can afford to get off the island at all. If the middle classes (what and whoever they are) can have their comforting appurtenances — which they hardly need to export, these days, because the local equivalents serve perfectly well and may indeed be welcomed as ‘local colour’ — why not the others? The middle classes would of course rather the yobbos stayed at home, playing kickshins and throwing up behind impeccable clapboard cottages lining the village green, instead of acting as evidence for the indigenous foreign population that respectable English tourists with the present-day Baedeker or Blue Guide might well have come out of the same unruly bucket a couple of generations back.

The English who travelled to or settled on the Riviera in the nineteenth century were, however, certainly responsible for some improvements in sanitation, though the French would undoubtedly have taken these in hand anyway as part of the general trend all over Europe. In this respect Cannes went up many notches in general estimation after 1848. ‘The drainage, formerly bad, is now considerably improved; many works have been already carried out, and others, more important, are about to be undertaken.’

An extract from HM Consul’s Report, October 1889, at Nice states: ‘The Municipality has introduced improvements which considerably increase the healthiness of this town, and which, I believe, have so far been carried out in no other towns on the French Riviera. In the first place they have secured, entirely irrespective of the natural supply of water, an immense water supply, which is calculated at little less than 1000 litres a day per inhabitant. The drains are fitted with automatic flushers, placed at intervals of some 300 metres apart; which appear to give excellent results. Street gullies of improved construction have been largely provided, which, when kept full of water (which is done by means of the hose in watering the streets), effectually prevent the escape of foul air, while allowing rain and other surplus water to pass into the drain. These are superior to anything of the kind I have seen in England or elsewhere.’

Dr James Henry Bennet, in Winter and Spring on the Shores of the Mediterranean, gives another point of view on the matter of sanitation: ‘In the small primitive agricultural towns of the Ligurian coast, and of the south of Europe generally, the want of main drains is not felt. All the inhabitants are usually landed proprietors. Olive and lemon trees, even in the sunny south, will not bear crops of fruit without manure, and where is it to come from in countries where there is little or no pasture unless it be from the homes of the proprietors? Hence, at Mentone and elsewhere, before the advent of strangers, the household drainage was everywhere scrupulously preserved, placed in small casks, hermetically sealed, and taken up to the terraces on the mountain side every few days by the donkey which most possess. There a trench was made around the base of a tree, and the contents of the tub mixed with the soil and the trench closed.’ For another page or so Bennet goes on to talk about drainage and cesspools, manure pumps, and dysentery.

Equally to the point perhaps is the advice given in the handbooks on hiring furnished apartments, in which ‘the general system is that the agent is paid by the owner. Visitors ought to see that all agreements are made in writing, and to mark particularly that charges for water, gas, porter, be included in the rent; and that a clause be inserted, that if any necessary articles of furniture be wanting, they can procure them at the owner’s cost, and that he pays for the inventory. All crockery, china, glass, linen, etc. should be gone over piece by piece, since, if on giving up possession there be the smallest crack or stain, the lodger will have to pay for the article as if it were new. Tenants are naturally expected to have all linen washed before leaving; but the cleaning of curtains and woollen covers is the affair of the owner.’

In a more general manner Murray tells us: ‘When Nice first became the resort of British residents, the salubrity and advantages of its climate were perhaps overrated, but at present there is too great a tendency in a contrary direction, in comparing it with other places adopted as a residence for invalids.’ Hare says that the place ‘is much frequented as a sunny winter residence, but is ravaged in spring by the violent mistral, which fills the air with a whirlwind of dust’.

Eustace Reynolds Ball in Mediterranean Winter Resorts wrote: ‘Considered purely in the light of an invalid station, there are several objections to Nice. Being a large city and the centre of fashion and gaiety during the season, its numerous attractions and amusements, offer too many temptations to the invalid visitor, and may lead him to neglect precautions, which may have a serious result.’ He quotes a Dr Yeo’s remarks that ‘whatever defects the climate of the Riviera possesses, these are specifically concentrated and aggravated at Nice.’

Let us continue to Mentone, where I spent the year of 1952, recovering from tuberculosis. In 1875 Dr Bennet wrote: ‘Until latterly but few of the tribe of health loungers chose Mentone as a residence. The Mentonians were at first all real invalids, glad to escape from the gaieties of Nice, as well as from its dust and occasionally cold winds. Many, however, are becoming attached to this picturesque Mediterranean nook. It is thus beginning to attract mere sun-worshippers, and a foreign population is gradually growing up, of the same description as that of Nice and Cannes … The inhabitants of Mentone are exceedingly gracious and cordial to strangers, and are doing their utmost to render the place agreeable to them.’

These ‘health and invalid guides’ discuss problems of sickness and disease in a way that suggests there were tens of thousands of hypochondriacs (or seriously ill people) in Britain who, having the money, were ready to go to the Riviera in the hope of a cure. People vitiated by a lifetime’s service in India, or those blighted by consumption in the damp climate of England (where the disease was endemic) or those needing to recover after the gruelling task of overseeing their factories in the industrial north, would look on the South of France as the sure place of restoration.

Reynolds Ball says: ‘In indicating the class of cases which receive benefit from a winter residence on the Riviera, one must first mention the affectations of the respiratory organs. Bronchitis, emphysema, laryngitis, the early stages of phthisis (especially those cases in which no important haemorrhages have taken place), all receive conspicuous benefit; and recognising the therapeutic value of absolutely dry air in all catarrhal affectations, great improvement is speedily manifest in cases of bronchial, nasal, post-nasal, pharyngeal and laryngeal catarrh.’

Those suffering from rheumatism and gout were said to do extremely well; rheumatism of the joints was almost unknown among the locals, although muscular rheumatism was occasionally met with. ‘The mildness of the climate and persistent sunshine, encouraging the action of the skin, produces an excellent effect upon the disease of the kidneys and liver, and cases of diabetes received marked benefit.’

In Mentone, according to Black’s 1906 guide, the Villa Helvetia is ‘a convalescent home for ladies not younger than 18 nor older than 40, who are received for 20 shillings a week, which includes everything except laundress and fire in the bedroom.’ In San Remo, just along the coast in Italy, the Villa Emily is also a home for ‘invalid ladies of limited means. They pay 25 shillings a week, which includes doctor’s fees, comfortable board and lodging, and wine or beer.’ The sanatorium at Gorbio did not take tubercular patients, and a full-page advertisement in Reynolds Ball’s guide, paid for by the town council of Beaulieu-sur-Mer, says, in case guests would be upset by the early morning coughing, ‘Consumptives refused in all hotels.’

Hare notes that English doctors, ‘seldom acquainted with Mentone, are apt to recommend the Western Bay as more bracing, but it is exposed to mistral and dust, and its shabby suburbs have none of the beauty of the Eastern Bay’. That was the side I lived on for a year, whereas Katharine Mansfield, who stayed in Mentone for a few months during the First World War in the hope of ameliorating her tuberculosis, chose the area suggested by Hare, and died of her affliction.

Dr D. W. Samways, in his Guide to Mentone, relates the following: ‘In one hotel was a young German lady, distinctly phthisical, who had lost a sister the previous year from the same malady. A young engineer also arrived, with indications of early pulmonary mischief. An American lady, somewhat seriously ill, completed the list of patients. After two winters in Mentone the German lady was sufficiently well to live in Berlin again, and later on I heard she had become engaged to be married. The engineer never needed to return, and I saw him in good health some years later. The American lady remained for several seasons in Mentone, but did not recover, though she considerably prolonged her life.’

Some of those convalescents who took walks in the environs were given a warning by Murray in 1881: ‘A very general complaint has been made against visitors trespassing in the olive-grounds and vineyards, in search of flowers, by which damage to a considerable extent is inflicted on the peasantry.’

Dr Bennet asks his readers not to pay children and donkey-women ‘for seeking and bringing them flowers’, but Murray has something more serious to say on the matter: ‘We may add that the depredations of strangers are not confined to flowers, but extend to lemons etc. Let them be made aware that the laws in France as to trespass are very stringent in such cases, the punishment extending to fine and imprisonment.’

One may wonder what happens to those invalids who came to the Riviera and die, either in a hotel, or in a furnished apartment. On this matter Reynolds Ball informs us: ‘Any actual cost incurred by making good any damage caused by the illness and death in putting the bedroom into a proper sanitary condition — repapering, whitewashing, renewing curtains, etc., must of course be paid for by the representatives of the deceased.

‘But any charge for “moral damages” by way of indemnity for supposed loss of custom, can, and should, be resisted. Speaking generally, if a sum exceeding 500 fr. be demanded, legal advice should be sought with a view of resisting the claim, or, at all events, the advice of the nearest British Consul should be taken.’

He cites the arrangements to be made at Montreux, in Switzerland, where ‘the proprietors have decided on a uniform tariff of charges for death occurring in any of the hotels of that town. A sliding scale has been adopted as follows: — For death from natural causes, the relatives of the deceased will pay from 200 to 300 francs; for a death due to a non-contagious disease, 300 to 400; while for a death resulting from a contagious disease, 400 to 500 francs.’