The Pillars of Hercules

5 “Le Grand Sud” to Nice

What threw me was the sameness of the sea. The penetrating blue this winter day and the pale sky and the lapping of water on the shore, continuous and unchanging, the simultaneous calm in eighteen countries, and those aqueous and indistinct borders, made it seem like a small world of nations, cheek by jowl, with their chins in the water. And it was so calm I could imagine myself trespassing, from one to the other, in a small boat, or even swimming. So much for the immutable sea.

On land, the station at Port-Bou, the edge of Spain, was like a monument to Franco. Fascism shows more clearly in the facades of buildings than in the faces of people. This one was self-consciously monumental, austere to the point of ugliness, very orderly and uncomfortable, under the Chaine des Arberes, a gray range of mountains. The train rattled, and it moved slowly on squeaky wheels through the gorge to the station at Cerbère, the beginning of France.

There were no passport formalities, the bright winter light did not change, and yet there was a distinct sense of being in another country. And that was odd because all we had done was jog a short way along the shore. Gibraltar is a marvel of nature — it looks like a different place. But the border between Spain and France (and France and Italy, and so on) looks arbitrary, vague in reality and distinct only on a map. But some aspects of it spoke of a frontier: the different angle of the mountains, especially the way the lower slopes were covered in cactuses, plump little plants, sprouting from every crevice and ledge on the rock face and cliffs that overlooked the harbor at Cerbère, an odor, too — disinfectant and the sea and the cigarette smoke; but most of all the Arabs. There had been none in the small port towns over the border, but there was a sudden arabesque of lounging cab drivers, porters, travelers, lurkers.

“There are a lot of them in Marseilles,” a young man said in English. He was sitting just ahead of me, with his friend, and holding a guitar case on his lap, he was addressing two Japanese travelers, still saying “them.”

He was referring to the Arabs without using the word.

“We’re going there,” one of the Japanese said.

“That’s a real rough place.”

“What? You mean we’ll get ripped off?”

“Worse.”

That stopped them. What was worse than being robbed?

“Like I got robbed on the subway train,” the first American said. “And then they tried to steal my guitar. There are gangs.”

“Gangs,” the Japanese man said.

“Lots of them,” the American said.

“Where do you think we should stay?”

“Not in Marseilles. Arles, maybe. Van Gogh? The painter? That Arles. Like you could always take a day trip to Marseilles.”

“Is it that bad?”

The second American said, “I’d go to Marseilles again if I could leave my stuff behind. That’s why I didn’t go to Morocco. What would I do with my guitar?”

“You speak French?” the Japanese traveler asked.

“I can read it. Do you know any other languages?”

“Japanese.”

“Your English is great.”

“I grew up in New Jersey,” the Japanese man said.

At this point I took out my notebook, and on the pretext of reading my newspaper wrote down the conversation. The Japanese man was talking about Fort Lee, New Jersey, his childhood, the schools. The man with the guitar was also from New Jersey.

“Fort Lee’s not that nice,” the man with the guitar said. It seemed a harsh judgment of the Japanese fellow’s hometown.

“It used to be,” the Japanese man said. “But I’d be freaking out when I went to New York.”

“My brother loves sports, but he’s too scared to go to New York and watch the games.”

“Like, I never took the subway in ten years.”

“I don’t have a problem with the subway.”

“Except, like, you might get dead there.”

The Japanese man was silent. Then he said, “How did these guys attempt to rob you?”

“Did I say ‘attempt’?”

“Okay, how did they do it?”

“The way they always do. They crowd you. They get into your pockets. One guy went for me. I kicked him in the legs. He tried to kick me when he got off the train.”

“That’s it. I’m not going to Marseilles,” the Japanese man said.

I got tired of transcribing this conversation, which was repetitious, the way fearful people speak when they require reassurance. It all sounded convincing to me, and it made me want to go to Marseilles.

The landscape had begun to distract me. Almost immediately a greater prosperity had become apparent — in the houses, the way they were built, the trees, the towns, the texture of the land, the well-built retaining walls, the sturdy fences, even the crops, the blossoms, the way the fields are squared off, from Banyuls-sur-Mer to bourgeoisified Perpignan.

With this for contrast, I saw Spain as a place that was struggling to keep afloat. It had something to do with tourism. The Spanish towns from the Costa Brava south are dead in the low season; the French towns just a few miles along looked as though they were booming even without tourists. They did not have that soulless appearance of apprehension and abandonment that tourist towns take on in the winter: the empty streets, the windswept beach, the promises on signs and posters, the hollow-eyed hotels.

The train was traveling next to the sea — or, rather, more precisely, next to the great lagoon-like ponds called étangs: Étang de Leucate, Étang de Lapalme, and into Narbonne, the Étang de Bages et de Sigean, the railway line between Étang de l’Ayrolle — like a low-lying Asiatic landscape feature, the traverse between fish farms or paddy fields.

Towards Narbonne there were fruit trees in bloom — apples, cherries, peach blossoms. And shore birds in the marshes, and at the edges of the flat attenuated beach. There were Dalí-esque details in all this — I put this down to my recent visit to the crackpot museum. The first was a chateau in the middle of nowhere, with vineyards around it, turrets and towers and pretty windows, a smug little absurdity in the seaside landscape, a little castle, like a grace note in a painting. There was no reason for it to be there. And much stranger than that, what looked like an enormous flock of pink flamingos circling over the étang a few miles before the tiny station of Gruissan-Tourebelle. I made a note of the name because I felt I was hallucinating. Flamingos? Here?

That night, in Narbonne, in Languedoc, I was wondering about those flamingos I thought I had seen flying out of the salty lagoons by the sea on the way into the city. Having a cup of coffee in the cool blossom-scented air of Mediterranean midwinter I struck up a conversation with Rachel, at the next table. A student at the university in Montpellier, she was spending a few days at home with her family. She was twenty, a native of Narbonne.

“They are flamingos, yes — especially at Étang de Leucate,” Rachel said.

The tall pink birds had not been a hallucination of mine; yet it was February, fifty degrees Fahrenheit. What was the story?

“All the étangs have flamingos”—the word is the same in French—“but in the summer when there are a lot of people around they sometimes fly off and hide in the trees.”

Rachel did not know more than that.

She said, “The étangs are very salty, very smelly at low tide, but there are fish in them and lots of mussels.”

“I associate flamingos with Africa,” I said.

Rachel shrugged. “I have not traveled. You are traveling now?”

“To Arles, and then Marseilles.”

“I have never been to Arles,” she said.

It was thirty miles beyond her college dorm at Montpellier.

“Or Marseilles, or Nice,” she went on. “I went to Spain once. And to Brittany once. I prefer the sea in Brittany — it is rough and beautiful.”

“What about the Mediterranean?”

“It is not exciting,” she said.

I could have told her that the Mediterranean extended to the shores of Syria, was tucked into Trieste, formed a torrent at Messina, hugged the delta of the Nile, and even wetted a strip of Bosnia.

“And will you stay in Nice?” she said.

“For a few days. Then I’ll take the ferry to Corsica.”

“I have a friend from Corsica. He told me that the people are very traditional there. The women are suppressed — not free as they are here.”

“Is his family traditional?”

“Yes. In fact, when they heard that he was talking about life there they got really angry. Corsicans think it’s bad to repeat these things. I feel bad that I am telling you.”

So to change the subject, I asked her about her studies.

“I am studying psychology. It’s a six-year course. I chose it because I want to work with autistic children after I graduate.”

“Have you ever worked with autistic children?”

“In the summer, yes, several times,” she said. “Ever since I was twelve I knew I wanted to work with handicapped people. I knew it would be my life.”

“That’s hard work, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s hard. You give a lot. You don’t get back very much. But I don’t mind. Not many people want to do it.”

Such idealism seemed to me rare. These were not sentiments I had heard expressed very often, and they lifted my spirits.

The next day was sunny, and Arles was not far. I left my bag at Narbonne railway station and went for a walk along the étangs, and watched the flamingos feeding and flying.

This Mediterranean sunshine was like a world of warmth and light, and it was inspirational, too. It was easy to understand the feelings of T. E. Lawrence, who took a dip there in 1908 and wrote to his mother, “I felt I had at last reached the way to the South, and all the glorious East; Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Crete,… they were all there, and all within reach of me.”

I had thought that I had left Narbonne in plenty of time, but the early darkness of winter fell upon Arles just as the train pulled into the station. I had wanted to arrive in daylight. It was the seventeenth of February; Vincent Van Gogh had first arrived in Arles on the twentieth (in 1888), and because of that timing his life was changed.

“You know, I feel I am in Japan,” he wrote to his brother Theo.

It was the light, the limpid colors. It was, most of all, the trees in bloom. And strangely that February was very cold and snowy. To see branches covered in snowflakes and white blossoms thrilled Van Gogh — and this in a low Hollandaise landscape of flat fields and windbreaks by the Rhône. They were almond blossoms mostly, but also cherry, peach, plum and apricot. Van Gogh painted the almond flowers on the branches, a Japanese-style picture that resembled a floral design that he had seen before on a screen panel.

Even in the dark I could see some blossoms, and in the glary light of streetlamps the almond petals were like moths clustered on the black branches and twisted twigs.

Arles had three or four large luxury hotels, but I was put off by their ridiculous prices. I had found the name of a twenty-dollar hotel in a guidebook. This was called La Gallia. It was apparently a cafe and pizza joint.

The man at the coffee machine said, “Go outside, turn right, go around to the back and up the stairs. Use this key. The light switch is on the wall. Your room is on the second floor. You can’t miss it.”

“Do you want me to sign anything?”

“No name needed. No signature. Just the money in advance. No passport. Sleep well!”

“Is there a toilet?”

“It’s in the hall. But you have a sink.”

It was a medieval tenement on a backstreet, with a cobblestone courtyard and a winding staircase. I was halfway up the stairs when everything went black; the timer on the light ran out. I struggled in the dark to the landing, where I fumbled my flashlight out of my bag. I used this to find the light switch on the next landing. It seemed so difficult contriving to enter and leave this odd empty building that I stayed in my room and went out at the first sign of dawn.

That morning there was an old man with a wooden leg trying to climb the stairs.

“Softly,” I said.

There was only room for one person at a time on these precipitous stairs.

“This wooden leg of mine is heavy,” he panted. “It was the war.”

“My uncle was here in the war.”

Cpl. Arthur Theroux of Stoneham, Massachusetts.

“Fighting?”

“Running a blood bank. He was a medic. Thirty-third Station Hospital.”

We had to throw most of the French blood away, Paulie. They all had syphilis. The American whole blood was the stuff we used.

In the watery morning light I saw a profusion of almond blossoms. But I would have noticed them without the suggestion of Van Gogh; there was no subtlety. It was an explosion of flowers, the trees frothing with blossoms. The cherry blossoms of early spring in London and on Cape Cod always indicated to me that winter was almost over, and there is something magical about their appearing before the trees were in leaf.

Walking towards the river, a man — American — asked me directions to the railway station. He was Jim, from Connecticut, relieved to be in Arles after a harrowing trip — so he said — through Portugal and Spain.

“I hated Spain. I almost got robbed in Madrid.”

He was a recent graduate of Bucknell. Philosophy major.

“Ever heard of Philip Roth? He went to Bucknell,” Jim said. “We had to study him. Everyone at Bucknell reads him. I hated that stuff.”

I asked him whether he was on vacation.

“No. I quit my job. I hate the job market. I worked a little while for Cadbury-Schweppes. They were developing a home soft-drink dispenser. The whole bit. Syrup, gas, water — your own soft drinks on tap. It was like a coffee machine.”

“What were you doing?”

“Test-marketing it.”

“Did it fly?”

“It was a failure. It was too expensive — and who needs it?” He kicked along beside me. “They weren’t open to new ideas, so I quit.”

“I’m sure you did the right thing — and here you are, a free man, seeing the world.”

“What are you doing?”

His lack of interest in writing or reading encouraged me, and so I said, “I’m a publisher.”

“What do you look for in a novel?” he asked suddenly. It was a good question.

“Originality, humor, subtlety. The writing itself. A sense of place. A new way of seeing. Lots of things. I like to believe the things I read.”

I pulled a novel, The Rock Pool, by Cyril Connolly, out of my back pocket and waved it at him.

“This has some of those qualities, but not enough.”

“What’s it about?”

“People going to pieces on the Riviera.”

“Another one of those!”

True enough, I thought. “Do you do any writing?”

“No. I’m planning to go to art school, but at the moment I’m heading for Bratislava.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Supposed to be a pretty nice place.”

With that, he jogged off to the railway station, and I continued strolling through the backstreets of Arles to the river. In many respects this was much the same place that Van Gogh saw; many of the same buildings still stand, the same streets and squares and boulevards. There is a vast Roman arena in the town, a splendid hippodrome the size of a small football stadium, used at certain seasons for bullfights. One series had just been held, another, the Easter Feria (Feria de Paque), was coming soon.

Not far from here, the town of Nîmes was the center of French bullfighting and had been for a decade or so, since the revival of the nauseating — what? recreation? pastime? — you could hardly call it a sport. It had been dying out, but Nîmes’s right-wing backward-looking mayor, Jean Bousquet, provided guidance and enthusiasm. There are three bullfighting festivals a year in Nîmes, one attracting almost a million people. Of course French bullfighting had been denounced by animal-rights activists and foreigners, but nothing encourages the French so much as disapproval, especially from aliens.

“Do you go to the bullfights?” I asked a man walking a dog along the river.

“Sometimes. But you know these special events are to bring in the tourists,” he said. “I prefer football.”

Arles was a small town and it had the two disfigurements of pretty French towns in the provinces, dog merds and graffiti. The sidewalks were so fouled they were almost impassable because of the merds. As for the graffiti, there was something particularly depressing about spray-painted scrawls on the stone of ancient facades. Up your ass, Paris (Paris-t’on cule) and Gilly = a whore and a slut (Gilly = pute et salope) were two of the more picturesque obscenities.

The town had prepared itself for tourists, but on this winter day it looked especially empty: too many brasseries, hotels, gift shops, and stores; in July it would be packed, the people said. But Arles had an off-season friendliness and lack of urgency. The waiters were not surly. One explained the drinks available and laughed with me over the odd names Foetus Whisky, Delirium Tremens Beer (“It’s from Belgium”) and the blue cordial liqueur called “Fun Blue.”

I eavesdropped in Arles, though it annoyed me when people were talking and I could not understand them, because of the intrusive background music or other voices. It was like looking at something interesting while someone intruded on my line of vision. I felt stifled and frustrated.

Some of the snippets tantalized me:

A man said, “Let’s do in Italy what we did in France, back at the hotel—”

A woman said, “I am not going to go to another place like that again, because, one, it’s too complicated, and two, what if we got sick? And three, the other people look really strange—”

There were almond blossoms everywhere, which gave a great freshness to Arles and all its fields and made it seem still rural, picturesque and even inspirational. I liked the provinciality of the place, and its clear light.

But Arles was not all floral, and tweeting with sparrows. The mailman was doing his rounds, a hardworking housewife with big red hands down at the grocer’s was complaining about the high price of morel mushrooms. This so-called cup fungus was selling at 168 francs for a hundred grams, which worked out at $126 a pound. And even in the early morning there were drinkers leaning on bars. It was never too early for a drink in provincial France. Two ladies were tippling Pernod. And down the street a florid blowzy woman was nursing a beer. This was at seven in the morning in an Arles backstreet.

To verify that Arles is a seaport, I walked along the east bank of the Rhône, in a southerly direction for a day of sunshine and sweet air. There were windbreaks of twigs and boughs, and the wide flat fields. There had been floods a few months before which showed on the banks of the river. Some sections of it had been fortified, sections of the retaining wall and the embankment filled in.

In the late afternoon I walked back to town to take the train the short distance to Marseilles. At the small railway station at Arles there were almond trees on each platform and they were in blossom. Such a pretty station! Such lovely trees! And then the TGV was announced. The TGV is the French high-speed train, much too fast and too grand to stop at a little station like Arles. It screamed past the platforms with such speed and back-draft that a special yellow TGV line was painted on the platform, so that people would stand at a safe distance, giving the train six feet of leeway. It howled like an earthbound jet, doing about 160 miles an hour, and with such a rush of air that petals were blown from the almond trees. The sight, the sound, the rush of air, made it a deafening event, the train slicing the day in half and leaving such a vacuum that I had the sense that my brain was being sucked out of my ears.

Anyone who hankers for the romance of railways, of the branch lines jogging through Provence, ought to consider the fact that the newest trains are nearly as obnoxious — as noisy and intrusive — as jets.

But even by the little blue, normal, stopping train of French National Railways it was an hour or less to Marseilles — about sixty miles away. We crossed the low delta of the Rhône, the fields of horses and flowers and vegetables, thriving in the winter sunshine; through the towns of Entressen and Miramas and along the shore of the Étang de Berre. I stayed as close as possible to the shore of the Mediterranean, which meant bypassing Aix-en-Provence and all the rest of the romanticized and much-written-about villages of Provence. They were not on my coastal route, which was neither a gastronomic tour, nor a sentimental wallow in the life of rural Europe. That seemed a good thing too — from what I saw of those clumps of cottages, the tarted-up villages seemed more pretentious and expensive than the jammed ports and cities of the Mediterranean, where settlements were too active to be stuffy. And I had a sense that these coastal places had stronger links with each other than they had with the inland capitals and gentrified villages.

That was true of Marseilles, a wonderful city to arrive in by train, certainly one of the best in the world, because the ornate St. Charles railway station is on a bluff. You walk outside and all of Marseilles is spread out below — the Old Town, the Old Port, the boulevards, the rooftops, and chimneys and church steeples, and on the far hill the cathedral of Notre Dame de la Garde, a gold statue on its dome. I could see the islands, the bluffs, the earthworks and fortresses and lighthouses. All this from the high stairs of the railway station.

“I read so much about the crime in Marseilles in my guidebook that I’m going to skip it altogether,” Jim, the American, had told me in Arles.

I was suitably warned, not to say terrified. Until I found a hotel I left my bag in a station locker; I carried nothing in my hands; I had no camera and very little cash. I walked briskly, as though I had somewhere to go.

Marseilles was a frightener; it was famous for its boasters and liars, for the way its people exaggerated, and it had a wicked reputation — for its gangs, its badly housed immigrants, its racism, and most of all for its crime. No wonder people compared it to New York City. It was certainly a center for drugs. The cocaine that was produced in the former French colonies in West Africa, the raw paste was smuggled into Marseilles to be processed, made into crack or base or crystal, or else powdered and cut with dry milk from Italy and sold all over Europe. Petty crime was commonly spoken of in Marseilles; I kept my head down and was safe. Such wickedness as drugs and racketeering, which kept both the police and the gangsters busy, did not affect the idle wanderer that I was.

It seemed to me to be the ultimate Mediterranean city, for its size and its diversity. As soon as I left the station and started down the marble stairs to the city, I saw a Gypsy woman smoking a pipe in the sunshine, and another counting coins she had made from playing tunes on her accordion. These Gypsies were as sorry-looking here as in Spain where they are relentlessly romanticized by travel journalists and persecuted by locals. Gypsies are generally despised in the Mediterranean as they are in the rest of Europe. The same could be said for the Moroccans and Algerians, who were said to account for Marseilles’s being notorious for crime. But every Mediterranean race was represented here, the Arabs were as common as the French, and there were Greeks, Spaniards, and Italians; there were tall loping Tuaregs in blue robes, and Berbers from Tunisia, and Senegalese selling handbags and watches. Arab women begged, each one squatting and holding a snotty-nosed child instead of a pleading sign, in a futile attempt — the Marseillaise seemed impervious to the pleas — to elicit sympathy.

In Marseilles the foreign men linger on street corners in small groups, because they come from cultures without telephones, where men linger on street corners in small groups. There they stood, dusky men, yakking and smoking. The so-called Foreign Quarter is in the Old Town, just below the station. The Baedeker Guide, Mediterranean for 1911, mentions this area: “On the N. side of the Quai du Port, the scene of motley popular traffic (pickpockets not uncommon), lies the Old Town, with its narrow and dirty streets, inhabited by the lower classes, including numerous Italians of whom the city contains about 100,000.” Now it is Arabs and Vietnamese in the Old Town; and the same perceptions — motley pickpockets, lower classes, cutpurses, parasites.

I walked down the Canebière (“Can o’ Beer”) along the Promenade Louis Brauquier (“poet and painter”) to the mouth of the Old Port. Out of the wind, sitting in the sunshine against a wall, was a line of people in various postures — old Moroccan women in shawls, men in berets, dog walkers, men with their shirts off, other men stripped to their underwear grinning into the sunshine.

Farther on, standing at the limit of the fort I looked out, and the Mediterranean had the look of a limitless ocean. I walked on, to the Gare Maritime, where ferries left for Algeria and Tunisia, and Corsica. I was headed for Corsica but the station timetables told me that I could continue down the Côte d’Azur and catch the once-a-week (in the winter) ferry from Nice to Bastia, a port in the north of Corsica. At the ferry station passengers were boarding the French ship to Algiers, all of them Algerian Arabs. Not a single Frenchman, nor any foreigners. There was a good reason for this: at that point seventy-one foreigners, and tens of thousands of Algerians, had been killed by Islamic terrorists in Algeria in a fifteen-month period.

I kept walking. Because of Marseilles’s pleasant thoroughfares, its absence of heavy traffic, its venerable architecture and its hills, it is pleasant for walking in and full of views. It was not particularly expensive either. My hotel, near the railway station, was about forty dollars a night.

It was fairly easily to get lost in Marseilles, particularly in the Old Town. As the Arab quarter, it had the fiercest reputation, though all I saw were cats and stragglers and the mindless defacing of the ancient walls with spray-painted graffiti. From behind bolted shutters I heard Algerian hilarity and screechy music. This was the area which in 1911 had the disreputable Italians.

My greatest fear walking down these backstreets was of being killed by a garbage truck. These vehicles came quickly around the corners and did not slow down, and as they filled the entire street I found myself diving for a doorway and flattening myself against it.

Because Marseilles was so frightening to visitors it lacked the touristic triteness that was so common on the rest of the Riviera, expensive hotels, and sluttish recreations, and piggy food and curio shops. The day after I arrived I walked in a different part of the city and found a market crowding the narrow lanes of the town around Place du Marche des Capucines that was more like an Arab souk. Sacks of nuts, and piles of dates, ten kinds of olives, fish and fruit and couscous, and French, Arabs and Africans mingling and haggling. The Arabesque of Marseilles, loathed and feared by the French, was one of its most interesting and liveliest aspects.

The maddening thing was my inability to speak to any Arabs. Their French I found peculiar and I don’t speak Arabic. I felt there was the same vast cultural gulf between the French (Catholic, bourgeois, monoglot) and the Arabs (Muslim, peasants, Arabic-speaking). They really did not know each other at all.

Walking past a police station, I decided to go in and bluntly inquire about crime in Marseilles, since that was all that travelers talked about. I had seen no sign of it, not even on the previous night, as I loitered and lurked.

There was an anteroom where five policemen sat smoking cigarettes and twirling their truncheons.

One policeman said, “Yes, we have one big problem here in Marseilles. My colleague will tell you what it is.”

The others laughed, as — on cue — a policeman said, “Arabs, Arabs, Arabs, Arabs, Arabs.”

“They are the cause of all the trouble,” the first policeman said. “Be very careful.”

In such circumstances, talking to someone who was generalizing in such a racist way, I had a choice of challenging his logic, scolding him for uttering such offensive things, and in this way ending the conversation; or keep listening, without interrupting, nodding and smiling in mild encouragement.

“What will the Arabs do to me?”

“They will steal your bag, your money, anything.”

“Are they armed?”

“This is not New York! No, no guns. The knife is the favorite weapon of the Arab.”

“Who are these Arabs? From what country?”

“They are Algerians. Also Moroccans, but mainly Algerians. They are awful. And they are everywhere.”

The French are entirely frank in expressing their racism. I wondered whether this lack of delicacy, indeed stupidity, was an absence of inhibition or simply arrogance. Their public offensiveness ranged from smoking in restaurants to testing nuclear bombs in the Pacific. Perhaps they did not know that the world had moved on, or perhaps they just did not care; or, more likely, they delighted in being obnoxious.

I thanked the policemen for this information and pushed on, pondering the relationship between racism and xenophobia. By a coincidence I saw an article that day in a Marseilles newspaper describing a bill put forward by Jacques Toubon, the French Minister of Culture. This bill was intended to cleanse the French language; it would ban all foreign words — anglicisms mainly — and enforce linguistic purity. Everyone knew the words, everyone used them. In the course of traveling along the French part of the Mediterranean I picked up a number of them which were specifically denounced by the minister and which would have been banned by the bill.

Most English-speakers are aware that the French — indefatigable trend-spotters — have picked up words such as le weekend, un snack and le club; and as a result of this quest for novelty French is rife with anglicisms. The French feel the same frisson from saying le smoking (meaning a tux) that English speakers feel from saying frisson. There are roughly three thousand entries in the Dictionnaire des Anglicismes. For example, le pad-dock (also used for bed), l‘autostop (hitchhike), le ketchup, and le leader. Le jamesbonderie is French for a daring feat; surbooker means overbook, le best-of, le challenge and le hit parade are obvious, and se faire lifter means to have a face-lift.

But a large element in French officialdom (representing an element in public life) hated this. It seemed to me that hating foreign words was perhaps related to hating foreigners, and was another example of French insecurity. Three months later the bill was ratified — fines of up to twenty thousand francs (thirty-five hundred dollars) for the public use of an English word when a French one would do; the next problem lay in its enforcement, particularly in a polyglot city such as Marseilles.

On my last day in Marseilles I treated myself to a bouillabaisse, the dish that Marseilles gave to the world. The fish broth was pungent and flavorful, saffron-colored as in the classic recipe, presented with croutons and cheese and remoulade and potatoes. And the vital ingredients were the fruit of the Mediterranean — rouget (mullet), rascasse (red spiny hogfish found only in the Mediterranean), Saint-Pierre (John Dory), moules, whiting, monkfish, bass, gurnet, weever, conger eel, crab, crawfish, clams.

The crab was very small. The waiter lifted the shell with a fork.

“And this, as they say in English, you suck.”

This one meal cost nearly as much as my hotel room, but it was worth it to sit with a view of the port, stuffing myself and reading a book and glancing at the boats in the port. Marseilles was obviously a tough place, but it was neither irritatingly sophisticated nor conspicuously poor. That was what I liked most about it, its air of being a cultural bouillabaisse made up of distinctly Mediterranean ingredients. I also had a confidence that I could go anywhere in the city — not a confidence I had ever had in New York or London. There were no mansions in Marseilles. The rich stayed in outlying villages, behind high hedges and barbed wire and Chien Méchant (“Wicked Dog”) signs, pretending they are in the bosom of Provence, and not in the city of stray cats and prostitutes and wanderers from the Barbary Coast. The reality of Marseilles was Arabs, skateboarders, hookers, the drug trade, and people working, all of them together, usually in the same narrow lanes.

I took a boat — a small launch — to the islands in the Bay of Marseilles, to the tiny Château d’If of The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas lived in Marseilles) and to the Frioul Islands. Château d’If was a combination of Alcatraz and the Magic Kingdom, a Disney prison, and like the nearby islands of crumbly sun-faded rock that looked like stale cake. No trees here, but ashore there were dry treeless headlands dusted with green, which were the last of the bushes.

I liked being out on the blue Mediterranean, among the sailboats, again that feeling of being at the edge of the sea that obliterated any clear idea of nationhood — the ports having mixed populations and a common destiny, living by the sea.

“The Mediterranean is beautiful in a different way from the ocean, but it is as beautiful,” Victor Hugo wrote on a visit to Marseilles. He made some pleasing distinctions. “The ocean has its clouds, its fogs, its glaucous glassy billows, its sand dunes in Flanders, its immense vaults, its magnificent tides. The Mediterranean lies wholly under the sun; you feel it by the inexpressible unity that lies at the foundation of its beauty. It has a tawny stern coast, the hills and rocks of which seem rounded or sculptured by Phidias, so harmoniously is the shore wedded to gracefulness.”

When I returned from the little cruise I decided to take another launch, and let it be my departure from Marseilles. We sailed along the coast, past the offshore islands of Tiboulen, Maire, Jane, Calseraigne, stopping briefly at Sormion and Morgiouy, and ending up at Cassis, where I caught another train. It was “Le Grand Sud,” stopping at Toulon, St. Raphael, and Cannes, passing St. Tropez, Fréjus, and Antibes. Most of the time the line was within sight of the sea, and the Aleppo pines and the palms at the shore, but as the train approached Nice the large apartment blocks and tall buildings obstructed the sea view.

The dream of the Mediterranean is not the Albanian coast or the docks of Haifa or the drilling rigs at the edge of Libya. It is the dream of this part of France, the sweep of the Riviera as a brilliant sunlit lotophagous land — the corner of the Mediterranean from the outskirts of Toulon eastward to Monte Carlo, a hundred-odd miles of Frenchness — food, wine, style, heat, rich old farts, gamblers and bare-breasted bimbos. All that and art too. It is the Cagnes of Renoir, the Nice of Matisse, the Antibes of Graham Greene; the Cannes Film Festival, the casinos. In describing the machismo of the corrida, Hemingway had put Spain on the map. Fitzgerald in his short stories and Tender Is the Night was the first chronicler of the Riviera, the bon vivants and drunks and flappers and phonies of Antibes or Juan-les-Pins. It could be said that Fitzgerald invented the Riviera as a fashionable place, but he had many collaborators in keeping it in business.

Ten years after Fitzgerald the names had changed. “All along the coast from Huxley Point to Castle Wharton to Cape Maugham, little colonies or angry giants had settled themselves,” the dissolute Naylor ponders in Cyril Connolly’s novel The Rock Pool, summing up the literary Riviera in the thirties. “There were Campbell in Martigues, Aldington at Le Lavandou, any one who could hold a pen at St Tropez, Arlen in Cannes, and beyond, Monte Carlo and the Oppenheim country. He would carry on at Nice and fill the vacant stall of Frank Harris.”

Yet it rains on the Riviera too, the traffic is awful, and there is no elbow room. It has been called the zone nerveuse and a special sort of madness attributed to residence in this part of the Mediterranean, “the arid foreshore of that iodine-charged littoral.” It is mainly older people, retirees, crooks, tax exiles — who else can afford it? — and meretricious businesses and dog walkers and stony beaches on the sluggish sea. Nothing is sadder than a resort out of season, no matter how good the food. And there are times when even this dreamland is crammed with all the stale and wilted lotuses that no one wants to eat.

• • •

It was a rainy February night in Nice and I was walking down the wet gleaming street from the station. I was pleased with myself for having arrived here at the lowest point of the season. The hotels and restaurants were empty. No need for reservations: I felt liberated from having to plan ahead. And so I kept walking, to evaluate the likely hotels, avoiding the ones directly on main streets (car noise, motorcycle blast), or near churches (organ music, yakking), or schools (screams, bells), or near restaurants (drunks, music, banging doors). A hotel on the seashore would have been perfect — silence, a light breeze, the slop and wash of little waves; but not even the great hotels of Nice are on the sea. As in Brighton, to which Nice is often compared, a busy main road separates the sea front from the hotels.

On a quiet square, the Place Mozart, a little old woman rented me a room for forty dollars, and just to see what I was missing I walked down to the Promenade des Anglais to the Hôtel Negresco for a drink at the bar. It is said to be the most expensive hotel in Nice, if not the best. Ha! Built in 1913, but imitating the Belle Epoque style, it is a hodgepodge of fatuous Frenchness, the bellmen and concierge and flunkies in footmen’s breeches and frock coats, bowing and scraping, and groveling for tips under gilt and chandeliers and red flock wallpaper, candlesticks with lightbulb flames and copies of bad paintings.

What I liked the best about Nice that night was the heavy rain. Nice was smack against the sea, and so the many lights from the apartment houses and the old world streetlamps created a Whistlerish effect of glowing bulbs and reflections, like one of his wet nocturnes. Yes, that was possible in New Jersey, too.

The next morning I walked down to the port of Nice, the Genoese-looking harbor, which is not a fanciful comparison — Nice belonged to Italy until 1860, Garibaldi was born there — and I saw the Rainbow Warrior at one of the docks.

This Greenpeace ship — one of three or four in the world — had sailed there to educate the French about environmental threats to the Mediterranean. The crew members were selling t-shirts and bumper stickers and handing out leaflets detailing terrible pollution statistics.

“Pollution is only one of the problems,” Catherine Morice said. She was from the Paris office of Greenpeace. “Drift nets are legal in the Mediterranean. And Italian drift nets are extremely long. Many kilometers. Spain and France also use drift nets. That’s something that has to be stopped.”

She showed me some reports detailing the drift-netters’ abuses — and the length of the nets, ten and fifteen miles long. I told her I was traveling along the Mediterranean coast, and had just come from Marseilles and Arles.

“That is one of the worst regions for pollution.”

“But Arles is pretty — you mean the Rhône?”

“The Rhône at Arles stinks and it’s dangerous. It’s a terrible river. We call it the couloir chimique—chemical corridor. It makes the Camargue a mess.”

And where travel writers rhapsodize about Gypsies and horses and Van Gogh — well, I had done a little bit of that, hadn’t I? — she said the oil factories and chemical factories of the Camargue are the source of a lot of Mediterranean pollution.

“Are there nuclear plants along the Mediterranean as there are along the coast of Britain?” I asked.

At this point Catherine called over to Jean-Luc Thierry, the Greenpeace nuclear expert.

Jean-Luc said, “No. They are not built on the Mediterranean, they are inland. But they are not far. There is a nuclear reprocessing plant at Marcols-les-Eaux, a hundred kilometers up the Rhône. We’ve found traces of plutonium in the river and in the estuary.”

Where there were Gypsies and horses and almond blossoms, there was plutonium.

“What sort of a reception are you getting with your campaign in the Mediterranean?”

“The French are very suspicious of efforts like this. The first question we always get is, ‘Where does your money come from?’ ”

“That’s true of a lot of countries.”

“France is worse. They suspect us of having foreign influence — the French paranoia — money from America or Russia.”

As though if this were true it would cast doubt on the statistics or invalidate the effort to clean up the Mediterranean.

“Does the pollution vary from country to country, according to the part of the Mediterranean?”

“Yes, but the most serious division is the north against the south,” Jean-Luc said. “A lot of the waste and pollution on the European side affects North Africa.”

The next morning Rainbow Warrior sailed for Calvi in Corsica, to carry the environmental message.

Later that afternoon, reading Nice-Matin on a bench on the promenade, I saw there was a symphony concert that night at the Acropolis, Nice’s cultural center. It was a twenty-minute walk from my hotel, but when I got there a man was waving his arms and saying, “No tickets — all sold,” to some disappointed people. I suppose I had a look of consternation on my face, because a woman came up to me and asked me whether I wanted a ticket. Her mink coat, her look of evasion and aloofness, and even her air of innocence made her seem like a tout; and yet she did not scalp me, but asked for the exact price that was printed on the ticket.

She vanished a moment later, and only then — as I was congratulating myself on my luck — did it occur to me that she had sold me a fake ticket.

Soon afterwards, I found my seat, and in the seat beside it was the woman in the mink coat. She smiled at me.

“My husband is sick,” she said. “So you are lucky. This is a popular concert.”

She was not a tout, nor anything near it. She was a good, kind, compassionate and honest person, whom I had wrongly suspected of being a hustler.

“My husband is so sorry to miss it,” she said. “But now you can enjoy it. May I look at your program?”

She was Madame Godefroy, and, for the duration of the concert, I became her husband. We shared the program. We agreed that the playing was wonderful. It was Berlioz (Overture to “Beatrice and Benedict”) and Beethoven Piano Concerto Number Three, and a Dvorak symphony (No. 5). The soloist was French and warmly applauded. The conductor was Chinese, Long Yü, and young (born 1964). We chatted about the weather, what a terrible winter it was! What a wet day! What a lovely concert!

Flushed and breathless with all these exclamations, Mme. Godefroy and I went into the foyer and had a glass of wine.

“We were living in Clermont-Ferrand, where my husband was working,” she said. “After he retired, about eight years ago, we came here.”

“Is it more expensive here in Nice?”

“The apartments cost twice as much, or more, as in Clermont-Ferrand. Property is very expensive in Nice. But everything else is the same — food, clothes, whatever.”

“I liked Marseilles,” I said.

Mme. Godefroy winced but said, “Yes, there are the Le Corbusier buildings. But Marseilles is dangerous. It has all the problems, too — drugs, immigrants, AIDS.”

She was too polite perhaps to mention blacks and Arabs, but I was reminded of how the young blacks in Marseilles imitated American dress code: baseball hats on backward, track suits, baggy pants, expensive running shoes, and the same unusual haircuts. There were no other role models in France, or in Europe, but the Americanized look marked these youths out and must have seemed like a threat.

“So you’re happy here, Madame?”

“Nice is safe,” she said. “The weather is good, except for this year. It is youthful, because of the universities and language schools. There are many retired people — perhaps thirty percent. But Cannes is worse — it doesn’t have universities, so it’s mostly retired people.”

“I always imagined that the French were settled people. I didn’t realize that they retired and moved to the coast the way people do in Britain and the United States.”

“My parents never retired and moved,” she said. “It happened after the war, when children moved away from their parents to find work. Before, in France, everyone lived together, the children looked after their parents, and they lived in the father’s house. But — no more.”

So the breakup of the family home was an economic necessity, dating from the recent past, when the young were uprooted and had to search for jobs. And the nature of jobs changed — the decline of agriculture, and manufacturing, the rise of the service industries; all of this since the war.

“Do you have any relatives living in Nice?”

“No, and I miss them. I miss my children and my grandchildren. All my children are married. Well, my younger son has been living with his girlfriend for so long they are good as married.”

She sipped her wine.

“My father is dead. He was ninety-three when he died. My mother is alive. She is ninety-one — but in good health and very alert.”

“Where are your roots in France?”

“Strasbourg. I was born there and my family lived there for many generations.”

“Hasn’t Strasbourg also been German at times?”

“Yes, it has gone back and forth, from French to German and back again. During the war”—she sighed—“we had to leave Strasbourg. It was a bad time. The Germans occupied it. We fled to Aix-en-Provence.”

She told me about the fighting, the house-searches, the crowded train, the hunger. This woman in furs in the foyer of the concert hall in Nice, the very picture of bourgeois serenity, had once been a refugee, fleeing from town to town, ahead of the Huns, in a desperate struggle for survival.

This talk of the war clearly depressed Mme. Godefroy, who perhaps realized that she was talking with a stranger who had been sitting in her husband’s seat, an inquisitive American. I liked her, though — her rectitude, her stoicism, her clear-sightedness: law-abiding, polite, married for life.

“Are you staying in Nice?”

“For a while. I want to travel in this immediate area. And then I’m going to Corsica.”

“I have been there. Once. It is very different. The people, especially the ones in the mountains, are very severe.”

At her request, because it was late, and there were lurkers here and there, I walked Mme. Godefroy to the taxi stand. I said good night, and then headed back to the Place Mozart, through the empty city, and detoured down the promenade, which was bright with wet reflections, and the water, too, the Bay of Angels a sea of gleaming liquefaction.

The concert had been a local event, part of this wintry low season, not a tourist attraction. There were other events — dances, plays, and this week — because the Lenten season had just begun — a two-week festival of parades and exhibitions. I went to one of the parades, because it seemed to me to have been put on expressly for people who lived in Nice and the surrounding towns.

The parade was called “Le Bataille des Fleurs,” and it involved floats and flower tossing. It interested me as local events often did for the way they roused people from their homes, children and spouses, and revealed their fantasies and enthusiasms. Families lined the streets, and so did soldiers and policemen and priests and punks. These French punks were grubby youths, swigging wine, looking dirty and dangerous. They jeered and shouted at the floats which were piled with flowers, and on each float a pretty girl in a ball gown or a tight dress or sequins, stood flinging mimosa (which had just come into bloom) to the bystanders. The sprigs of mimosa, with tufty yellow fluff, had the look of baby chicks.

One of the flower girls was black and attractive, wearing a white wedding dress and a veil.

“She’s a good one,” said a man beside me to his friend.

“Oh, yeah,” the friend said, and leered at the girl. “Amazing.”

And they clamored for her to throw them some mimosa.

There were military bands with blaring trumpets. A Tyrolean oompah band. Another: St. Georg’s Bläser from Haidenbach. A brass band called The Wolves (Les Loups), playing loud and wearing baggy wolf costumes. More floats, more skinny fox-faced girls in pretty dresses flinging mimosa, and when they ran out of mimosa they tore flowers from their floats and threw those. There were Germans dressed as Mexicans, French cowgirls and drum majorettes, medieval knights and wenches, playing trumpets and twirling elaborate flags. Twenty little girls in traditional Provençal costumes tossing flowers and inviting the stares of elderly gentlemen. Zouaves, clowns, and a band of pink teddy bears. Musical policemen and “Miss Galaxie” and the forty-piece band of Stadtkapelle Schongau (Bavaria) in lederhosen: more oompah. “Los Infectos Acelerados” and a down-home band from East Texas State University — baton-twirling cuties in black leotards and short skirts.

Seeing Americans, the French children became hysterical and began spraying strings of goo at them out of aerosol cans, screaming, “Mousse!”

The day after the parade, I tiptoed to Nice Station. It is impossible to stride confidently through Nice, city of dog merds.

When the English painter Francis Bacon was seventeen he saw dogshit on a sidewalk and had an epiphany: “There it is — this is what life is like.” What enchantment he would have found in Nice, where pavements are so turdous that a special one-man turd-mobile trundles along sucking them up its long snout. Even that ceaseless activity hardly makes a dent.

The turd-mobile is defeated by an unlikely enemy: an older overdressed French woman, a widow, a retiree, a prosperous landlady, someone precisely like Mme. Godefroy. She is the last person you would associate with dogshit, and yet this delicate and dignified woman spends a good part of the day calculating the urgencies of her dog’s bowels. There are thousands of these women and their dogs all over the Riviera. They are forever hurrying their tiny mutts down the sidewalk and looking the other way as the beasts pause to drop a stiff sausage of excrement just where you are about to plant your foot.

At the station, I said to myself: If the next train goes east, I’ll head for Ventimiglia and eat spaghetti in Italy. If it goes west, I’ll eat in Antibes or Juan-les-Pins.

It was an eastbound train to Mention, and once again I was struck by the courtesy of the older French rail passengers, strangers to each other, who chatted about trivial things and seldom departed in silence; nearly always when they left a train compartment they said, “Bye, now” or “Bon voyage” or “Take care.”

There was something else about the train, that Fitzgerald mentions in Tender Is the Night. “Unlike American trains that were absorbed in an intense destiny of their own, and scornful of people on another world less swift and breathless, this train was part of the country through which it passed. Its breath stirred the dust from the palm leaves, the cinders mingled with the dry dung in the gardens. Rosemary was sure she could lean from the window and pull flowers with her hand.”

Beyond the pretty bay at Villefranche-sur-Mer, a little jewel among rocky cliffs, I could see St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where King Leopold of Belgium, sole proprietor of the Congo, had built a regal estate that was so complete, even his mistresses and his private priest, his confessor, lived in a private mansion on the grounds. The idea was that the king could sin all he wanted, for the priest was on call to give him absolution on his deathbed. Somerset Maugham had bought the priest’s house, the Villa Mauresque — named for its Moroccan decor. I had planned to stop here, but the whole kingly place was now a set of condominiums.

Past Beaulieu-sur-Mer, palmy, sedate, piled against the hillside, with mansions on ledges; past Eze-sur-Mer, less grand, with great clusters of banana trees at the station. The bays beyond Eze were beautiful but the beaches were stony, the cliffs perpendicular, a wall-like coast similar to the one I had seen on the Costa Brava. After Cap D’Ail came Monte Carlo — bigger, sleepier, nastier than I had expected, and it was impossible to tell the condos from the grave vaults. I decided to stop there for lunch.

I walked from the station, trying to figure out where I was. There are three regions in the Principality of Monaco — Monacoville, the hill where Prince Rainier’s palace dominates; the valley of the Condamine; and another hill, Mount Charles — Monte Carlo. The whole place owes its existence to Grace Kelly, who provided Rainier with a son, thus maintaining the Grimaldi line. She met Rainier when the prince became involved as a human prop in a photo shoot in Monaco to promote one of her films; then he pursued her, with a priest acting as a go-between. He was well aware of the clause in Monaco’s treaty with France that asserted that Monaco would be absorbed into France if Rainier did not somehow produce an heir. Now it is for the young balding playboy, Albert Grimaldi, to secure the Grimaldi line with an heir of his own.

The Grimaldi family, said to be the oldest monarchical line in Europe, is — like most of those families — royally dysfunctional, filled with stressful and unsatisfying relationships, though Grimaldi self-esteem is not in short supply. They are well aware that their home was a dump until the mid-nineteenth century, when Prince Charles III built a casino. He did it in much the same spirit that the Pequot Mashantucket Indians introduced gambling to Connecticut, because it was forbidden everywhere else (France and Italy had banned it). So Monaco got rich, as the Pequots got rich, on suckers being encouraged to throw their money away.

But the wealthy people who live in Monaco are the opposite of gamblers. They are mainly anal-retentive tax exiles with a death grip on their cash and a horror of spending, never mind gambling. There are thirty thousand residents. Fewer than ten percent of them are natives, which says a great deal. Tax havens are by their very nature boring or else actively offensive; if they were pleasant, everyone would want to live in them. But only by promising tax incentives do the places attract their resident populations. This is not Happy Valley. For one thing, the chief characteristic of wealthy people is that they are constantly whining about how poor they are; the rest of us can take a malicious satisfaction in the fact that these tycoons have only each other at which to cry poormouth.

I had a pizza, and walked around, but all my attempts to start conversations with the Monagasques ended in failure. That was another unhelpful personality trait of tax exiles — paranoia.

Farther down the railway line, nasturtiums grew like weeds at Rocquebrune, and in Cabrolles there was space and light and a great valley slotted into a range of high snow-dusted mountains, with stony features that matched those of the local bourgeoisie.

Menton was a Victorian-looking seaside resort of indescribable dullness. The fat, philandering Edward VII used to like it here, for the apparently limitless opportunities it afforded him to eat and chase women. Menton was having its own celebration today, the Lemon Festival (Fête du Citron). This one was obvious and programmatic, and it was watched without much enthusiasm. The floats were constructed of lemons and oranges in the shape of whales, dinosaurs, the Eiffel Tower, airplanes, full-figured women, windmills and so forth. It was neither as rich nor as revealing as Nice’s parade with its flowers and oddballs.

I had decided that if I grew cranky I would simply move on to a better place, but it was not convenient for me to leave Menton. I did see the reality of United Europe at Menton station. Here we were on the border between France and Italy. A group of elderly Italians, none of them younger than seventy or so, were trying to buy cups of coffee and some cookies. The French woman at the counter was snarling at them.

“If you don’t have the money stop wasting my time,” she said.

They did not have French money, they did not speak French. The woman at the counter, a mile or so from Italy, did not speak Italian.

“What is she saying?” a man asked plaintively in Italian.

“She is asking for money.”

“If you want to buy, change your money!” the woman said in French.

“For francs, I think.”

An Italian said to her in Italian, “All we want to buy is coffee. It’s not worth changing money for that.”

Another Italian said to her in Italian, “We will give you a thousand lire apiece. You can keep the change.”

“Don’t you understand me?” the French woman said.

So there was no sale, nor were the Italians able to eat or drink anything; the border between France and Italy was simple to pass through, but the language barrier was insurmountable.

The European Union, seen from the Mediterranean, was full of misunderstandings which made that argument a trifle. People were so confused about EC regulations in the Mediterranean that Euro-rules had become Euro-myths. They were ludicrous, but still they were believed, and they made EC nationals angry. Fishermen will have to wear hair nets, it was said. All fishing trawlers will have to carry a supply of condoms. There would be a ban on curved cucumbers. British oak would no longer be used in furniture because it was too knotty. Donkeys on beaches would have to wear diapers because of droppings. Henceforth, all European Community coffins would have to be waterproof.

There were advantages to being in the European Community, but the Mediterranean was a community, too. At the fruiterer’s in Menton in February there were grapes from Tunisia, strawberries from Huelva in Spain, tomatoes from Morocco and Sicily, mandarin oranges from Sicily, and the North African dates, figs, prunes, nuts. Clementines from Corsica. And locally grown artichokes and lemons, and apples (Bertranne and Granny Smiths) — all from Provence. In addition, there were cheese, sausages, honey and preserves, and ten varieties of olives. Almost the whole of the world’s production of olive oil came from these neighboring Mediterranean countries. The suburban density in Menton and on the Riviera generally was misleading; the shoreline catered to the hordes of tourists and the complacent rich, but just across the coastal highway and railway tracks the land was still profoundly agricultural — both in mood and culture.

Back in Nice, I did my laundry, sitting in “Albertinette,” the launderette, and writing notes. On my right was a housewife folding clothes, on my left an Arab watching his clothes revolve in the washer. With maintenance in mind, I got a haircut afterwards. The woman cutting it was interrupted by a man who came up and began gesticulating and complaining.

He said in French, “Your hair is too long!”

“That’s why I am here,” I said.

“But it’s still too long, the way you have it.”

“You don’t approve of my hair?”

“No. You need to emphasize your body,” he said, becoming passionate, plucking at my hair. “Cut the hair shorter, show the energy of the face. Make it so you can run fingers through it — like this! Get some harmony!”

I was not sure whether he actually believed this or was simply teasing me by pretending to be a stereotypical Frenchman and demonstrating how passionately he could talk about trivialities. On the other hand, maybe he was serious. In any case, I ended up with very short hair.

I had traveled east to Menton; my ferry to Corsica was not leaving for another day and a half; and so I went westward to Antibes on the stopping train — Nice, St.-Laurent-du-Var, Cros-de-Cagnes, Cagnes-sur-Mer, Villeneuve-Loubet, Biot, Antibes.

A lovely blonde French woman got off the train at Antibes, and as she was struggling with a suitcase I offered to help. She gladly accepted, and we were soon walking from the station in Antibes together, her suitcase banging against my leg.

“I am sorry my suitcase is so heavy,” she said.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “I’m fairly strong. Ha-ha!”

“You are so kind.”

The thing weighed about fifty pounds. If I had not offered, how would she have carried it?

“I suppose you have tools in it, or guns of some kind?”

“Cosmetics,” she said.

“That’s all?”

“It is full of cosmetics,” she said. “I have just come from Nice where I was demonstrating them in a store.”

She was that attractive, rather formally dressed and businesslike coquette with mascara and red lips you sometimes see in the aisle of a department store waving a tube of lipstick or else offering to squirt perfume on your wrist.

I put the bag down. I said, “Just resting. Ha-ha!”

“Ha-ha.”

“What about having lunch?” I said.

“Thank you. But I have an appointment.”

“A drink, then? Or a coffee?” I said. “I am a stranger here.”

The word stranger had an effect on her. It is not the way a French traveler would describe himself. He would say, Je ne suis pas d’ici, I am not from here. My way of saying it was odd and existential, something like “I’m a weirdo,” and it did the trick. Moments later we were clinking glasses.

“Menton is for the old,” she said. Her name was Catherine. “So is Nice. St. Tropez is superficial. Money, drugs, rich people, lots of Italians. No culture, no mind at all.”

As a demonstrator of cosmetics, who did nothing but travel from town to town with her leaden suitcase, she knew France very well and the Riviera like the back of her dainty hand.

“And Monaco is just a joke,” she said.

“That’s what I decided, but I thought it was because I am an American.”

“Believe me, it is a joke. I spent five days there and it was like a year. I spend five days everywhere, showing the products. I was recently in St. Malo. Brittany is good, but it’s cold.”

She was about thirty, not married, slightly enigmatic. She said that in spite of its superficiality she liked the south of France.

“Where this wine comes from,” I said.

“Cassis, yes,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Just looking around,” I said. “I was in Antibes about fifteen years ago, visiting a man. I want to see if his apartment is still here. Want to see it?”

Catherine smiled, and it seemed to mean yes, and so we finished our glasses of wine and walked down the street, to where Graham Greene’s old apartment, “La Residence des Fleurs,” stood.

On the way she said, “Some men disapprove of cosmetics.”

“Not me,” I said. “A woman wearing makeup likes to appear in a certain way.” I tried to explain this, but did not have the words.

“Attrayant,” she said.

It sounded right. I said yes, definitely, vowing to look the word up.

“As you do.”

She seemed pleased and embarrassed, and touched my hand. She said, “I know this address.”

“An English writer lived here. Graham Greene.”

“I don’t know the name. What did he write?”

“Novels, stories. Some travel books.”

“A good writer?”

“Very good.”

“I think you are a writer,” she said. “From your questions.”

“Yes. I want to write something about the Mediterranean.”

“You should go to a different part — not here. Nothing to write about here! Ha-ha.”

“Plenty to write about here,” I said.

I was thinking about my previous visit to Antibes. Then, I had not wondered why a millionaire novelist would choose to live in a small apartment three blocks from the harbor, with no sea view at all. But I wondered today. How could Greene have lived so long by the Mediterranean in a flat where all he saw from his windows were other houses? He had lived there more than twenty years, and I found it hard to spend a single afternoon in the place — the foreshore packed with apartment houses, the harbor jammed with yachts and sailboats, no beach to speak of, the little town blocked with traffic. Greene had wanted to avoid paying his British taxes — but what a way to go about it.

“It’s almost time for lunch,” I said.

“But I must go. My friend will be wondering where I am. He can get very excited.”

“He lives in Antibes?”

“No. He is visiting from Paris. He has a dangerous job.” She smiled at me. “A stuntman for films.”

So I ate lunch alone, more fish soup and fruits de mer and wine. I had not been trying to pick her up — I had love in my life. Yet I thought how there was no mistaking this word “stuntman,” which she had said in English. It seemed to me, as she spoke it, to suggest one of the most intimidating professions imaginable. If she had said he was a boxer or a marksman I would not have been more seriously cautioned. You see this lover of hers defying explosions and car crashes and hurtling through flames, enough for anyone’s manhood to shrink to the size of a peanut.

Attrayant means alluring.

After lunch, I hurried out of town, walking to Juan-les-Pins. In 1925, Gerald and Sara Murphy took up residence in their “Villa America,” at this end of Antibes. They were the bright couple who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to create the civilized and generous hosts Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night. He and Zelda supplied the dark side, the most interesting part, hysteria, madness and desperation, in those characters, “in the grip of fashion … while up north the true world thundered by.”

In great contrast to Nice, where the beach is shingly and stony, the beach at Juan-les-Pins is sandy, though it is small and narrow. “The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one,” Fitzgerald writes in his brilliantly observed novel. “In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by the sea-plants through the clear shallows.” To the west, under a reddened sky a complex and lovely view, where Cannes lay under a headland.

“A shameless chocolate-box sunset disfigured the west,” runs a line in The Rock Pool. That, in a single observation, is the English writer’s embarrassment in the face of natural beauty.

Since almost every other writer who has described the Riviera has praised it, it is worth looking at a paragraph of Riviera abuse, that is, a general unfavorable review of the whole Mediterranean Sea. It is rare to find a body of water accused of being so hideous and worthless.

“The intolerable melancholy, the dinginess, the corruption of that tainted inland sea overcame him [Cyril Connolly writes]. He felt the breath of centuries of wickedness and disillusion; how many civilizations had staled on that bright promontory! Sterile Phoenicians, commercial-minded Greeks, destructive Arabs, Catalans, Genoese, hysterical Russians, decayed English, drunken Americans, had mingled with the autochthonous gangsters — everything that was vulgar, acquisitive, piratical, and decadent in capitalism had united there, crooks, gigolos, gold-diggers and captains of industry through twenty-five centuries had sprayed their cupidity and bad taste over it. As the enormous red sun sank in the purple sea (the great jakes, the tideless cloaca of the ancient world) the pathos of accumulated materialism, the Latin hopelessness seemed almost to rise up and hit him. Like Arab music, utterly plaintive, utterly cynical, the waves broke imperceptively over the guano-colored rocks.”

The insults are almost comic — Connolly was actually a sucker for the voluptuousness of the Riviera, and returned to that landscape in one of his other books, The Unquiet Grave, where he wrote of “swifts wheeling round the oleanders … armfuls of carnations on the flower stall … the sea becomes a green gin-fizz of stillness in whose depths a quiver of sprats charges and counter-charges in the pleasure of fishes.”

Under the pines in the Jardin de la Pinede and at the Square F. D. Roosevelt in Juan-les-Pins, there were friendly folks playing boules. Why was this interesting? Because they were all men, they were all polite — they all shook hands before and after a match; and most of all because they seemed the antithesis of what people wrote about Juan-les-Pins. They were obviously hard-up, blue collar, manual workers, fishermen and cabbies and farmers. They completely possessed the center of the square. A number of them were Vietnamese. I watched three Vietnamese trounce three Provençal players — their winning technique lay in lobbing the steel ball in a perfect arc, so that it bombed the opponent’s ball and sent it skidding.

One of the players walked towards me to sit down and smoke, and so I talked to him. But he waved his hands at me, to get me to stop talking.

“It is not necessary regulation to speak to my face in the French,” he said in English. “I can catch all the majority of what you are saying.”

“I was watching you playing boules.”

“The game of bowlings is a genius, and you can perform so many skill-tricks to gain the winnership and shock the opponent, your enemy.”

“Of course.”

“So you see the French games nothing like American — hit people with ball and fight with hands or take — ha! ha! — your gun and gain. What you see is typical French bowlings.”

“Is it a sort of club?”

“Also”—he wasn’t listening to me—“wonderful alimentation in Provence.”

“Where did you learn English?”

“From the war. From people,” he said. “But explain me one thing, why Americans speak English in France the manner they speak in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, everywhere, and so we cannot catch at all. But if I speak French to them the way I speak with my wife, ah, whoof! They will never catch!”

This went on a bit more. Then I walked back to Antibes by way of the lighthouse, the Phare de L’Ilette on the Cap d’Antibes.

The Mediterranean here was an enigma. It was corrupt, it was pure. There were horrible apartments, there were beautiful headlands. There were nasty tycoons, there were friendly folks. The sea was polluted and blue, the sea was a green gin-fizz of stillness. Everything that had been written about the Riviera was true.