The Pillars of Hercules

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.