The Pillars of Hercules

“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.