The Pillars of Hercules

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?”