Antibes and World War II: Two Tales of a City

Posted on August 23, 2012January 31, 2022 by jemma

It’s the perfect summertime view... — It’s the perfect summertime view…

Last week I did something I’ve wanted to do all summer.

There’s a lone bench at the end of l’Ilette peninsula, a small piece of land that juts into the Mediterranean Sea near the end of Antibes’ old rampart walls. The bench faces the bay, looking out onto Old Town, and if you peer over your right shoulder when seated there, the Cap d’Antibes. Smack in the middle of that view of Cap d’Antibes is our home, Bellevue.

Below the bench on l’Ilette peninsula, the sea rolls onto a rocky outcrop that, at least this summer, is home to a wakeboarding shelter. At the base of the peninsula on the right side is the reasonably upscale Le Royal Beach restaurant.

But these things, you would say, are new additions.

...but a darker history lies just beneath the water’s surface. — …but a darker history lies just beneath the water’s surface.

The bench itself is basically two slabs of white cement. Behind it stands a tall shard of limestone with a plaque on it that has gone green, as copper does, with age. What I wanted to do all summer was quite simple: to read a particular book, or at least a section of that book, sitting on that particular bench stationed nearby that particular monument. So there I sat a short while ago, bicycle parked on my right, water bottle on the bench beside me, book in my lap.

Being the height of the August holidays, it was hot. The sun scorched down out of the late morning sky. As I tried to enjoy the experience I’d longed to savour, all I wanted to do was dive down to the Royal Beach restaurant and continue reading under the shade of an umbrella, drink in hand. But I could hardly do that. I was due to meet a friend there for lunch later. And anyway, more importantly, they’d suffered here on l’Ilette peninsula. There was no reason I shouldn’t do so, too.

I leafed through the book to remind myself of its context, squinting through my sunglasses as the sun bounced off its pages. Duel of Wits by Peter Churchill. That I’d even found the text was pretty amazing. I’d originally come across a summarized version in French, buried somewhere in the museum website of Nice’s Musée de la Résistance. The book had been translated from its original English, I later learned, under a wholly different title.

Peter Churchill’s Duel of Wits launched my mad campaign. — Peter Churchill’s *Duel of Wits* launched my mad campaign.

But last winter, as I sat in Toronto researching the details of life in Antibes more than a century ago, one thing led to another. Searching online, I found a secondhand copy of Duel of Wits at a community college somewhere in Indiana. It was pretty beaten up, I understood, but I bought it anyway, for $1.99 plus another $1.99 shipping. When the book arrived in Toronto, I packed it away for summer in France. I already knew the part of the story that interested me most, having read it online. I’d save the full story, in its original (and my original) English, for Antibes.

So there I sat in the mid-August sunshine, on a cement bench with a navy hardback book having the reference number 940.548 CH taped onto the base of its spine. Published in 1955, this copy was marked with stamps for the libraries of Scott Community College and Palmer Junior College. Flipping its pages brought forth a wholly familiar smell from my youth – that musty paper scent you find in old books, and especially in those sorts of books that have oodles of facts to impart to any chance reader. The scent cut straight through the expected smells of the seaside – sea and salt and sweat – and beckoned me into another world.

Churchill had dedicated his work to Arnaud – the code name for the late Captain Alec Rabinowitch, a radio operator – and to his underground contacts who, like him, had died in their pursuits.

On the next page, the author explained that his writings covered his four secret missions into wartime France, which he entered twice by submarine and twice by parachute. The stories began in July 1941 and ended in April 1943. All the stories, Churchill emphasized, were true.

I skipped to the biographical index at the back – anything to avoid the hard work of the inside pages in the blazing sunlight. I recognized some of the names from my wintertime research:

Arnaud, to whom the book was dedicated – captured in 1944, then executed.

Julien (Captain I Newman) – captured and executed.

Louis of Antibes – did I recognize this name? Or was it just the “Antibes” that jumped off the page at me? – He was captured and died on an evacuation march from a concentration camp.

Matthieu (Captain Edward Zeff) – captured and survived.

Taylor, Lt-Cdr “Buck” – commanded his own submarine. Survived.

Vigerie, Baron d’Astier de la – never captured.

These characters were part of the story I’d read several months ago, across a wide ocean, at a time when the temperatures had lingered well below the freezing mark. The story had read like a thriller – except this one had been real.

I remembered the big picture. A British submarine, the H.M.S. Unbroken, had driven into the Baie de la Salis – the very bay beneath me – one night in April 1942. In charge of the operation was the author of this book, Peter Churchill, a member of the British Special Operations Executive. He rowed ashore in the pitch night, sometime around 3 a.m., and mounted the steps that led up to l’Ilette peninsula – landing here, right here, on the ground beneath my bench.

If someone had lingered on the terraces of our Bellevue that night, I’d thought when I first read the story, they could’ve witnessed the landing in the movement of shadows.

Churchill’s mission was to deliver two radio sets and two radio operators (Matthieu and Julien) to the home of Dr Elie Lévy, a kingpin of Antibes’ Résistance movement who lived three blocks up on Avenue Foch. Under the cover of night, Churchill first navigated the streets alone, locating Dr Lévy’s house before returning for his colleagues and supplies. At one later point in his clandestine sweep into Antibes – already scared of the shadows – the British secret agent ran into Dr Lévy himself on the tip of l’Ilette peninsula. What’s more, Dr Lévy had brought with him a man who turned out to be Baron d’Astier de la Vigerie, making a last-minute addition of this diplomat to Churchill’s passenger roster as the submarine departed the bay beneath Bellevue.

That was the story within Duel of Wits that I wanted to read in English, right then, right there on the cement bench at the tip of l’Ilette peninsula, under the burning sun. I heard a couple people approach from behind, stopping to admire the view rather than to pay homage to some timeworn war memorial. A fully formed drop of sweat ran down my right calf and deposited itself on my ankle. Skimming would be the only way. I flipped to the middle of the book and hunched over its musty, yellowed pages. A breeze kicked up. Instant air-conditioning. I was doing the right thing.

Some would say I’ve been behaving a bit oddly all summer. Put one way, I’ve been riding my bike around town with one eye on the road and the other scouring the second-floor facades of buildings where plaques might appear. And if it’s not buildings, I’ve looking at the road signs with more than the necessary curiosity.

I’m sure I’ve looked like a swot. Maybe I am one, as I could’ve been lying on the beach all summer instead. Friends, more kindly, have started calling me a history-buff. Really? History has never, ever been my thing. It was always a jumble of dates and wars and useless information, so I thought – except when my own, paternal grandmother told me stories about the wagon train that went from Pennsylvania to Iowa, carrying our ancestors with it, along with the gold pocket watch that I knew from her display case in the living room and the needlepoint tapestry that hung over her couch.

History was only interesting to me when there was a real story behind it. History was interesting only when it was living.

So that’s what I’ve been recreating over the past year – a living history of Antibes centered around the man, Edouard Muterse, who built our Bellevue all those years ago. Having lived through the destruction of Antibes’ rampart walls, and then the giddy, star-studded rise of Juan-les-Pins, and finally the descent of World War II onto his doorstep, Edouard Muterse has led me through interesting times, to put it mildly.

Midwinter in Toronto, sharing a bowl of steaming latte one morning with my friend Jenny, I tried to summarise what I was working on with my writing project. She’d asked. She listened courteously, seemingly interested, to what was more an essay than a summary. At the end of my speech, she said quite simply, “This project will change you.”

Such a simple but profound statement – and Jenny’s a mere 30-something! When I told Philippe about her comment later that evening, he said, “That’s why she’s the vicar.” Okay, he had a point.

But this work was big and meaningful – to me, at least. And at the end of it all, even if the details interested no one but me, I figured that all this reading of erudite French would at least give my second language a bit of a boost.

So the first thing I did on returning to Antibes this summer was check out that old war monument on the l’Ilette peninsula – the stone I’d glanced at once in the six years we’d been coming here. It had something to do with the heroes of some war, I’d recalled, without having taken in a smidgeon of the detail. Such a distanced stance to war memorials, I believe, is more common among North Americans than Europeans. We’ve never lived through the terrors of a World War on our doorstep.

That June day, a few people had occupied the end of l’Ilette peninsula as I approached on my bike, but I soon realized they were simply admiring the view of Old Antibes. They had no interest in the shard of stone and its green plaque.

That unassuming monument on Antibes’ l’Îlette peninsula really does relate to Peter Churchill’s mission! — That unassuming monument on Antibes’ *l’Îlette* peninsula really does relate to Peter Churchill’s mission!

But I stopped to read. It was true! The monument did – it really did – place the adventure of the H.M.S. Unbroken in these waters that lapped against the shores of our Bellevue! To express my true joy – after all the wintertime research – that this thrilling mission was in some way linked to the story of our home would’ve made me a freak. So I bottled it and took a picture instead.

Next thing, I rode up Avenue Foch, the trunk road out of Antibes that I’d driven and ridden and walked more than a hundred times before. I headed to the third corner on the right, as Peter Churchill had so carefully identified in his book. Would I really find Dr Elie Lévy’s house, a covert headquarters of the Résistance?

Among the modern condo blocks that lined Avenue Foch were two older buildings with signs posted to their exterior walls: Mr Lefebvre, architecte, Antibes, 1933. Churchill and his mates would’ve walked right past them, I thought. And then there, at the corner of the third block, mounted on the façade above what’s now an interior design and lighting shop, was a marble plaque: Here lived Dr. Elie Victor Amedee Lévy, Captain; arrested May 4, 1942; died in deportation to Auschwitz; hero and martyr of the Résistance; died for France.

The story was real.

The memory of Dr. Elie Lévy hovers silently on Avenue Foch.

Shortly thereafter, I hopped on my bike again to check out 10, Boulevard du Cap. During the war this address was a place to avoid – a hotbed of the Résistance, rented out by one André Girard, even if people didn’t generally know his name.

There was no number 10 mounted along Boulevard du Cap. And there was hardly a commemorative plaque. But I’m sure I found that infamous block of apartments as it was the only building between numbers 8 and 12. Interestingly though completely disconnectedly, the building is situated at the corner of Avenue du Bosquet. A center of Antibes’ wartime Résistance had been positioned just over the fence from the villa named Le Bosquet, the home of Edouard Muterse, the man who built Bellevue.

I want to take a photo of the place, but I hesitated. Just up the walkway there was a wooden balcony with draped rope railings. Two sinewy guys with long hair were lazing up there, having a smoke. It was exactly as I’d pictured Mr Girard with his own buddies, planning their next move.

Antibes’ wartime past, and the object of my studies, form an unlikely intersection.

All summer long, Antibes has been revealing herself to me on these two levels, present and past. This latter level is deeper from the surface, but it’s there, only appearing to those who look for it – and know to look for it.

At Antibes’ bus station at the edge of Old Town, Avenue du 24 Août commemorates Antibes’ libération from the occupying forces in 1944. The road – at least from what I’ve read – seems to trace the path of the US soldiers as they approached from Cannes that day. What’s more, Avenue du 24 Août leads directly into Café Pimm’s, the exact spot where (under a different name) the Résistance had congregated in wartime. That morning, 68 years ago almost to this day, a band of armed résistants had marched from that café up Old Town’s central artery, Rue de la République, singing La Marseillaise. It was the day of Libération. They would’ve passed through the plaza that’s now called Place des Martyrs (the one I’ve always referred to – almost blasphemously now – as Place du Carrousel for the merry-go-round that typically occupies our attention), all the way to la mairie, where they demanded – and received – their hand at the local government.

My stitching together of these facts admittedly could be a bit dodgy – I’m hardly writing a doctoral thesis here – but from all my wintertime reading, I’m sure that most of the story is correct.

Over in neighbouring Juan-les-Pins, Boulevard Edouard Baudoin remembers the man who made the place a famous party town back in the 1920s and 30s. Aptly, the boulevard links the town’s casino with the Hôtel Provençal, party headquarters back in its heyday.

On the Cap d’Antibes, Avenue Aimé Bourreau, named for Antibes’ own hyperactive mayor from the 1930s, intersects Avenue Guide, which carries the name of the family who held much of the land on the Cap on which the mayor built.

The Guides, incidentally, were the ancestors of Edouard Muterse, Bellevue’s originator. There’s a whole section of Antibes that contains streets linked to his history – Chemin de St-Jean, Avenue Reibaud, Passage Cauvi and, of course, Avenue Muterse. There’s another area of town – just around the corner from the apartment rented out to the résistant André Girard – that’s all about this notable family, too, where you find Avenue du Bosquet and Chemin de Guérande. But to explain all these nuances and connections would make me a real bore.

And one day this summer when I managed to peel my eyes from all the plaques and street signs, I found bunkers from World War II – and earlier – on the shores of the glamourous Cap d’Antibes. I simply had to know where to look for them.

It should be said that sometimes all these signs can lead you astray, like this one on a disused door under an arch in Old Town Antibes: Watch out! Trapped local.

I’ll stop. These “discoveries” might be interesting only to me. Or perhaps it’s the route of discovery – that “ah-ha!” moment – that makes the connections so intriguing. What I mustn’t become is a history drone when unsuspecting friends show a whiff of interest.

...in some reaches of the glittering Cap d’Antibes. — …in some reaches of the glittering Cap d’Antibes.

As I read on the bench at the tip of l’Ilette peninsula, the mustiness of the yellowed pages filtered into the sea air. The breeze united with my sweat to form a glorious, personal air-conditioning. I still considered the umbrellas and drinks at the Royal Beach restaurant below, but soon I sank into this realm of 70 years past. Yes, as I read the events anew in English, I confirmed that I’d understood the story the first time in French.

But, though the big picture had remained clear, I’d forgotten the detail. It was hardly a matter of language; the truth is, I’d simply forgotten. Like the fact that on that dark night in April 1942, two bicycles had popped up in the street out of nowhere. Policemen doing their rounds. Churchill and his colleagues Mattheu and Julien had hidden automatically.

And while I remembered Churchill’s encounter on the peninsula with Dr Lévy, I’d forgotten the tangential way in which it began. That night, as the small group huddled in the darkness of their clandestine mission, Lévy launched a question for Churchill – before he even bothered to introduce the diplomat who loitered alongside them. Where, the doctor wondered, were the faked baptismal certificates for his two daughters? Churchill had promised the papers so that Lévy, a Jew, could avoid having his house (purchased in his daughters’ names) confiscated by the Germans.

I’d forgotten, too, that this expedition helped Churchill get a promotion. But I did remember all these details now, as I read them again in the blazing sun.

There was a new tidbit that I pulled from the English text, too, quite probably because the Musée de la Resistance’s website had omitted the detail altogether. The success of this particular mission had rested on fundamental knowledge that Churchill had amassed in his earlier years. It was then that he’d lain on Antibes’ sandy beaches. His parents, the British secret agent reflected, had unwittingly financed this segment of his career.

I wondered anew, given our family’s consecutive summers in Antibes, what we were launching in our own seven-year old’s journey.

By then I was officially boiling. My face burned and my water bottle was almost dry. I’d read more later, I told myself – and elsewhere, in conditions where I could actually absorb the information. I hopped on my bike and headed back toward the road – but my retreat was too hasty. Having just sped by the stone monument to the H.M.S. Unbroken’s expedition, I circled back to re-read the green plaque. It was written in both English and French, but as is the case with so many translations, the two halves gave different information.

The monument remembered the landing of the H.M.S. Unbroken submarine, under Captain Peter Churchill, on April 21, 1942 – and commemorated all those who took part in such landing operations.

The wording of the H.M.S. Unbroken monument reveals yet another story. — The wording of the *H.M.S. Unbroken* monument reveals yet another story.

It was presented to Major Camille Rayon (a major Résistance player back in the day) by Lieutenant-Commander C.W. Buck Taylor (who drove the submarine that night) on May 23, 1992.

The last line then caught my eye. It spanned the centerline of the plaque, occupying both the English and French sides, and actually protruded from the face of the stone:

En hommage au Docteur ELIE LEVY (LOUIS)
qui dirigea cette operation, et mourut en Déportation

In tribute to Dr Elie Lévy, code name Louis, who directed this operation and died in deportation.

I had learned the story of the H.M.S. Unbroken through the eyes of Peter Churchill, a British secret service agent. But local history – the collective memory of the people who live here in Antibes– comes through a different lens. To them, the mission was directed by Dr Elie Lévy, an Antibois. He was one of their own. To them, it was Lévy who was the heart of the mission, not Churchill.

History buff or not (and I’ll argue not), I’ll never really get French history. We write our own texts, from the perspectives we know. Still the alternative angles are worthwhile. It is precisely the stories and different voices that keep history alive.

There’s a whole other world here in the Côte d’Azur. It lives invisibly alongside the sandy beaches and sunny cafés. And it’s breathing, shallowly, for those who stop and linger.

Monaco and Taxes: Method or Madness?

Posted on August 16, 2012June 8, 2015 by jemma

Recently I had lunch with a woman who calls a most unusual place “home”: Monaco.

Monaco’s most famous hotel ranks high on the tourist route... (photo: Steve Muntz) — Monaco’s most famous hotel ranks high on the tourist route… (photo: Steve Muntz)

Most people only visit Monaco. They’re daytrippers who sweep through this tiny principality known for luxury and bling. They tick their sightseeing boxes of the Monte Carlo casino, the five-star Hôtel de Paris, and Port Hercule, the megayacht-studded harbor that visitors usually glimpse from above given Monaco’s vertical geography. If there’s time, these same people head into Monaco’s old town to photograph the palace where the Grimaldi dynasty has ruled since the 13th century, and then they stroll through the narrow and supremely clean streets, with the aura of Princess Grace still hovering around certain corners.

That’s what most people do. I know a few others who understand Monaco a bit more intimately. They keep apartments in this two square-kilometer patch of land for tax purposes. Staying in Monaco, no matter the duration, invokes no income taxes.

Not that Monaco is a bad place, deserving only of tax exiles. Situated between the Italian Alps and the Mediterranean Sea, it has a breathtaking landscape that boasts sunny, mild weather practically all year round. It showcases a month-long sporting extravaganza, and festivals that draw international stars and artists. It offers the delights of a philharmonic orchestra, an internationally acclaimed ballet, a modern art museum and an ornate opera house – things normally allocated only to the world’s top cities.

Monaco has all these things crammed into a gleaming jewelry box that’s smaller than New York’s Central Park. The problem with the place is that it hardly seems real. The same tax-savvy folks who own Monégasque apartments also tend to own sprawling residences just over the border in France, where they live more normal lives for the maximum time possible – while studiously counting their days in France in order to avoid its crucifying taxes on residents.

...as does a stroll through the principality’s pristine old town. — …as does a stroll through the principality’s pristine old town.

Other people, of course, set themselves up this way as a sham. They buy a pied-a-terre in Monaco and stay in France fairly full-time hoping not to get caught. It probably works better if you’re not a known entity like the Formula One champ Michael Schumacher, who several years ago was caught on cameras and, long story short, decided to sell out of France and Monaco all together for quieter (tax-wise and otherwise) Switzerland.

Philippe and I ourselves once entertained Monaco as a way to elongate our time in the Côte d’Azur in completely legal fashion. But the idea lasted a fleeting few seconds on our radar, which was the moment I likened the place to a glorified battery chicken coup. Anyway, these days we have a seven-year old who attends school in Toronto. She will keep us honest.

But Pauline, the name I’ll give this woman with whom I was sharing lunch one Saturday afternoon in France’s rosé winemaking region, actually called the gold-leafed poultry pens her home.

I found it fascinating. This was where she had lived for a couple of decades. The fact that she’d originally grown up outside Monaco – of all places near Cardiff in the lush, agricultural surroundings of Wales, where everyone talks to everyone – made the fact even more staggering.

Sailing is a memorable way to approach the few square-kilometers that make up the Principality of Monaco. Photo: Steve Muntz

What’s more, Pauline brought up her children, a girl and a boy, in Monaco. The schools are good, she said, efficient and clean. Her kids get to mix with a huge variety of cultures, and that was mostly a good thing because they had chances she never did.

Surely, I thought, these cross-cultural experiences must’ve populated an impossibly narrow band on the economic rainbow, but she had something of a point.

Actually, on second thought, maybe she had childrearing all worked out. The elevators that link Monaco’s cliff edges would’ve been much easier to navigate with baby prams than the flights of stairs that carve up most of the world’s sidewalks. And there are more police officers per capita in Monaco than in any other country on the planet, and what with all the surveillance cameras, no street is unwatched. Little Johnny would be safe there. What’s more, the queues of traffic that jam Monaco’s streets – some 30,000 people come to work in the principality every day – mean that cars won’t move fast enough to knock Johnny over when he chases his ball from one narrow sidewalk to the other.

Even the taxis are Mercedes. Photo: Steve Muntz

On the other hand, birthdays were sometimes an issue, Pauline admitted. For his 14^th birthday, her son wanted a cake in the shape of a guitar. Pauline made it herself; she’s not a chef, but she worked hard on the project and felt proud of her work. One invitee, a Russian boy who was son of some Vladimir Warbucks, looked at the cake and said, “Oh, what’s so special about that?” And then when the other boys continued overnight for the scheduled sleepover, the Russian punk wasn’t allowed to stay because his bodyguard had to take him home.

Young Warbucksamov was the outlier, Pauline insisted. Her kids have attended amazing bar mitzvahs in Monaco. They’ve enjoyed birthdays on yachts and lunches at the Hôtel de Paris. (“I’ve not had lunch at Hôtel de Paris,” she said.)

And here I’d worried our bar was creeping a smidge too high when we threw Lolo’s last birthday party at her sweaty gymnastics club.

Michael Schumacher was once a Monaco “resident.” Photo: Chris J. Moffat, via Wikimedia Commons

What about gifts? I asked Pauline. What on earth do you buy these kids for birthday gifts?

Don’t even talk to me about gifts! She said. They had to have the right label. Which is a frightening idea if you inhabit a city whose streets are lined with Chanel and Valentino.

A redeeming activity for Pauline’s children was the scouts. In some ways, she said, the scouts were like family to her kids. The organisations weren’t hugely popular in Monaco, but they offered exceptional opportunities. The scouts, for example, got to stand in a prominent position at Monaco’s royal weddings, such as the recent one between Prince Albert and Princess Charlene.

Pauline’s daughter spent the last two years of her schooling in Nice, where she suddenly realized that there was more to the world than the bubble of Monaco. Now she’s 23, attending university in Paris, and in an effort to shun all that’s Monégasque, she has become what Pauline called “semi-grunge”. Her son, 16, still populates the bubble. She said he needs to prick it.

The taxing subject of Monaco cropped up a few days later when Philippe, Lolo and I were invited onboard a megayacht in Antibes’ bay for lunch.

Monaco’s Port Hercule could be the backdrop of your child’s next birthday party. Photo: Steve Muntz — Monaco’s *Port Hercule* could be the backdrop of your child’s next birthday party. Photo: Steve Muntz

(Incidentally, I recognised my own childrearing issues – Monaco or otherwise – shortly after we arrived onboard. Lolo pointed out a squat table in the yacht’s immaculate lounge and announced with the discerning eye of an interior designer, “Look, Mommy! This is stingray skin!”)

Conversation over the yacht’s long, lunch table shifted – as it does so readily in these circles given France’s new political order – onto French tax laws and how to avoid, at all costs, becoming French tax-resident. There was Monaco, of course. And there were gimmicks to avoid being detected in France, such as pay-as-you-go mobile phones, cash rather than credit, and quick jaunts over the border to neighbouring Italy.

But no matter what you do – so went the typical conversation – don’t die in France (particularly as a tax resident). Roughly speaking, the government allocates most of your estate to your children and takes a good whack for its own coffers. If you have no direct offspring, the government takes even more. This division of your estate will occur even if you have other ideas of what you want to do with your wealth, and have executed a will saying so. Even if you want to donate some of your legacy toward more broadly-minded, philanthropic purposes.

As the yacht’s stewardesses hovered politely as we spoke, topping up the wines and offered seconds. Philippe and I described the case of Jimmy Goldsmith, the Anglo-French billionaire financier and tycoon. In his later years he actually represented France as a Member of the European Parliament – but even then, he didn’t want the country to grab his wealth. As we heard it, in the late 1990s, when pancreatic cancer prompted a heart attack and he reckoned his end was near, Goldsmith jumped on a private plane. He went to die in Spain.

Antibes’ Bay de la Salis is a yachtman’s paradise.

All the while at the head of the long table, the yacht owner smiled knowingly. His head nodded as the boat swayed in the bay’s rippling waters. Yes, he himself knew that issue too well from a good decade ago.

His own father, who had been very wealthy, died in France after a battle with cancer. The family called the French morgue – and then promptly hung up the phone. What on earth were they thinking?

Instead, they got the French doctor who’d looked after their father to sign a death certificate saying that he had died in Switzerland. Then they rolled up the corpse in a carpet and carried it downstairs. (In the process, the body slid out onto the dead man’s brother, who let out an enormous shriek. Cue The Three Stooges soundtrack.)

The nurse who’d tended their father for the last year of his life dressed the corpse, and together the group propped him in the back seat of a car, securing him with a seatbelt. The nurse popped a hat on his head. (Cut the stooges. Cue Little Miss Sunshine.)

Around this time the phone rang. No one dared answer – in case it was the morgue ringing back.

This yachting family had hardly suffered life in Monaco’s gilded chicken coup. They hadn’t fiddled with pay-as-you-go mobiles or bundles of cash secreted away in a villa safe. But, as ever, there was a method behind the madness. France’s tax authorities provided the madness, so the grieving family provided the method.

A lead car drove along France’s motorways toward the Swiss border, so the story went. One passenger phoned back to confirm there were no guards. The fully-dressed corpse left France shortly thereafter. Along with it went another wad of wealth that, only a phone call earlier, had been destined for France’s greedy piggybank.

Fast Food – à la Côte d’Azur

Posted on August 9, 2012June 4, 2014 by jemma

Philippe and I went out for pizza the other night with a couple local friends. Walid had been raving for some time about Le Colombier, a restaurant on the beach in neighbouring Juan-les-Pins. Desert-island-meets-Côte d’Azur is the best way to describe the place. A scattering of tables perch on the sandy beach, close to the edge of the lapping Med, while other seats are partially sheltered by an artful, grassy overhang at the back.

The owner of Le Colombier is Walid’s childhood friend. He ordered for Walid on his first visit, late after a night out. Walid’s buddy brought him a piping hot disc of thin crust made from artisanal flour, smeared with fresh tomato sauce and topped with a special blend of cheeses and herbs. Next, his friend grabbed a large knob of black truffle in his palm and began scraping it with a sharp edge, again and again over the pizza, and then again, adding layers of the earthy delicacy to the late night snack.

It was the best pizza Walid had eaten in his life. Now he and his wife Nada were sharing Le Colombier with Philippe and me. Indeed, the owner swung by our table. He, like Walid, was in his 40s. Relaxed cargo shorts and tousled hair matched his tanned face and designer stubble. We should feel at home.

French menus, I find, are often like poetry. Even the humble pizza is somehow elevated à la française. Le Colombier’s menu contained the usual suspects – margarita, vegetarian and the like – but all seemed more gourmet simply because cheese had become fromage and red peppers were poivres rouges. But there were more exotic pizzas at Le Colombier, too, some that pole-vaulted over the standards like:

Diamant Noir (Black Diamond): carpaccio de truffe, sauce tomate, mozzarella, crème de truffle, jambon Serrano – EUR 30,00
Cardinal: homard (lobster), tomate, roquette, œufs de saumon (salmon caviar), beurre maître d’hôtel (fancy butter) – EUR 28,00
La Ritz: Magret fumé (smoked duck), truffe, foie gras, tome de Savoie (fancy cheese), pignons (pine nuts), asperge verte (asparagus), champignons forestiers (fancy mushrooms), mâche (fancy lettuce), œuf de caille (quail egg) – EUR 40,00

Hungry? Impressed, perhaps, by the culinary creativity of French pizza? Or maybe you’re disgusted. In any case, make no mistake that these are personal pizzas – at $36 – $52 a crack. (The vegetarian is a touch more reasonable at $18.)

The most unusual concoction Walid, Nada, Philippe and I try is the namesake (and more reasonably priced) Colombier pizza: chèvre (goat’s cheese), tomate, mozzarella, miel (honey). It’s deliciously sweet and creamy – like a one-pot meal that includes dessert.

But if pizza’s not your bag, what about a burger? The beach restaurant also offers the Burger Rossini, which comes with foie gras poêlé, crème de truffle and frites de papates douces (sweet potato fries) for a sweet EUR 37,00 ($48).

The strangest bit about the whole evening, though, was the thought I had as we retraced our steps along Juan-les-Pins’ seaside promenade. I realized what a bizarre and incredible menu we’d just encountered. It had taken me that long.

France sort of does that to you, or at least the foodie you, with the beauty of its menus. Their poetry swoops you into the fantaisie of French food, and off you go, headlong, nostrils piqued and taste buds bristling, into the delicious creations of France’s famed terroir.

On top of that, the Côte d’Azur – this specific piece of the French terroir – has a way of lulling you into the idea that opulence is normal, or even expected. Where else would you find Wich (pronounced “wish”), a new shop that popped up along a busy Antibes traffic artery proposing le sandwich haute couture?

Love haute couture sandwiches and pizzas, or leave them, there’s a broad development of the French palate that takes root straight back to the baby food stocked on the shelves of French supermarkets. At six months a French baby tries semoule vanilla fleur d’oranger (a starch scented with vanilla and orange tree flower), mousseline ratatouille and petits légumes – colin (pureed vegetables and pollock fish). Eight months brings on mashed lamb (hold the mint sauce), while by 12 months the French baby marches straight into purées of riz – champignons – sole tropicale (rice, mushrooms and sole) and pommes vapeur – épinards – saumon (potatoes, spinach and salmon).

It’s hardly just local brands that promote culinary exploration. Among others, Nestle stocks the baby food shelves in France. In the US that brand is synonymous with chocolate. Instead Nestle promotes baby food in the US under the name Gerber, for whom pasta stars are far more fashionable than anything that swims in the sea.

This book seeks to explain a French child’s life-long love affair with grown-up foods.

The introduction of a French child to each new taste, to paraphrase Pamela Druckerman’s French Children Don’t Throw Food, is like the beginning of a life-long relationship. François, meet fennel. Fennel, this is François. That sort of thing. Whether they get on at the first encounter is a bit of a gamble, but they are reintroduced at regular intervals.

It carries on into the classroom. When my daughter Lolo briefly attended a pre-school in Cagnes-sur-Mer, the town next to Nice, lunch began – even for the two-year olds like her – with three, small leaves of lettuce. My daughter hardly made friends with lettuce when she was two, and I’m not sure the two players have properly shaken hands or air-kissed since.

The next year she moved to a maternelle in Juan-les-Pins. One Monday morning I checked the week’s menu, which was posted on a board in the school courtyard. It was hardly pizza and foot-long hotdogs. I remember seeing beignets de calamar (fried calamari) for lunch one day. Another day required my dictionary: sanglier. Wild boar. After a few months at this maternelle, I was constantly amazed at my three-and-a-half-year old’s vastly expanded palate come dinnertime. I bought into the French way whole-hog (whole-boar?) – until I entertained a second, opposing thought that, hey, the real reason Lolo was piling into garlicky, oniony Boursin cheese smeared on cucumber rounds was hardly that her taste buds were exponentially enhanced. By the time she got home from school, she was starving.

Having schooled in Toronto for the last three years, Lolo’s relationships with Boursin and beignets de calamar have gone cold. Kids are kids in Canada, and the lunchroom menus mostly comply. To quote seven-year-old Claire, Lolo’s Canadian friend who visited Antibes last month, when I offered her a new food for breakfast one morning: “I’ll eat it someday when I get older and my taste buds go away.” The disgusting food in question was a sweet pastry, a pain au raisin, fresh from our local boulangerie.

Claire and her Canadian family eventually left us for Paris, and among the first things Claire, her equally lively twin sister and six-year-old brother saw was someone eating an escargot. “Serious blog material,” their mother wrote to me.

What France does, it seems, no matter the roots of the person, is bring out an interest in food. Most often that interest involves a sense of passion, and usually that passion is a good one. I saw it perfectly in Brad, father of the six- and seven-year-old Canadians, as he stood in Antibes’ bustling Marché Provençal one morning, hunched over a rickety table that offered a couple dozen knobs of black earth, each the size of a child’s fist, for EUR 580 a kilogram. Brad was waving the aroma of the truffles upward toward his nostrils, his eyes closed in pleasure.

La Tonnelle lies on the shore of St Honorat Island, where the house specialty is an enormous spiny lobster, plucked live from the restaurant’s tank and grilled. — *La Tonnelle* lies on the shore of St Honorat Island, where the house specialty is an enormous spiny lobster, plucked live from the restaurant’s tank and grilled.

Philippe says I have to include this other example in this week’s blog, even if it happened to us last summer. There’s an upscale beach restaurant called La Tonnelle on Saint-Honorat, an island in the bay off Cannes. Here, along a peaceful, wooded shoreline, a greedy diner can order the langouste du vivier cuite à la plancha (a spiny lobster, plucked live from the restaurant’s own tank and grilled). Weighing in at a good three pounds each (I’m guessing, as I’ve witnessed two such orders), the diner – who is expected to tackle this beast alone – is further indulged by the resounding clang of the restaurant’s bell. The boxing match begins, Gourmand vs Langouste, or something like that.

What makes the situation even more bizarre is that the restaurant – indeed, the whole of Saint-Honorat – is run by a small band of Cistercian monks. Indeed, the order has been worshipping and tending vineyards on this serene island since the Middle Ages. Tolerating today’s influx of day trippers surely is made easier by the revenue they bring in. At EUR 175,00 a lobster, the monks, too, must be licking their chops.

This Antibes boulangerie got Alain Ducasse’s nod. — This Antibes *boulangerie* got Alain Ducasse’s nod.

One night this summer Philippe and I followed the passion of a three-starred Michelin, French chef. He’s the sort of chap you don’t mind following. Alain Ducasse had named his favourite boulangerie and restaurant in Antibes and this, of course, made the newspapers. The boulangerie was this one, just down the lane from the Marché Provençal. As for his top restaurant pick, my husband and I were slightly stunned that we didn’t know the place after all these years. But carved into the back streets of Antibes’ Old Town, straddling both sides of a narrow one-way passage, is Le Michelangelo Mamo.

The restaurant is, unsurprisingly by its name, Italian. It’s gorgeous inside, housing rustic stone, wooden beams and copper pots juxtaposed by candelabras, white tablecloths and upholstered chairs. Mamo was obviously the guy in red trousers with a mop of white hair, the one who remained highly visible at the steps of the restaurant, chatting with the parade of guests whose cars arrived single-file down the narrow road, each diner more glamourous than the next. The next minute Mamo was hopping across the street to clear a table or refresh its linen. The restaurant should be called Mamo’s Michelangelo.

Philippe and I skipped over the Mamo burger that came with fois gras and truffles. I guess it’s rude not to offer this taste combination in any upscale restaurant along the French Riviera. Our meal of pasta and fish went without any particular surprise or hitch – none of Brad Pitt, Clint Eastwood or Al Pacino walked in, though they all have before – until someone stopped by our table as we were about to leave.

It was Julian, the guy who rents us cars. He’s a charming 30-something, even if you’d hardly guess it by his baggy, off-the-bum jeans and his spectacular, shoulder-to-wrist tattoos laced with English phrases like “One Chance, One Life”.

Julian was hardly the guy I expected to see at Alain Ducasse’s favourite restaurant. He talked to us glowingly about the man Mamo, the succulence of the restaurant’s food, the perfection of its wines, Mamo’s new spot in New York. And, as he unwittingly socked it to us, Julian was shocked this was our first visit chez Mamo. Clearly, it was hardly his.

Christelle confirmed the trend unknowingly as she whisked Philippe and me home from the airport last week. Our favourite female taxi driver – who’s married to Eric, our favourite male one – loves Plage Keller, another upscale beach restaurant on the Cap d’Antibes. But, Christelle said, she and Eric must be careful about the timing of their visits. If they go at Sunday lunchtime, for example, it’s hardly a quiet meal. The couple can’t make it to their table without greeting most every diner in the restaurant.

Food, I think, must reach everyone who even dabbles in France. But with this sort of culinary passion churning through the veins of your typical Frenchman, there are inevitable cultural rifts with the rest of the world.

Jean-Francois, a chap originally from Provence who teaches me French in Toronto, often highlights these differences through language. The word “abattoir“ in the French language, for example, doesn’t have the same negative connotation as the Anglophone “slaughterhouse”. The French aren’t afraid to eat anything, he explained, so “abattoir” simply comes from the verb “abattre”, to cut down or bring down. A professed foodie himself, Jean-Francois also was quick to point out, and with particular glee, that the French have no word for “pet”. (They say un animal domestique or un animal de compagnie.)

Another difference is how we enjoy our food. An Anglophone’s inclination toward gourmandise might manifest itself in guilt or radical food preferences. This is particularly true among Anglophone women, and I admit to ranking among the brigade who asks for salad dressing on the side and omits all red meat. The French, on the other hand, tend to consume everything but in strict, seemingly innate moderation. And on the rare occasion that they go overboard, they make great use of the passive tense. If a plateful of delicious pastries seems to evaporate, they might say, “Elles se mangent tout seules!” They ate themselves!

So we live in hope with our seven-year old and her taste buds. We’re reasonably careful with her diet in Toronto, offering healthy foods within a more limited range. Pop and pre-fab cupcakes in fancy foil packaging never inhabit our shelves. Better if she doesn’t even recognize them.

But kids know things. The day after we arrived in France this summer, Lolo and I went grocery shopping. Her eyes bugged out over orange soda and Oasis, another sugar-injected fruit drink. She needed the brightly decorated, plastic bag full of MOOVs, individually wrapped, long-life brioches with pépites de chocolat. (These, where gorgeous boulangeries populate practically every street corner!) “It’s what we always have on play dates here,” she pleaded.

So. The people teaching my grade-schooler about junk food are the French themselves?

S’mores are an intriguing American idea. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

That said, it goes both ways. Last summer a bunch of French kids gathered around our fire pit and we introduced them to the Girl Scouts’ favourite: S’mores. I’d come as close as I could to creating the original with French products, settling on roasted pink marshmellows mushed between squares of dark chocolate and a couple, graham-cracker-like biscuits de thé. It was hardly health food, but s’mores à la française were delicious, and I figured they could be acceptable in the name of cultural expansion.

During the last school year the mother of Clotilde, Lolo’s French friend, emailed me. There was a cookbook project at school, and Clotilde wanted to include the recipe for s’mores. Could I please share it with her?

I explained my morphed recipe for the Girl Scouts’ finest, also sharing the play-on-words about always wanting “some-more”. What came back in published format was this:

Recette américaine des S’mores
(“j’en veux plus”) (which, if I may interject, is the literal translation of “I want some more”)

8 biscuits “petit-beurre”
4 carrés de chocolat au lait
4 grosses guimauves

Placez un carré de chocolat sur un biscuit.
Mettez une grosse guimauve sur le chocolat.
Placez un autre biscuit sur le dessus en pressant doucement.
Enveloppez le S’mores dans du papier d’aluminium.
Grillez sur le barbecue à temperature moyenne-élevée de 4 à 5 minutes.

The recipe hardly needs translating, except to say that the fourth step involves wrapping the uncooked s’mores in aluminium foil and, step five, grilling them on the barbeque at a medium-high temperature for somewhere between 4 and 5 minutes.

The founder of Girl Scouts would be giggling in her grave.

It was hardly pizza with foie gras or truffles, but Philippe had a different take. “Very upscale s’mores,” he said. “You don’t even have to get dirty. Only the French can do that.”

How a Roman Boat Exacerbates the Lure of the Côte d’Azur

Posted on August 3, 2012June 4, 2014 by jemma

The morning as Philippe and I left Antibes on a mini-holiday of our own, heading up to London for the opening of the Olympic Games, he caught this snip on the TV news: Président Hollande asks his ministers to stay in France for their summer holidays.

Vacation home in Spain? Tough luck. Family in Belgium? See you next year.

I’m betting this new ministerial proviso – which, so a British friend quickly pointed out, is akin to something Mr Cameron said last summer – will put even more bodies on the Côte d’Azur’s bursting roads and beaches this summer. It’s simply the latest shove in a well-established trend.

In early July, before the season truly commenced, the local Nice Matin newspaper predicted a large influx into our region this summer. It’d be the best traffic since the economic crisis of 2008, the paper predicted, even if the average visitor would cut corners on expenses. Fierce competition between Air France and easyJet would bring passengers into Nice Côte d’Azur Airport, which already had broken its daily passenger record. All in, the paper said, we’d see around 11 million visitors in the Côte d’Azur this summer, plus another million passengers from cruise ships.

It’s not just the French ministers who are expected this summer. The whole of France seems to be staying home, avoiding traditional hot spots like Tunisia and Morocco where the heat’s just a little too intense these days. Foreigners, too, are looking for a stable destination. Among them, the Yanks were due to make a strong return, thanks to the wobbliness of the Euro. As for the rich and famous, they never really left. Flying into Nice’s airport one afternoon at the beginning of July, we counted 60 private planes. All of them were parked.

These were the summer tourist forecasts, anyway, and they were easy to understand with a glance at France’s weather forecasts. Of all places in the country, the Côte d’Azur has been the place to be. Most days, particularly early in the season, the map of France was cloaked in black clouds and flaccid temperature readings – everywhere from the English Channel to the Pyrenees’ mountaintops, from the Atlantic coastline to the German borders and the capital of bouillabaisse, Marseilles.

Everywhere, that is, except for the Côte d’Azur. The weather forecaster was probably getting bored. “Beaucoup de soleil sur la Côte d’Azur aujourd’hui.” It was getting rather boring. The poor chap never got any new lines. But while this patch of sun-filled paradise was prominent in France, the size of its real estate was petit – like Florida is to the US, Mallorca to Spain, or Hong Kong to China. The Côte d’Azur is a happy footnote.

All of which makes for a marvelous amount of madness in the area – particularly during the high season and especially on the roads. I’m sure that I’m partially immune to the area’s traffic follies because they mount steadily throughout the summer months, playing some odd, walk-on role at the backdrop of the annual, comic drama.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to prick this CDA bubble and remind me of its absurdity. It happened this year, in spades, when the representatives of the real world who visited our Bellevue came equipped with an army of (their own) highly intelligent and verbal children.

Shortly after entering Côte d’Azur traffic space, seven-year-old Paige shouted from the back seat of her family’s airport rental car, “Cars are coming from everywhere! Is this a country with no rules?”

Paige had just spun through her very first rondpoint. The centrifugal force inside the car was surely something, but it probably formed only the dot on her exclamation point.

The roundabout in question was located only minutes from Nice Côte d’Azur Airport. It handled traffic of swerving tourists as well as impatient locals. Within this semi-managed chaos, motorbikes apply their new road privileges with particular grace and agility, slaloming up the center aisle of two lanes of traffic (headed the same direction) in a mad push to get there first.

The roads still being what they may, I must admit that the Nice Matin’s tourism forecasts don’t feel as if they’re panning out. Traffic is frantic, but a bit less so than I remember it. Beaches are busy but a bit less populated. And surely a reflection of the economy, restaurant reservations are hardly a problem.

Our beloved, high-heeled taxi driver Christelle confirmed this notion at the beginning of August. As she drove Philippe and me home from Nice’s airport – in full 12-centimeter heels (I asked) – she declared that this summer was turning out to be “plutôt calme” – rather calm.

Indeed, a quick flick through the Nice Matin over the week I’ve been away shows that the July tourist numbers in neighbouring Cannes were 5 – 10% off last year. Part of the decline is attributed to an early Ramadan as many wealthy Middle Eastern visitors have cut their holidays short. Meanwhile, for the busy month of August, hotels are recording a 70% reservation rate. The president of the regional tourism committee puts a positive spin on the situation – but then he would. We’re not far off last year’s numbers, he says. The president of the hoteliers’ association calls business “rather satisfying.”

But I hardly hear corks popping either. It’s a far cry from the great expectations for summer 2012. And frankly, at least for our hometown of Antibes-Juan-les-Pins, I must say the modest downturn is a good thing, for one simple reason: We have no parking.

Parking is the reason I’ve barely touched our rental car this summer. Instead, I bike.

It took getting out of the Côte d’Azur last week for me to appreciate how gruesome the situation has become this summer. The first thing I did on stepping out of Heathrow Airport – joining the mobs of elbows and backpacks from the 204 countries represented at the Olympic Games – was marvel at how gloriously generous the parking spaces were at London’s biggest transport hub. And that there were actually spaces available.

A couple Saturdays ago, Philippe, seven-year-old Lolo and I drove into Cannes for a memorial service for a church friend. The parking situation was fraught as the church lay just a couple blocks off the city’s long beaches and its famed Croisette shopping boulevard. But we were lucky. One car, just a block and a half from the church, was pulling out.

After the service, Philippe pointed out two parking police on a smoke break in the shade of the opposite building’s entryway. “Only in France!” he said.

Not even this car, parked in the middle of a Cannes intersection, got a ticket.

Looking right and left, not a single ticket lay on any car’s windscreen. There wasn’t even a ticket smacked on this car parked in the middle of an intersection, just a couple blocks from Cannes’ busiest streets. (Cleverly, the driver had avoided all zebra crossings. Parking on a pedestrian crossing in France is akin to crossing your town’s only boulanger. Life would not be worth living.)

Such is the parking situation in the neighbouring city of Cannes. That there was a ticket on the windscreen of our own car is merely a side note – a 17-Euro fine if we managed to pay it within 45 days. Talk about generous. But then we extrapolated: Parking near the church is free on Sundays. But that was Saturday. The parking police on the smoke break deserved a rest. They’d probably stung half the folks in the church.

And still, Cannes’ parking has nothing on Antibes-Juan-les-Pins’ this summer. In an effort to deal with the cars, our hometown is in the process of tearing up its single-layer parking lots. Oodles of slots are off-limits this summer, sequestered behind the looming walls of construction, obliterated by a massive push to create over 600 new spaces.

At least there’s the promise of new parking in Antibes.

It’s short-term pain for long-term gain, right? Then there was news.

At the edge of Antibes’ Old Town, opposite the busy Port Vauban that berths some of the world’s biggest megayachts, cranes inside the Pré-aux-Pêcheurs parking lot were digging into the earth. A three-level, 377-space, underground parking garage was scheduled for delivery before next summer’s crush.

Then in June, the worksite offered up the skeleton of a wooden boat. This glorious new slice of ancient Roman civilization, nestled in the earth just inches off Antibes’ rampart walls, suddenly became the talk of the town – and of journalists and YouTube and the broader community of history buffs. Nothing like this had ever been found along the Mediterranean coastline except in Marseilles, the home of bouillabaisse and, seemingly, ancient boats.

The Pré-aux-Pêcheurs parking lot gets a makeover. — The *Pré-aux-Pêcheurs* parking lot gets a makeover.

Already measuring 14 meters in length, site archeologists reckoned that the Roman remains could be much bigger. The boat had probably taken 600 trees to build. Questions began to circulate. Who would pay for the boat’s removal and preservation: The city of Antibes? The département of the Alpes-Maritimes? France? The EU? A rumour surfaced that – quelle chance! – another, even older boat might lie beneath the first one!

In a single lurch, Antibes’ parking chaos became more enduring. Indefinite, even.

Luck swung our way. Philippe, Lolo and I managed a personal invitation to view the dig – a good month’s work after all the initial hype. Our friend Jean-Louis, who heads Antibes’ museums, squeezed in a visit for us one lunchtime. We rushed to the site at a moment’s notice. The remaining parking at Port Vauban being chock full (of course), we slid our car into a space that was reservé for some poor boat owner.

Jean-Louis handed us hardhats while an enormous power shovel scooped and swung at the opposite end of the construction site. Soon we were heading into the site floor, treading sand and silt that were a couple thousand years old.

An ancient remnant becomes a new treasure.

Our friend pointed out the flat, white shells that scattered over the surface. He handed one to Lolo, who brought it to me with obvious delight. Jean-Louis had told her she could garder the shell – and she promised me, on cross-examination, that no, he didn’t say regarder. There’s a fine line, linguistically and otherwise, between observing and keeping such an ancient specimen.

We approached a green canopy in the corner of the worksite, right at the foot of Antibes’ old rampart walls. It sheltered the precious maritime remains. We filed underneath, standing single-file on a piece of plywood at the edge of the archeological site.

A wooden ribcage sprawled on the ground before us, denuded of its earthen blanket for the first time in 2,000 years. Once 20 meters in length, the hull of the boat lay tilted and splayed out on the ground, pressed flat by centuries of sand and feet and horses and cars that had occupied the living centuries above it. Bronze nails poked vertically from the boat’s wooden frame. Bits of metal still bound some of the most important joints. A man sprayed the fragile remains with water as it baked under the green tarp.

Is this a temporary home for the city’s latest archeological prize – or a developmental nightmare?

Fancy equipment lined the edges of the dig, like a three-dimensional camera that helps archeologists understand the boat’s original form. Along the sides of the carcass were remnants of terracotta vases and pots, still partially buried in earth. Cutting through the edge of the boat’s frame was a cement mound. Workers had sunk a pylon without realizing.

The ship’s construction was very sophisticated, Jean-Louis explained, with its first-rate materials and interwoven wooden joints. It hardly had been a pleasure boat but a vessel used for Mediterranean commerce. I imagined the ceramic pieces reconfigured, laden with olives and their oil, or maybe water or wine. But this venture into Antibes’ ancient port was obviously the boat’s last.

Sprayed water helps preserve the fragile remains of the Roman boat.

Isabelle, the site’s chief archeologist, joined us later. (The government must employ not only builders on these types of sites but also a whole archeological team.) She explained that this corner of the construction site had been Antibes’ port in 400BC – 600AD. At the current level of the dig, there was a rich history. Shallower layers had carried less interest; the Roman port was choked off by silt during medieval times. It was in these recent months of the modern era, I reflected, that we were digging through the Mediterranean’s history, literally, layer by layer, allowing it to unfold before our eyes.

The next step, we learned, is to remove the Roman boat, piece by piece, from its ancient tomb. Each wooden segment will be saturated with a liquid preservative and frozen. On thawing, the water will evaporate and the wooden structure will be cloaked in the preservative. Or something like that. And then someone will build the boat all over again.

Roman construction had a certain sophistication.

The final product will be too large to occupy Antibes’ nearby Musée d’Archéologie, a couple gorgeous, vaulting chambers carved into Bastion St-André at the base of the old rampart walls. Alternatively, Lolo wondered why the city couldn’t keep the boat where it was and simply build a small museum around the remains. I enjoyed this notion that the boat should retain its two-millennial resting spot, so I launched her idea to Jean-Louis. He laughed. The space was already devoted to parking! The money was spent!

Put another way, modern convenience trumps historic relics, no matter their importance. And given Antibes’ parking situation, I sort of get it.

The Roman boat will take up residence in a former radio station on the edge of town. It’s a large, city building and no one’s using it. The doors should open in three years, give or take.

Antibes’ Archeology Museum is nestled into a stronghold of the city’s old rampart walls.

As for the underground parking garage itself, the cranes are working 24-7. (How many shifts that requires under French labour law, I hardly can calculate.) Completion of the garage is slated for next summer, but the spaces won’t be operable until something like October 2013.

If, just for one more summer, the economy could remain a bit tight? Or less drastically, maybe we could hope for a quick surge in the Euro come next June. Another early Ramadan wouldn’t be a bad thing either, nor would a spot of ministerial holiday leniency or a grand sorting out of the resort towns in North Africa.

Philippe, Lolo and I returned our hardhats and thanked Jean-Louis for organising our visit to the historic find. As we waved goodbye, he scooted off in his car painted with Antibes-Juan-les-Pins’ crest on the front doors.

That car, I realized, had to be the biggest job perk of all. With it, he can park anywhere.

Saint-Cézaire: The Endurance of Yesteryear

Posted on July 24, 2012June 4, 2014 by jemma

I’ve had a suggestion for my blog. I love reader contributions – and what marvelous timing! We’ve been flat out with visitors. Creative time has disappeared as quickly as an entire baguette once gorged by my enormous black Labrador.

Some villages in the Préalpes seem to test the notion of gravity.

Oxana, a good friend from my London banking days, was passing through the Côte d’Azur a couple weeks ago when we squeezed in lunch together. She was staying in one of those perched villages in the distant hills – the so-called Préalpes (the ridges before you officially get into the Alps) that hug the coastal region around our Bellevue. The location prompted Oxana’s question: How do all these pretty, little French villages survive?

It’s hardly an esoteric question for financière-types like Oxana and me, but I’d reckon it might pique the curiosities of non-bankers, too. How many times have I driven through the outskirts of the Côte d’Azur, or through the undulating French countryside, and wondered exactly the same thing!

In short, how do the good folks of sweet French Podunk actually feed themselves?

In fact, just a couple days before I lunched with Oxana, Philippe, Lolo and I had returned from a long weekend in France’s celebrated Loire Valley. As we drove through the rambling countryside strung with bike paths and vineyards, its hills sprinkled with chateaux and picturesque little villages, I’d asked Philippe, half-rhetorically, that very thing: How did communities survive?

The Loire Valley is home of the stately... — The Loire Valley is home of the stately…

I went on to explain. The villages definitely needed a postman or two, and a couple doctors and pharmacists. Ditto a handful of firemen, policemen and a vicar to head the peal of church bells. Depending on the size of the village, there might be positions available at un tabac, une boulangerie, une boucherie and maybe even a full-on grocery store. There’d be des fonctionnaires – of course, there’d be a whole host of government workers – as every tiny town seemed to foot the bill of a stately and prominently situated mairie, complete with geranium-filled window boxes. And being the Loire Valley, there were most definitely vineyards and sprawling fields for vintners and farmers, and hotels and restaurants to support a fluctuating tourist season.

But these job opportunities hardly seemed enough to employ an entire region – all year-round, right? So what did people do? Where did the money come from to keep those pretty little window boxes so pretty?

...as well as the pastoral. — …as well as the pastoral.

Neither Philippe nor I could solve the riddle. Then Oxana posed the same question, this time aimed at the fringe of the Côte d’Azur. The Question grew especially curious here in the Préalpes of the French Riviera, where there’s hardly the breath of open field to grow a head of lettuce!

Maybe there are lots of retirees, Oxana suggested.

Yes. But still.

I posed Oxana’s Question to my English entrepreneur friend who has lived and worked in the Côte d’Azur for six years. She’s so involved in the community that if any outsider could answer this question about France, I figured it’d have to be her. One time, in fact, I’d asked her whether she considered herself partially French these days. No, she said, without even a second thought. She was totally English. She spoke in English and worked with Anglophones. Then she paused. She was a bit French, after all, but only when she argued. She could argue as well as the French.

Anyway, this very English friend who’s truly invested in France reminded me how popular the fonctionnaire/governmental profession is in l’Hexagone. It employs a whopping 50%-or-so of the working population. Indeed, an article in The Economist during the run-up to France’s springtime elections cited a similar statistic: The French state, at 56% of GDP, is the largest of any euro country. Someone does, indeed, populate those beautiful mairies.

But Oxana’s Question stayed with me. A few days after our lunch, Philippe, Lolo and I decide to be proper tourists ourselves, as we occasionally do. It’s like anywhere. If you simply live in a place, you miss some star attractions. In the dozen years I lived in London, I spent precisely 45 minutes in the British Museum.

Cabris is one of these perched villages in the Préalpes.

That Saturday morning our family decides to take a drive to the Grottes de Saint-Cézaire. We maneuver the congested Côte d’Azur highway from Antibes and Cannes, leaving the sparkling Mediterranean behind us as we cut inland toward Grasse, and then westward into the Préalpes. A winding road traces through the quaint, perched villages of Cabris, Spéracèdes and Le Tignet.

The Grottes de Saint-Cézaire are a wonder of stalactites and stalagmites, iron-imbued rock and pure calcite stone. This series of vertically linked caves plunge 100 meters into the earth (40 of which are on show), where temperatures remain cool and the atmosphere calm all year long, no matter what madness unfurls on the land up above. Indeed, the wiry speleologist who shows us around says he prefers inhabiting this quiet, underground refuge. It’s far preferable to the sprawl and soaring temperatures of the real world – whether that world is the crazy Côte d’Azur or even these calmer parts.

And what luck! We visit the grottes on one of the last days of the low season; this period runs for the bulk of the year when the caves host about 100 visitors a day. The following week, and for the ensuing four or five, the attraction is expected to receive more like 1,000 tourists each day. (A quick calculation from the banker types: Nearly 90% of the Grottes de Saint-Cézaire’s annual revenues come from that handful of high-season weeks every summer.)

Exiting the grottes, we continue along the twisting road into the caves’ namesake village, Saint-Cézaire-sur-Siagne. Another of the area’s walled towns, it perches on the edge of a cliff. The valley below marks the boundary between two French départements: the Alpes-Maritimes (home to our Antibes and the rest of the Riviera) and the more forested, pastoral Var. Put very simply (as the Var does include the likes of throbbing St Tropez), going from one département to the other is basically akin to moving from a line of Coppertone-impregnated beaches to the sun-soaked fields and vineyards that produce France’s abundance of cut flowers and rosé wine.

The St Cezaire Caves are a stunning, subterranean monument of stalactites and stalagmites.

Being past midday, Saint-Cézaire’s Saturday market is packing up in the main square outside the old rampart walls. Vendors move their produce, pottery, clothing and jewelry from fold-up display tables, piece by piece, back into the crates and wooden boxes from which they’d come.

Philippe tries to purchase a few apples, but the vendor cannot make the sale. He already cleared the day’s revenues at the mairie – so he offers us three apples, one each, as a gift. Of course we protest. “C’est normal,” he says kindly but insistently.

It’s certainly not normal to me. Apples in hand, we enter the 12^th-century gate of Saint-Cézaire’s rampart walls and nose around the narrow alleys within the limestone village. They offer up darling things that you’d expect to see in an archaic town: a 14^th-century chapel-turned-private residence, a 12^th-century feudal castle-turned-mairie (what else!), and an awe-inspiring, panoramic view. We may not be far from Bellevue as the seagull flies, but the feverish world of the Côte d’Azur feels utterly foreign.

Philippe, Lolo and I return to the large, cobbled square outside the ramparts for a spot of lunch. It’s evident that here is where the population congregates and lives. There’s a pharmacie and a branch of La Poste. Tucked into some corner must be a boulangerie; no living, breathing town in France could survive without one. And there’s a handful of cafes and bistros, their tables flung out onto the square and occupied by chatting clienteles.

From St-Cézaire-sur-Siagne you can peer into the neighbouring Var.

Brasserie La Fontaine looks the most inviting. Its decor is sleeker than it really needs to be in this setting, but the view from my seat – a magenta-coloured mesh chair set in a white metal frame – is exactly what I’d hoped to find on my family’s day out in the French hillside. Beside our table is an enormous platane tree, its roots probing beneath the rumpled cobblestones of the square. Next to it is the storied Fontaine aux Mulets, or Mules’ Fountain, that dates to a comparably recent 1868. Church bells chime intermittently. Nearby a young man sweeps up after the Saturday market with a stick broom.

Philippe reads one of the brasserie’s posters as we wait for our meal. Morning coffee, orange juice and a pain au chocolate – all for a two-Euro coin. “Try finding that in the Côte d’Azur,” he says.

We’re not that far away from the French Riviera, in all truthfulness, but it feels as if we’ve landed in another era – when people led their mules to the fountain and swept with stick brooms. When things could cost a single coin – if the vendor didn’t insist on giving them to you for free.

My lunch plate even harks back to the olden days. The brasserie’s chèvre salad is called l’aumônière, a sweet term for the church’s purse. On a bed of greens lies a thick slice of velvety goat’s cheese, mingled with honey and sprinkled with a generous dash of pepper. It’s wrapped in a crisped crêpe that’s cinched at the top like a purse of alms, similar to one that might have dangled from the belt of some medieval resident of this walled village.

Our lunch in Saint-Cézaire is turning out to be too postcard perfect not to ask Oxana’s Question. A woman comes to our table to check that everything’s fine. She’s a pretty middle age, her dark hair falling fully around slender shoulders. I guess she’s the owner of this café, possibly having taken the business on from her parents. That’s how things seem to go anyway.

Philippe and I are très complimentary. “Yes, the food is delicieux, merci! But une petite question: What do people DO around here for work?”

We flesh out The Question – the enduring puzzle we encounter whenever we travel into small, far-flung French villages that still luxuriate in their own post offices, stunning mairies, tidy market squares and plethora of adorable cafes. What’s more, all this is available here in Saint-Cézaire, where for a good 10 months of the year the biggest local attraction brings in a miniscule 10% of the annual tourist traffic!

The dark-haired woman is dumbfounded. She’s wondering what planet we’re from. “People work in factories,” she stumbles.

She’s searching for words. You can tell she wants to add, “Isn’t that obvious, you numbskull…?”

“And there are visitors here all year round! And this is the banlieue of Grasse and Cannes! People here work in Grasse and Cannes – even in Nice!”

At the mention of Nice, the café owner stretches her hand, almost in supplication, toward a woman seated at the table behind me. The customer is nodding profusely, her blonde ponytail bobbing in unison. “Ben oui, à Nice!” she says. She, too, looks a little shocked.

Philippe and I are getting educated. People travel out of Saint-Cézaire to work in these bigger cities! It takes only (an unbelievably short) 30 minutes to reach Cannes! And then these commuters return home at night and live here in Saint-Cézaire – a place where “it’s like we’re always on holiday!”

Okay, the café owner does have a point. And I’m hardly a speleologist.

This may not be statistical proof to answer Oxana’s Question, but I’m definitely getting a flavor of the right response. As so often is the case in France, the solution to any equation involves the style de vie – that famous and intoxicating obsession with lifestyle.

“Does everyone ask you this question?” I say to the pretty, dark-haired woman. The “everyone” is a slip of the tongue, but somehow I’m hoping that Philippe and I aren’t entirely alone, or offensive, in bringing this hard-working café owner into our fanciful debate on village economics.

“Non,” the owner says. In fact, she tells us, precisely no one has asked such a (brazen) question. Then she pauses and looks at us carefully, almost suspiciously. “Are you from the Côte d’Azur?”

We nod hesitantly. Yes, we have, indeed, traveled here from that distant land.

French Taxes: Hardly Exceptionnelle

Posted on July 12, 2012June 4, 2014 by jemma

A few days ago I had an early morning phone call from a woman with a most courteous and congenial voice. She wanted to set up a rendez-vous. She said she had good news.

Even the news of good news from this woman was especially good. Why? Because the gentle voice belonged to none other than our French accountant.

News about France and its exploding tax regime forms either old or continually more depressing headlines these days. Income tax rates under the new, Socialist Président Hollande are surging up to 75%, friends keep telling us – as if we hadn’t heard. In fact one calculation made out that all in, once you count the barrage of social charges, France’s top rate will be more like 90%.

Rather precipitously, I said to my husband Philippe that whatever our accountant’s good news might be, we should bank it for next year.

Meanwhile, just to keep France’s economic forecast on a knife’s edge, in his early days as président, Mr Hollande has increased the minimum wage, introduced rent controls and is levying more taxes on big companies and banks. There was talk about amending the already hefty contribution à l’audiovisuel public to include not just the number of TVs in each household but also the number of computers. (Logic, if there is one: People check news on their computers.) At least this flagrant bid to stymie the French economy has failed at the last minute.

Mr Hollande has aimed these taxes at his own countrymen. As for the rest of us lot, he sought to impose an excruciating tax on foreigners who owned homes in France. Fortunately the EU courts have kept him on the right side of the law.

Life here in the Côte d’Azur often seems to run contrary to the convictions of the rest of the country, most famously in this area’s proportion of sunshine, and this year’s presidential election was no different. Voters in the département of the Alpes-Maritimes’ gave the more business-friendly Mr Sarkozy 64% of their votes, leaving only 36% to Mr Hollande. The mid-June legislative elections lurched even further to the right. Precisely none of the nine députés elected by this département hailed from Mr Hollande’s Parti Socialiste – or from any left-leaning party, for that matter.

In a country famous for its demonstrations but which finds all talk about money vulgar, one lesson Philippe and I have learned during our first few weeks back at Bellevue is this: If you’re fortunate enough to have it, don’t flaunt it. One friend, a rather glamorous French woman living in nearby Vallauris, was summoned to court a few months ago over a traffic accident that happened two years ago and that already had been consigned to the insurers’ completed files. The judge was interested in the fact that our friend drove an Audi cabriolet. Then he asked this ghastly question: How much does your husband make? My friend told him that her family does okay. She was slapped with a EUR 1,000 fine and lost her license for six months.

Steps from the city’s mairie, Antibes’ Rue Clémenceau is home to a string of shops and cafés. — Steps from the city’s *mairie*, Antibes’ *Rue Clémenceau* is home to a string of shops and cafés.

No matter the economic climate, few things are closer to French hearts, especially female French hearts, than essential esthetic services. On a recent trip to The Cutting Shop in Old Town Antibes, I discussed some rather delicate issues with my curly-haired technician. The salon typically has a long busy season, she said, with its location on a busy street near the world-class Port Vauban (and surely, if I can suggest it, because of its English name that must attract this yachtie clientele). But this year, she said, the first three months of The Cutting Shop’s busy season have been completely lifeless. Indeed, I then noticed a bunch of staff standing around in full whites with nothing to do. There’s no pedestrian traffic, she said, even though her friend at Port Vauban’s capitainerie says the docks are jam-packed!

(I find out separately that Port Vauban is, indeed, chockablock but for a less propitious reason: Many yachts are in dock with a single caretaker on board. The owners are going nowhere. That said, my source told me, there are early signs of improvement. The five-day superyacht charter (which used to last at least a full week) is coming into fashion again, with a subsequent couple-week villa rental. But even this luxury is a far cry from the heydays of five-week superyacht charters alongside concurrent villa lets that allowed the fortunate very-few to flit between two seven-star accommodations at the drop of a hat. Or the spin of the helicopter’s blades, as it were.)

So as the salon professionals in white stood around waiting, hoping, my technician explained that clients are only taking the necessary services. “L’épilation devient le luxe,” she said. Waxing, something that I thought was an out-and-out French necessity, is becoming a luxury. This news bulletin arrived two years after I was literally scolded in Antibes using a razor – lambasted to the core for causing two hairs to pop up where a single follicle should lie! Now I was learning that the French continue their épilations, but they alternate methods. One wax, one shave. One wax, one shave.

Indeed, my first stop after The Cutting Shop that day was the pharmacy. Before I even collected a shopping basket, I ran into a large, promotional stand for Veet, cire professionelle. Professional wax, sold on the cheap at Schlecker.

Still, life goes on in France. An English entrepreneur friend put it well. Despite the fact that she has lived in Antibes for something like six years, she describes herself as wholly English: an English person working in the English language in an English world that happens to be in France.

“I’m constantly amazed at how the French can do with so little,” she told me, making reference to some absurdly low monthly take-home pay statistic of the average French family. My very English friend was identifying the French ability to do something that we typically think is very British: To Carry On.

Philippe’s and my favourite produce seller at the bustling Marché Gambetta in nearby Cannes is case in point. Business this past winter was down 20% year-on-year, he told us while transferring our artichokes and carrots into a bag, but this June was his best ever. Then he paused from his work. Never mind all that, he said. The quality of life is excellent here in France. The newspapers just blow up the idea of a crisis.

The rendez-vous with our French accountant comes about just a few days after her phone call that was full of frankincense, myrrh and good news.

The good news? You’ve got it. Our taxes have fallen this year!

Whatever the gripes about France’s economic mess and the increasing sting imposed on French (and foreign) taxpayers, the wealth tax (or more precisely the ISF, l’Impôt de Solidarité sur la Fortune) that we owe to the French coffers for 2012 will only be a smidge more than half of what we paid last year. A smidge more than half!

I should point out that this payment is the largest component of the three taxes we pay to the French taxman as owners of a property here. The other two are les taxes foncières (for real estate) and the above-mentioned contribution à l’audiovisuel public, neither of which is insignificant. Still, things are looking better this year. We can thank Mr Sarkozy for the gesture.

But there’s more. “Je vous donne des bonnes nouvelles mais avec un bémol,” our accountant says. She’s giving us good news but with un bémol, literally a “flat” notation on a musical note. I get it: a hitch.

Her bémol is this: Watch out for next year. Président Hollande can change the wealth tax. Okay, no surprises there. But, she warns, he also can change it retrospectively. What’s more, French administrations actually do change tax rates retrospectively.

The accountant shares a joke circulating on French emails at the moment. The title:

The unofficial national symbol has seen better days.

Image du contribuable français en 2012

Picture of the French taxpayer in 2012

Beneath these words is a photo of a rooster, France’s unofficial national symbol. He’s trying to strut around ceremoniously, but it looks like his entire being has been mangled by the whirling blades of a lawnmower.

Beneath this poor excuse for a rooster is a caption: Le plus important, quand le fisc t’a plumé(e), c’est de toujours garder la tête haute! The most important thing when the tax authorities pluck you is to keep your head high!

In short, Carry On.

Needless to say, the notion of the plucked rooster has rendered Antibes’ property market lifeless. Offers are typically coming in 30-40% below listing prices. It seems that purchasers are willing to shoulder the economic uncertainties for a hefty discount. Homeowners almost certainly decline their offers. The future is unknown, so why sell out at such a discount?

Antibes’ Picasso Museum is situated within a 14th–century Grimaldi family château. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Taking a direct hit, too, are Antibes’ museums, the most popular of which is the recently renovated Musée Picasso, gorgeously situated inside a former, 14^th-century Grimaldi family château. Visitor numbers are up this year, but people are buying fewer souvenirs. Where they formerly bought a commemorative book, they now buy a postcard. Worse, the museum’s director told Philippe, his budget – contributed, of course, by the city of Antibes – has been hacked by 40% this year. Laying off French workers is next-to-impossible, so it’s his operating budget that has to take the full, body impact. Expenditures on exhibits, renovation and maintenance will get the brunt of it.

Case in point: I couldn’t figure out this season’s opening hours for Antibes’ Musée de la Tour. Philippe called his museum director friend. His response was particularly telling. “Le Musée de la Tour est un musée fantôme!” No one’s there anymore. Still, fingers crossed, the director may be able to get me inside.

Of course, it’s not all bad news around here. Five hundred jobs were created in Antibes-Juan-les-Pins this summer to accommodate tourism. More anecdotally Philippe and I were thrilled to discover a packed dining room a couple weeks ago at Cafetière Fêlée, one of our favourite restaurants in Antibes. Julian, the young chef, started his business three years ago. We’ve visited him ever since, often knocking around in his virtually vacant, stone dining room while feasting on his exquisite Asian-French fusion creations. Three years, he declared back then, was what he needed. Et voilà, this summer – despite any inkling of une crise économique – Julian has hired a second server, he’s axed his cost-cutting prix fixe menu, and Cafetière Fêlée’s future seems more assured than ever.

Isn’t this the way to the Musée de la Tour? — Isn’t this the way to the *Musée de la Tour*?

And there’s always système D (système débrouiller, discussed in last week’s post). Another Antibes-based friend runs a suite of wellness services, from acupuncture and osteopathy to meditation and neonatal support. But rather than employ everyone under one big, happy, corporate umbrella, she rents out her cluster of simple rooms by time slots and handles all the group’s publicity. The care providers, meanwhile, are self-employed. She manages a unique and award-winning business in a totally legal fashion that somehow manages to circumvent the most suffocating French laws on hiring, firing and taxation.

Still some folks – at least those in a position to do so, and therefore with reason to do so – have made their exit strategies. Our dear family doctor in Antibes declares that nothing good can come from the new Socialist government. He’s building a home in Ho Chi Minh City – his wife is Vietnamese – and already frequents his condo in lowly-taxed Hong Kong.

Lucile, our pilates instructor, agrees that business owners like herself don’t count for anything in France anymore. Fortunately her business hasn’t changed with the new government – except in a minor way. Two clients – both French women of significant wealth – said that if Mr Hollande was elected Président, they’d leave the country. Lucile had thought it was simply talk, but now one of the women lives in Switzerland. The other moved to Belgium.

The accountant’s bémol arrives just this morning. The same congenial voice that once delivered good news now resurfaces on the end of the telephone line as we’re eating breakfast.

Guess what, she says. Mr Hollande and his fine new fleet of fonctionnaires have just changed the tax rates!

The new government has changed the name of our amended wealth tax, too. It’s called une contribution exceptionnelle – like it’s a one-off. The extra money is due in November. “But half of France’s taxes are exceptionnelle, “ the gentle voice warns.

As for our accountant herself, she will officially retire next July at the age of 55.

Well, not exactly officially. More precisely, she will be fired. It’s all pre-arranged with her boss. But seeing that firing anyone is a sticky business in France, the company will pay her a nice wad. And there will be unemployment insurance as well, of course. Our accountant reckons she has paid for unemployment insurance for the past 35 years. She might as well get some of it back.

She adds, feigning confidence, that she’s going to look really hard for another job next year, but at her age….

Anyway, tallying up all the figures she will maintain her spending power. Her mortgage is paid, and she has some savings. Her income stream from 2013 onward, when the rest of France will struggle under the creativity of Mr Hollande and his regime, will flow from a tidy combination of her severance package, the unemployment insurance, a nip into her savings – and the fact that she will be paying no taxes.

And this – a clarion call that could easily echo throughout the cities and villages of the increasingly burdened Hexagone – is how you deal with the French economy.

A Quebecker’s Guide to the Côte d’Azur

Posted on July 5, 2012June 4, 2014 by jemma

Our cappuccino maker needs maintenance.

Let me put this another way: My oxygen tank is in the red and someone’s building an enormous bonfire on the beach outside Bellevue. Using young, moist wood.

In good times our beautiful, chrome Cimbali graces the kitchen countertop at Bellevue. Its Italian splendor would suit the smart cafés of Rome and Cannes; ours simply would be the more petite version.

This Malongo warehouse on the outskirts of Nice is my emergency room.

Care and maintenance of such a dazzler requires a specialist, which in this case is the Malongo warehouse where we bought the machine some years ago. The vast, nondescript, rectangular box of a building lies just north of Nice – a good 45 minutes’ drive from Bellevue assuming no beachside pile-ups, swerving tourists with Belgian plates, or mobile snack cabins lumbering along the road.

Philippe and I have various commitments on the Monday of the breakdown, so the earliest our Cimbali can arrive at the shop is the late afternoon. Philippe confirms the hours on the phone.

The shop is open 8:30 – 12 and 1:30 – 4:30, a woman replies. (That it’s open at all on a Monday in this part of the world is, frankly, commendable.)

Philippe says that good, he can make it by 4:30.

To be sure, the woman responds, he’d better be there by 4.

4 or 4:30? Philippe asks.

“C’est compliqué ici,” the woman says. It’s complicated here. (This response simply in asking the opening hours.) Philippe should arrive by 4:00.

We have lunch guests that linger that afternoon but, duly warned by the Malongo receptionist and his caffeine-anemic wife, Philippe makes a hasty exit from the lunch table at 3:20. He screams down the motorway toward the north of Nice, hoping beyond all hopes that he will encounter no Belgian plates and make the opaque 4:00 deadline.

Employees are streaming out of the immense Malongo warehouse when Philippe arrives. Where’s service? He yells out the car window to one of the skivers.

We’re closed.

He tries another tack. Who’s the head of service?

A guy with a beard.

Philippe pulls his car further into the lot and heads through a towering garage door into the service section of the warehouse. He spies a man with a closely cropped, white beard. Are you in charge of service?

The bearded man asks what he can do. Philippe says he’s looking for service for our Cimbali that we bought at his shop about five years ago.

The guy with the beard looks at his watch. I imagine the frown that flits across his lips, the wrinkles that surface horizontally along his forehead, the shrug that emerges across his tired shoulders: the French gesture that what you are asking is simply a step too far. No, your request is utterly preposterous.

The service chief taps his wristwatch. It’s 4:02, he says. We’re closed.

Philippe’s heart sinks. Worse, my husband learns that the person in charge of this sort of service is out until Wednesday.

But, obviously, this is an emergency. Philippe decides to pull out the big guns. Just as he did a couple weeks ago at our favourite Cannes beach restaurant when the place was unexpectedly booked up (in last week’s blog), my husband lathers up his best Quebecois. The gritty form of French is chock full of ancient terms and thick consonant sounds that haven’t fashionably lost their edges. Philippe’s hoping his “we’re-long-lost-cousins” routine works another time.

Mais, Monsieur, I came all the way here from Canada to get my machine serviced! Philippe says it with dramatic flourish worthy of the Cannes Film Festival, were it set in Nice.

The bearded guy considers the Quebecker in front of him. He’s mildly entertained. A bit intrigued even. What’s the problem? he asks the tardy customer. The after-hours service door has opened, just a crack.

C’est l’enfer! Philippe says. Eyes wide, arms flapping like a good, espresso-drinking Italian, my husband is saying our Cimbali is like hell. La vapeur hisse de partout! With grand, Italian-Quebecois gestures, Philippe’s creating a volcano of steam that hisses and spurts out everywhere.

Now three juniors crowd around the bearded head of service. They’re smiling. They’re all smiling, in fact! They’re clearly lapping up the show.

The juniors begin to offer suggestions about what could be wrong with our luscious Cimbali. In the end, the Malongo service shop agrees to keep our machine and will ring back on Wednesday.

Mission completion, part one. In cosmopolitan and culturally mixed places like London or New York or Dubai or even the Côte d’Azur, I am amazed at how much homegrown tradition still envelops our characters, whether overtly or less so. Several weeks ago a friend wanted to send me a DVD here in France. Was our player Zone 1 or Zone 2? Did it go by North American or European standards? Come to think of it, the email said, was I – me personally – Zone 1 or Zone 2 these days?

It’s true, I’ve moved around a bit, but my immediate response is one that I stick by today. I’m European in North America, and North American in Europe. I don’t exactly conform anywhere. Apparently most people with cross-border lives respond in a similar way.

When I asked my seven-year-old daughter, who’s age-appropriately fluent in French, the same question, she had an immediate response, too: I feel French in France and Canadian in Canada. (I don’t remember this, but she probably rolled her eyes at the same time, wondering how on earth I could utter such a daft question.) Kids are the perfect chameleons.

But when the two “countries” involved in this line of interrogation are France and Quebec, the line grows murkier. Philippe can whip out beautifully embellished French that befits graduates of les grandes écoles. Spicing his language up with the angular sounds and old-fashioned turns of his native Quebecois, though, has its merits, too. My husband fits in when it suits.

It could be, too, that growing up in Quebec nurtured Philippe’s ability to absorb the Frenchman’s facility with système D. Short for “système débrouiller”, where se débrouiller means to manage (or get around) things, système D is often the best way to get things done in a world where nothing gets done.

On Wednesday, it’s Philippe who rings back the Malongo service shop. Indeed, the specialist is in but he’s trop chargé. He can’t even take a look at our Cimbali until late next week. Which is hardly acceptable around here because that beach bonfire is brewing, and there’s the forecast of un sirocco.

Okay, the sirocco isn’t really in the Côte d’Azur’s weather forecast, but this windstorm that blows hot, sand-filled air to the area from the Sahara Desert seems an appropriate way to gauge the rising temperature within our caffeine-starved household. And that same sirocco would thrust billowing smoke from the hypothetical beach bonfire into an oxygen-depleting Bellevue.

Guests (and regulars) seem to adore our coffees. Photo: Steve Muntz

Somehow these two men – the Cimbali service specialist and my Quebecois husband – start yarning on the telephone about les grands espaces in Quebec, the lovely open spaces of this piece of France flung abroad. Speaking of, Philippe slips in as his native aptitude for système D locks in, we have visitors coming from Quebec on Thursday and Friday next week – which is why it’d be really nice to have our Cimbali back where it belongs.

My husband hardly demands anything of the service specialist. He simply offers a suggestion that would be mutually beneficial to all parties involved.

Oh, Monsieur! The specialist says down the line. Now I understand! Would Wednesday next week be okay?

Philippe tells me about this telephone exchange with obvious delight. I’m thrilled, too, as the Queen of the Kitchen will soon return.

Then a shadow crosses my face. Who’s coming from Quebec next week? Who’s rocking up from my husband’s homeland to stay untold nights at Bellevue – that he neglected to tell me about?

Philippe smiles. He’s delighted with his response – and the way he has fooled me, too: No one!

Central Casting: Characters of the Côte d’Azur

Posted on June 28, 2012June 4, 2014 by jemma

Sunday afternoon started out innocently enough. Philippe, Lolo and I have been to church in Cannes – church, I say – and we are chatting with our good friend Walid after the service. We ask about a lunch spot.

L’Écrin, he recommends. Walid has lived in the Côte d’Azur forever and seems to know everyone. Indeed, he knows the owner of this intimate beach restaurant that is just a few minutes’ drive away. Walid rings to make a reservation for three. He insists on a good table.

Our journey takes us down Cannes’ storied seaside boulevard, La Croisette, where the Cannes Film Festival spills onto the streets in May in its most fashionable and frolicking manner. In today’s sultry heat, the route is lined with a handful of art stalls and people who move slowly. We merge right onto a peninsula that – all Anglo-friendly-like – is called Palm Beach. The soft sea air drifts into my open passenger window as Lolo, seated in her car seat directly behind me, begs for more stories about her antics as a baby.

Our seven-year old often asks about old memories when we’re in France. It was here in the Côte d’Azur that she ate her first ice cream, here that she took her first steps, and here that she lost her first tooth. (Unfortunately her firsts occurred in that very order.) Revisiting her earliest haunts resurrects these memories. Today’s story is a favourite – one that I already recited to her a few days ago – when, aged three, Lolo sat on the church’s front steps during the children’s talk. Asked what gifts her (earthly) father gave to her, she said quite simply, “Jewels.” The congregation tittered as they dreamt of sapphires and rubies – this is the Côte d’Azur, after all – but Lolo simply was describing the pink and purple plastic crystals that mounted in a glass jar at home for good behaviour. Twenty jewels meant a trip to the toy store.

Traffic comes to a standstill along the Palm Beach peninsula, and I’m suddenly aware of a woman standing at the curb. She’s striking with ebony skin, a pretty face and long, straight, black hair. Her strappy, full-length beach dress is filled quite amply at the top. And she’s staring right back at me through the open car window. I stop the story about the jewels.

The striking woman is suddenly talking to me from the curb. Does she need help? She’s saying something about – did she say something about her breast?

Yes, yes, I think she did. The busty woman is touching one of her ample firearms. She’s saying something – something in English, no less – about my husband touching her breast….

I become more aware of my husband sitting quietly next to me, trying to manage the traffic. And I become keenly aware of Lolo, my seven-year-old student of life who watches the performance from her box seat behind me.

“THAT IS INAPPROPRIATE!” I bark at the boob woman in a weird combination of good manners and sudden rage. I am Charlotte, all horrified and wide-eyed, in Sex in the City.

Fortunately, before my passenger window has closed fully, traffic starts to move. I’m riled up, sure I am, but I try to pretend nothing has happened and continue the sweet story involving a three-year-old girl and her plastic jewels.

The world Lolo is inheriting is far more cosmopolitan than my own was, aged seven in the US Midwest. Part of this inheritance is the world today, and yet I know this sun-drenched patch of the planet isn’t the Illinois cornfields. The French Riviera is where beauty salons advertise this – shall we say “cutting-edge” – treatment for your precious locks: diamond dust.

“Diamond dust!” Philippe said unbelievingly when we first heard the advert in the car the other day. My husband’s a bit of a rock guy. “Do you know what they really use diamond dust for? Cutting steel!”

But diamond dust sounds all glitz and glam, and that’s the sort of thing that’s revered here in the South of France. Diamond dust, and now Inappropriate Boob, help me understand that our parenting duties must work overtime here, searching out some sense of normality – whatever that is. It’s our third summer in a row in the sunny CDA, and before that we’ve come for long stretches over various parts of the year. If repetition brings familiarity, I fear familiarity will breed partial immunity to the Côte d’Azur’s oddities – both family-friendly and otherwise.

Somehow we’ve blown past Le Port Canto, the supposed location of Walid’s recommended restaurant, and we find ourselves in another parking lot on Cannes’ Palm Beach peninsula. We spot a sturdy man with a white beard and sun-wrinkled skin as he pulls some beach stuff from his car’s boot. His tropical shirt, red shorts and straw hat scream “local” – if he’s not Tommy Bahama in the flesh. Philippe slides down my window to ask directions.

Tommy goes through an animated and thorough explanation about how we get from here to there. He doesn’t leave out a corner or a cut-through. I’m watching him through the open window, pleased that I can understand about 80% of this friendly chit-chat.

Philippe thanks him. As we begin to pull away, Tommy calls out, “Enjoy it!” He says it exactly like that: “Enjoy it!”

“How did he know?” I ask Philippe, feeling all touristy. “Did you use your best French?”

“Yes – just like a Frenchman.”

I decide it’s my fault. I probably watched Tommy’s side of the conversation with a wide, American, post-orthodonture smile. Usually, though, it’s Philippe that gives us away, and he does it on purpose. I stay sagely silent in these sorts of conversations while he lathers up the froth on his Quebecois accent.

The mizzuna aux gambas is my habitual lunch at Vegaluna. — The *mizzuna aux gambas* is my habitual lunch at *Vegaluna*.

It’s amazing how much mileage this “we’re-old-cousins” language gets you in France. Just last week a quick phone call to Vegaluna, our habitual Sunday lunch spot on the beach in Cannes, determined that the place was all booked up. Booked up! And it was only mid-June, a full month before the usual summer onslaught!

So last Sunday, Philippe ambled into Vegaluna a couple hours before lunch. He worked up a good lather on his language. The restaurant’s host had lived on Saint-Martin, the French side, for 10 years with a bunch of Quebeckers. He had great memories. A table for six magically surfaced at the appointed hour.

This week it’s Walid’s beach restaurant, and it’s a find (once we finally find it). L’Écrin offers up such treats as this array of heirloom tomatoes with burratina cheese. We dine under a canopy of seaside umbrellas, a light breeze breathing over our shoulders and faces. Out in the bay sailboats zigzag through the waves with the 17^th-century fortress on Île Sainte-Marguerite as our backdrop. Closer up, a couple topless bathers grace lounge chairs in the beach part of the restaurant, but as our table is conveniently elevated on the terrace – remember, this is the wife writing – all members of our party can focus on their food.

L’Écrin’s heirloom tomato salad includes a generous dollop of creamy burratina. — *L’Écrin’s* heirloom tomato salad includes a generous dollop of creamy *burratina*.

That said, a gorgeous, perfectly formed woman occupies the neighbouring table. She wears a lime green string bikini underneath an equally stringy white beach cover. Philippe has a good look as she walks by.

Another character parades through the tables with more regularity. Her face is nicely tanned but partly obscured by enormous, almost bug-like sunglasses. The rest of her is perfectly white. She wears a flowing white cover-up, under which we can make out a voluptuous figure and a white, one-piece bathing suit. She carries an enormous white bag full of things that are probably white. She conducts herself live a diva, though her cap is a little weird – snuggly fitting, almost like a piece of terry cloth that’s stitched together in the form of a ski cap. The second time Diva strolls her catwalk through the tables, I think she has forgotten something. The third time I wonder. The fourth and tenth times I realise what Diva has lost may be something more intrinsic.

Hours later – while l’Écrin’s food and ambiance were worthy of postcards, the pace of the service wasn’t – we amble back to our car. A white wig glows in the distance, on the other side of a grassy expanse. I guess that’d be in the wings, stage right. The wig is shoulder length and glossy and perfectly straight, and it’s sitting atop some black, sleeveless outfit.

The storied Fort Royal on St Marguerite Island lies just across the bay. — The storied *Fort Royal* on St Marguerite Island lies just across the bay.

Lolo is the most curious. Seven is the age of reason, so Philippe and I understand, and we can see it in our daughter’s behavior, her ability to remember the past, and her questions. But today is not the day to be reasonable.

The wig glides away from us. We realize it must belong to someone who’s perched on top of a passenger seat in a car that’s cruising along the main street of the Palm Beach peninsula. Yes of course, Lolo, White Wig should be wearing a seatbelt.

Philippe and I are careful not to attach a gender to White Wig. We want to say “she” but for some reason we both hold back. I cannot bear to explain the concept of trans-anything to my daughter who has a burgeoning sense of reason.

It takes a few moments to realize that we’ve happened on a parade of vintage cars. Philippe, a bit of a car buff himself, identifies a Ferrari Daytona from the 1960s or 70s, a Morgan that could be from the 40s, and a Jaguar from the 60s. (It’s an XK-E, he says. From the tone of his voice, I guess I’m supposed to be staggered.) The DeLorean catches our eyes with its winged doors spread wide open, skyward, as it cruises the street. Some of the cars’ occupants dress in the style of their vehicle’s vintage, such as the hippies in the late-60s Mustang who sport paisley shirts and full-on bellbottoms.

Once we’re outside Cannes’ limits, we’re finally home free, I think. We’re heading back to our far more normal, seaside town of Antibes for some family time. Except for the fact that Antibes is attached to Juan-les-Pins, which since its heydays in the 1920s, has always been a bit of a rabble-rouser.

There, strolling the sidewalk of this beach road, is Tarzan. It is his moment in the Côte d’Azur’s ever-shining spotlight. He saunters in our direction, side-by-side with Jane, who looks pretty normal if even a bit glamourous. (When I mention Jane to Philippe afterward, he will confess, “I never had a chance to look at her.” Which is really saying something.)

But Tarzan himself is magnificent. His long hair is pulled back tightly from his face, making it look like he has a cropped Mohawk on top, chased by a ponytail of braids dangling (or swinging rope-vine style) to the small of his back. His body is perfectly muscled and his skin gloriously bronzed and frequently tattooed. And we, the innocent passersby, have plenty of occasion to count his bulging muscles and fine tattoos because all Tarzan wears is a neutrally coloured, skin-tight pair of shorts – something between a pair of spandex short-shorts and a woman’s monokini.

Lolo hardly notices Tarzan. For all she knows, he could’ve been coming from someone’s birthday party. And me, well, I hardly give him all the attention he is worth. Somehow we are adapting to this theatre of the Côte d’Azur. Blatant recognition of this idea makes me worry anew about the world Lolo sees – and her nascent sense of normality and reason.

To amp up my anxieties (as mothers do from time to time), I now worry about the upcoming arrival of Toronto friends with their three intelligent, curious and hyper-aware children in tow – all aged six and seven.

What will these bright sparks glean from the sidewalks of the Riviera during their first trip overseas? What will the parents think of this hive of indulgence where we choose to socialize our own intelligent, curious and normally hyper-aware daughter, aged seven, for the whole of every summer during her tender childhood? The same girl whose socialization we nurture much more carefully in Canada for the bulk of the year – the girl who’s a classmate, friend, team member, travel partner and confidant of their own children?

And which – I fear even contemplating this question – which of Inappropriate Boob, Diva, White Wig and Tarzan’s co-leads will jump on the Côte d’Azur’s revolving stage and sing their arias to welcome these good Canadian guests to town?

Summer in the Côte d’Azur: The More Things Change…

Posted on June 22, 2012June 4, 2014 by jemma

Summer has officially begun – and it could begin in no more official way for Philippe, seven-year-old Lolo and me than with a hearty welcome at Nice Airport by Christelle, the effervescent wife of our habitual taxi driver Eric. Her highlighted red hair is longer this summer, clipped back artfully by sparkly butterflies, and she towers over me in her customary heels.

Neither Iceland’s Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon... — Neither Iceland’s Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon…

Christelle greets us with a cheery bonjour and plants two kisses each on Philippe’s and my cheeks. I scramble to remind Lolo of France’s bonjour ritual and the expectation – particularly now that she’s a grown-up seven – of good manners. Soon we’re cruising along the Côte d’Azur’s illustrious highways in Christelle’s 4×4, making good tracks toward Bellevue, our summer home at the mouth of the Cap d’Antibes.

We are thanking our lucky stars that we are here. Philippe and Lolo are breathing in the Riviera’s warmth like it is some long-lost blanket that disappeared for an eternal and unbearable Canadian winter. Truth is, Canada’s winter wasn’t so bad this year. The other truth is that we’ve been in Iceland for the past week, and while we completely lucked out on an abundance of sunshine and lack of rain, only the hardiest Icelanders donned their tee-shirts.

...nor its lava-encrusted coastline at Vik provided the warmest start to our summer. — …nor its lava-encrusted coastline at Vik provided the warmest start to our summer.

I, personally, adored Iceland more than either of my Mediterranean-leaning family members, but I am glad we emerged from the Nordic country with our brains in tact. Last week we visited the Westman Islands, a set of small islands off the big island that are famous for their volcanic eruptions, and there we set eyes on its Member of Parliament, Árni Johnsen. Having been sentenced to two years of prison in 2003 for embezzling government funds, the husky Mr Johnsen just survived another “accident” on the main island, this one involving high speeds, alcohol, and his car being “torpedoed” off the highway. He credits his continuing life to a 50-tonne roadside boulder – and to the fairies that dwell within it. The MP got permission from a self-proclaimed elf specialist to move the enormous hunk of rock to his front yard on the Westman Islands, but he has incited a local row from a professor of fairyism, who says that fairies should never move house (or rock, as it be). All of this, I must remind you, from a respected member of Iceland’s good political leadership who, at this very time, is working to save the country.

The volcanic Westman Islands have received yet another rock.

But I digress. The air is certainly warmer here in the Côte d’Azur, and the place is completely free of elf spirits. And even if France has its own economy to worry about saving, at first sniff of the busy airport and streaming traffic, the Côte d’Azur certainly doesn’t seem to be bothering with all that.

Christelle whizzes the three of us and our mounds of luggage toward the Cap d’Antibes. Her sunglasses are round and modishly oversized, her shoulders bare in her not-the-typical-taxi-driver’s flowered, silky dress. I’m trying to work out how she manages the accelerator all day in those heels when I notice that her arms glitter in the sunlight. I’d forgotten that body lotion often sparkles in the Côte d’Azur, too.

We’re just in time for the summer weather, Christelle tells us. It began only a day ago. And business is booming. The world has descended on the Côte d’Azur this season, she says. And as if to prove it, her fare goes up a whopping 33% from last year. Let’s hope it was the luggage.

Returning to Bellevue is, as usual, a mostly splendid feeling. Now in the seventh year of these reunions, our home is both known and comfortable but it’s also a bit foreign and foreboding after the long months away. How do I turn off the alarm? It’s always the first question. What’s broken? Which beasts will emerge from the humid, seaside terrain? (This year’s answer: the ubiquitous teams of ants, a creepy earwig, and a full, meter-long snake.)

A boule’s dull, metallic clink creates an oddly welcoming sound for our return. Photo: Steve Muntz — A *boule’s* dull, metallic clink creates an oddly welcoming sound for our return. Photo: Steve Muntz

We ease into the ritual of life here. Three parades of honking cars circulate past Bellevue on Saturday afternoon, punctually on the half-hours, as wedding parties take their habitual tours around the Cap d’Antibes, tracing the Mediterranean coastline. Sabrina, our beloved French au pair, pays us a visit, much to everyone’s delight. The boules come out in the early evening over the garden wall at the Port de la Salis, sending a reverie of dull, metallic clinks onto Bellevue’s terrace. Seated here in the early evening, Philippe, Lolo and I dive into our usual Quatre Saisons and Hawaïenne pizzas from Miguel at Bistrot de la Plage. We admire our favourite view all over again, gazing onto Antibes’ old rampart walls and the cobbled village those walls once protected. The vibrant shades of the afternoon soften into pastels as the sun sinks toward the skyline.

The early part of the night now upon us, we take a drive that first night over to the adjoining town of Juan-les-Pins. Our routine is to stop for ice cream at Pinocchio’s and have a chat with Marc, the shop’s owner and father of Lolo’s former classmate. Business is tougher this year, he reports. The season is slow to start in Juan-les-Pins. His advice conflicts with Christelle’s upbeat one but we feel it. Juan-les-Pins still throbs at night but somehow less so.

As I get ready for that first deep sleep after a day of travel, the usual beacon from the top of the hill swirls outside the bedroom’s back windows. The Garoupe lighthouse pierces the dark sky more visibly this year – the tower itself even partly visible from our second story windows – as many trees and shrubs have been trimmed back.

But this year there is one change to our early ritual, and it’s a significant one. We are missing a major character in our French existence. Bernard.

The grey man – as I have described him in prior posts, both for his complexion and for his eternally grumbling but somehow endearing French ways – didn’t nod to us as Christelle’s taxi swung into Bellevue’s gates, his visit coinciding with some aspect of home maintenance. He didn’t shake Philippe’s hand as I unloaded Lolo from the taxi. He didn’t ask me his usual “La vie est belle?” line with no intention of hearing whether life really was good or not. And he didn’t look at Lolo’s newly attained stature and half-exclaim, “Elle a agrandi.”

Bernard, the man who was my father figure in Antibes especially while Philippe travelled and I looked after Bellevue, is no longer. He died a couple months ago, suddenly, on Easter weekend. He shot himself. There was no note.

We already miss him. Other changes to life in Antibes are, thankfully, far more positive. Car and motorbike drivers still are tempted to scream up and down Boulevard de Bacon’s long hill outside Bellevue’s walls. But now, and wonderfully so, the dashed lines segregating the edge of the road for pedestrians have pushed a whole foot further into the centre. What’s more, the city has placed a tall, freestanding blue-and-white-striped reflective signal along the road, at the corner of our property with the port. I can only imagine what drama, horrific or otherwise, occurred to slide these changes through the city’s red tape.

These Crocs have a certain French flair.

As I bike through town in these first days, I look for evidence that the ghastly European economy is ravaging the good city of Antibes. Sure, some shops have gone away, but others have popped up out of nowhere, like an upmarket Italian restaurant just a short walk down the beach from Bellevue. And there’s now a whole store in Old Town, smack on Rue de la République, that’s devoted to very un-French Crocs. Its walls are lined in a rainbow of shoes. To think that over the past five-or-so years I’ve relegated my purple Crocs to the confines of Bellevue’s high walls!

But the truth often lies beneath the first glance here. Both Philippe and I are asking questions about the economy. It’s not only we who want to learn more. Philippe’s on a mission for his North American business contacts, too.

So we settle in. At the beginning of every visit like this, I know I stick out. Never mind the language; I’m doing my best. Worse is trying to endure the everlasting afternoons without snacking. Lunch is placed at a normal hour and dinner is late in the French tradition – but it’s completely un-French for an adult to snack in between them.

It’s tough to hide its red-and-white cover.

One afternoon shortly after our arrival, I bike to the Boulangerie de l’Îlette and take a seat outside. The waiter remembers me. I order a grande crème and slice of cherry clafoutis and set about to consume both in their entireties. I’m starving. I’ve brought my book to the boulangerie, an oddity in itself because coffee, done the French way, is all about sharing conversation. Even worse, the book is Pamela Druckerman’s French Children Don’t Throw Food. I try to hide the title. The prior chapter has just advised me that French women never, ever order grand crèmes – only petite espressos, please – and that the midday pastry is one big, huge ‘non’.

I’d go so far to say there’s an out-and-out publicity push in France to ne pas grignoter. Roadside adverts for the new strawberry McFlurry display this line at the bottom, as if snacking on a McFlurry is equivalent to smoking an entire pack of cigarettes: “Pour votre santé, évitez de grignoter entre les repas.” For your health, avoid snacking between meals. Lolo pipes up from the backseat of the car. She can recite that phrase verbatim. The exact same message runs on TV between her morning cartoons.

I must say the grande crème and cherry clafoutis are delicious. So, I try to rationalize, which French mothers are biking around town like I do? Or, for that matter, skipping alongside their children on the sidewalk while waiting for a ride? And anyway – very un-French-like – I didn’t pour a single grain of sugar into my coffee!

This beach is hardly just for sodas and ice creams.

I guess it’s hard to become bleu-blanc-rouge too quickly. Charmingly, just as we are who we are, much remains the same about the ritual of life in Antibes. I bike along the beachside road, helmet covering my skull and sunglasses shielding my eyes, but even under this disguise a wave emerges from Chez Josy, my favourite snack kiosk on the beach. (I go there for lunches, of course, not snacks.) Philippe, Lolo and I reunite with local friends, both Anglo- and Francophones, over meals. We rediscover our pilates class at Cannes Pilates, and the owners of our favourite Cannes café (Volupté), fish shop (on Rue Chabaud) and produce stand at the Marché Gambetta. We pick up where we left off.

In our small way, I am realizing, we have become part of the summertime fabric in the Côte d’Azur. An expected piece of Antibes’ high-season mosaic. We, too, are part of the ritual.

Double Vision: The End of a Cap d’Antibes Summer

Posted on August 26, 2011June 4, 2014 by jemma

I’m living in two parallel worlds again. That’s how I know this glorious breath of France is now coming to an end.

It’s time to think about whether Lolo’s black oxfords fit anymore – for school in Toronto. Fresh air and sea salt always seem to add a size or two to her feet. It’s time to return all her French library books and to sign-up for ice skating classes in the autumn.

In an out of the way corner of Lou Gargali – somewhere that won’t overshadow my last precious moments here – I’ve begun to stash some French items I can’t live without in Canada: my favourite vinaigre balsamique, le blé gourmande (quite simply, durum wheat), and hair conditioner. (I know, women and their toiletries.) I’d like to take home one of Jacques Vial’s oozing, wholly unpasteurized rounds of chèvre from Antibes’ Marché Provençal, but I think the Canadian authorities might get a little snippy.

That said, last spring a French friend living in Toronto was thrilled to receive a care parcel from home: pâté, saucissons (dried sausages) and hard cheeses. The covert, cross-border food swap is quite remarkable.

The Domaine la Dilecta is available for rental. — The *Domaine la Dilecta* is available for rental.

Not that my last few days in the Côte d’Azur this season have been any less, well, Côte d’Azur. The place is still offering up some gobsmacking stories. Property gossip from Angela, our dear agent immobilier, is always a treat:

We now know the rental price tag for Domaine la Dilecta, the sprawling property at the top of Cap d’Antibes where our family had the pleasure of spending the Fourth of July (see July 6, 2011 post). You, too, can be King and Queen of the Cap in this 10-bed, 10-bath, 19,375-square-foot mansion and its 4.5-hectare park for a mere EUR 300,000 (US$429,000) per month. That includes lawnmowing and pool maintenance, but no breakfast.

After years of rumours, German heiress Heidi Horten’s property, a rare, sprawling villa on Cap d’Antibes land that’s pieds dans l’eau (literally “feet in the water”, meaning nothing, not even a road, lies between it and the sea) is officially on the market. The asking price is EUR 55 million.
This rambling seaside property is even for sale.

Back into the stratosphere, the top floor apartment over La Brasserie, a restaurant between “our” boulangerie and Angela’s real estate office, recently sold for EUR 1.5 million. EUR 10,000-a-square-metre rate was significant for our seaside village of Antibes (though still a snip in Cannes). An interesting trend surfaces: The pad sold to a Frenchman. He and his country folk are once again investing in Côte property. After all, the banks aren’t paying anything.

Non-property assets also tempt the ritzy, summer clientele. Philippe stopped into Cannes’ Cartier shop earlier this week. A Russian mother and daughter were shopping for an engagement ring (which in itself is interesting). Eeny, meeny, miny, mo. The daughter couldn’t make up her mind between the ring for EUR 1.2 million and another for EUR 1.4 million.

Almost permanently berthed along this far-flung quay at Antibes’ Port Vauban, this yacht featured in the James Bond film Never Say Never Again. — Almost permanently berthed along this far-flung quay at Antibes’ *Port Vauban*, this yacht featured in the James Bond film *Never Say Never Again*.

And the yachts along this French Rivieran shoreline! For two weeks now, Roman Abramovich’s Eclipse has been anchored in Antibes’ bay, perfectly centered within the little porthole window that peers from my office onto the bay. Poor Roman, the UK’s Daily Mail Online reports. Antibes’ authorities tell him there’s no space in Port Vauban for his 538-foot megayacht, the longest private yacht in the world. The sole berth that could possibly accommodate his extravagance is a far-flung jetty occupied by super-wealthy Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Alsaud’s jewel, a mere 265-feet in length (though nonetheless a storied vessel, having featured in the 1983 James Bond film Never Say Never Again as ‘The Flying Saucer’ owned by villain Maximilian Largo).

Yes, we have the occasional spat in the sunny Côte. What the Daily Mail Online didn’t realize in reporting the rude brush-off by Antibes’ authorities toward the king of Chelsea Football Club was that the Saudi prince actually paid for this jetty to be built. His multi-decade lease is still running.

Closer to reality, Lolo has lost her third and fourth teeth this summer, so Lou Gargali has enjoyed two visits by la petite souris. The toothfairy hasn’t obtained landing rights in France, so French children rely on a little mouse for payment. Except that Lolo, who gets tenderhearted about any marginally collectable item, couldn’t bear to part with either of her teeth. We’ve learned that a pleading note – and a small wedge of cheese – will ensure the souris’ money.

I expect tooth number five will present a drama. Will the toothfairy accept cheese? We’ve never actually met her. Somehow my daughter has managed to lose each of her four teeth so far under French jurisdiction.

A final note, too, for continuing readers of French Lessons who’ve followed this summer’s investigations: Philippe and I enjoyed a last-minute invitation to visit the Aussels at none other than Le Bosquet, the storied home occupied by Antibes’ last viguier (the local representative of the King of France) back in the mid-1700s; the very bastide that housed Guy de Maupassant in 1886; and the family home of our own home’s founding father, Edouard Muterse. We stood in the salon where Edouard met his friends. We glimpsed his office. We ambled through the library he built and walked upstairs to see the space that housed his family museum.

Philippe and I returned to Lou Gargali that evening feeling as though we’d somehow met this man who’s now long gone. We held another precious gift in our hands: The Aussels gave us a plate from Lou Gargali’soriginal collection, the very service used, quite incredibly, by Madame Aussel during her own childhood, a plate furnished for Lou Gargali by Edouard Muterse himself. (To understand what on earth I’m talking about, and what has grabbed the fancy of readers this summer, take a look these posts in order: June 30, July 15, July 22, July 30 and August 11, 2011).

But now it’s time to go. The July/August issue of Cannes Soleil will soon be pulled from the shelves in our neighbouring city. Did I mention that Lolo and I featured in a story on the revitalization of Cannes’ produce markets – picture and quotes and all? Our fleeting celebrity soon will evaporate. Summer’s expiring and so is that bit of fun.

So will end another favourite French escapade. The alarm went off the other night just after midnight. One of the sensors, we later learned, had rusted. But in the heat of the moment, Philippe and I rushed outside onto Lou Gargali’s balcony to try to glimpse the theives’ escape. At that very moment, the only thing missing was the clothes on a young couple beneath us, who waded from the shoreline into the sea. Ah, l’amour….

Time for all this Côte d’Azur fun to stop. School is starting. Lolo’s excited to show off the holes in her mouth to her Canadian classmates – and to share new lyrics to the traditional tune of “Happy Birthday”:

Joyeux Anniversaire,
Le gâteau tombe par terre
Sur les pieds de ma grand-mère
Qui sentent le camembert!

Happy Birthday,
The cake falls on the floor
On the feet of my grandmother
That smell of camembert (cheese).

Did I honestly believe at one time that French kids had perfect manners?

One thing’s for sure, though. The field trips back in Ontario will be less interesting than those in the Côte d’Azur. Last year one of Lolo’s six-year-old French friends went on a field trip with her class to a winery.

It is sad to say this temporary goodbye. It’s true that I look forward to living in a unified world again, even if that world is the Great White North. But we’ll hold France in our hearts, especially in the winter months – cheese, megayachts, skinny-dippers, little mice and all.

And I’m buoyed by the knowledge that we’ll return to the Côte d’Azur next summer where – in the continual pursuit to understand what makes this place so utterly mesmerizing to foreigners like us – I’ll be dishing up a whole new series of French Lessons.

Côte d’Azur Economics: The Gelato Index

Posted on August 19, 2011June 4, 2014 by jemma

First, news from last week:

Voting is pretty much unanimous. Early indicators came from the crew at Plage Provençal, and you’ve confirmed it: Our Bellevue is rightly known as Lou Gargali. Now, if only switching the name was as effortless as the French shrug….

Now for something new:

It’s mid-August, and La Rentrée suddenly infiltrates the air. La Rentrée is the French institution that resurrects itself as September looms. The beaches and ice cream parlours begin their annual clear out – en masse – as long-time holidaymakers head back to the grind.

Tomorrow (Saturday), French highways are already labeled “red” by Bison Futé. Put this way, everyone who’ll be stuck in Saturday’s bouchons – and there will be hundreds of kilometers of them – knows ahead of time that the jams will exist. Meanwhile, Bison Futé says today (Friday) will be a “green” day for half the country. But of course no one will shorten their holidays.

Days after the high season finishes, Antibes’ streets grow quieter.

That Rentrée feeling steals up every year. On Monday, the 15^th, mid-August exactly, I sat chez le coiffeur for some overdue assistance. Only two hairstylists worked; the others idled at the front desk. As Terrence wielded his scissors over my head, he looked onto the quieter pedestrian street and declared, “It’s the end of summer.”

Just like that, it’s decided. But it’s not just him. In the streets of Antibes, the sauf lundi regime had returned in a silent, unanimous onslaught. Outside the summer peak, Antibes’ shopkeepers run reasonably precise schedules, many of which include the phrase “sauf lundi”. Except Monday. This Monday afternoon gates reappeared over shop doors.

La Rentrée has got me all reflective. It’s been a great summer, no doubt, but it’s been, well, different. Of course, as readers of French Lessons will know, I’ve spent decent hours in the Archives Municipales, the Médiathèque and the Bibliothèque Antiboulenc. That’s as good a reason as any to call a sea-and-sand Côte d’Azur holiday different. But there’s more to it.

At the beginning of June, when our family returned to this sun-kissed land, we visited Gelateria Pinocchio in Juan-les-Pins. It’s owned by friends and, as luck would have it, Pinocchio’s gelato is both luscious and lovely. As Marc stacks the creamy goodness into a cone, he forms the shape of a rose.

It hasn’t been a typical summer in the Côte d’Azur.

“If gelato sales are good at Easter,” he told us in June, “then they should be good in summer, too.” That’s the local economic indicator. And what luck, Easter was good this year.

But this summer’s gelato sales wouldn’t be strong because of weather. According to Riviera Radio – if I must admit it, that’s the English-speaking station in Monaco – the average temperature in the Côte d’Azur during the whole of July was five degrees Centigrade less than average.

Think about that. Five degrees Centigrade is nine degrees Fahrenheit. And we’re not just talking about the odd, cloudy weekend. We’re talking about the whole of the middle of summer.

And there has been rain. Real rain in the Côte d’Azur! Last summer we apologized profusely to friends from Leiceistershire who visited Lou Gargali in mid-August, coinciding with the only rain of the season. (In fact, they didn’t mind the moisture. Like I said, they were from Leiceistershire. They brought anoraks. They called the rain “lovely” and “warm”.)

One evening this summer as Philippe travelled, a storm cut out part of Lou Gargali’s power supply. A loose shutter banged against an exterior wall, echoing through our home’s ribcage at the exact time I led Lolo up to bed.

“I think the house is haunted, Mommy,” she said. The years flooded back. When we signed on the dotted line in 2005, French contract law pointed out that we couldn’t back out of the purchase based on any servitudes occultes – any supernatural forces – that may afflict the place. Maybe we should’ve considered the phrase more carefully.

As clouds have descended on the Côte, sidewalk cafes and restaurants have unsurprisingly felt the barometric pressure. Even the four, seasonal snack shacks that reign day-and-night over the nearby beach, had their windows snapped tight for a couple days.

Tourist traffic is different, too. Higher campsite volumes have hit hotel businesses. Arabs continued to take up residence in Cannes’ chichi accommodations, but Ramadan started in early August – and swoosh, out they went. All put together, the Nice Matin newspaper said tourist numbers were up 10% in the Côte d’Azur this year – but that people were spending less. Except, apparently, for the Russians.

The attendant at Juan-les-Pins’ Pain de Sucre, a branch of the chic swimsuit shop, confirmed the year’s trend. Her Italian clients traditionally come at the start of each season to select three designer swimsuits. This year, she said, they bought only one new suit – if they came at all.

Abramovich’s Eclipse megayacht – photographed here from within Antibes’ enormous Nomade sculpture – is nothing short of a show-stopper. — Abramovich’s Eclipse megayacht – photographed here from within Antibes’ enormous *Nomade* sculpture – is nothing short of a show-stopper.

But don’t get me wrong. It’s still the famed Côte d’Azur and all. Roman Abramovich’s Eclipse megayacht – the world’s longest at a full 538 feet – is anchored in the bay outside Lou Gargali this week as I write. Earlier this season we’ve gawked at Luna, “A”, Katara, Lady Moura and a host of other floating subdivisions.

Meanwhile, our postbox continued to suck in the usual, French Rivieran offerings, like these:

A brochure from SL Cannes trumpeting “Our Chauffeur – Your Car”. A chauffer comes to drive your private car, to the airport or anywhere else in Europe.

A calling card for a “Luxury Car Wash”. Cars need TLC, too. Someone comes to your house to wash your car, starting at 60 Euros a pop. (Surely the actual price will be a function of the grime, the make of the car, and the size of your property.)

A handwritten note from a Cannes real estate agent: “Merci de me contacter le plus rapidement possible.” Thank you for contacting me as rapidly as possible.

“A”, designed by Philippe Starck, is probably the most striking yacht in the Med.

A single mail drop about Lou Gargali hardly resurrects the property heydays of 2007 and 2008. That’s when the likes of Brad Pitt and Bernie Madoff – not that I mean to compare them – contracted to purchase apartments in Juan-les-Pins’ famed-but-ruined Hôtel Provençal for EUR 30,000 per square metre, so a source told me this summer. Now the owner of the prominent shell does a small burst of construction every six months or so, just to keep his building permit alive.

Interest is on pause at Lou Gargali, too. A few years ago, countless people (mainly Russians) stopped by to ask how much – even though the house was hardly for sale. This summer the enthusiasm was confined to an early evening. The street gate buzzed. A teenage boy was kicking his ball on the neighbouring beach and – whoops – it flew over our wall. Could he claim it? Philippe let him in – but told his five friends that only one person was necessary to fetch a ball. They groaned. He finally relented and ushered the boys in for a gawk. “Nice place you have here,” one of them said politely, and in English.

The legendary Hôtel Provençal in Juan-les-Pins has been set for an overhaul for decades.

A pause from the typical Côte d’Azur silly season has suited me just fine this summer. I’ve hardly minded a drop in the beastly heat and humidity. And anyway, I’ve spent far more time indoors than most anyone would consider permissible.

In the end, the strange summer hasn’t been bad either for Marc, our friend at Gelateria Pinocchio. Even if holidaymakers weren’t frequenting the area’s restaurants or buying swimsuits with their usual gusto, they’ve been piling into rose-shaped gelato cones.

Terrence at the salon is upbeat, too. A cooler July means summer is delayed, he said. September will be terrific in the Côte d’Azur.

Unfortunately, we’ll hardly know. It’ll be the time of our own Rentrée.

Bellevue: The Story of Antibes’ Uncle

Posted on August 12, 2011June 4, 2014 by jemma

When Jean Aussel and his wife first set foot in Bellevue – coming here to tell us the story of our home, while also allowing Jean’s wife the chance to revisit her childhood abode – one of the first things he did was hand me a simple gift. The photocopied pages were spiral-bound and entitled Les Brises et Les Vents sur Notre Littoral. The Breezes and Winds along our Coastline.

This scholarly paper explains the mystery behind Bellevue’s original name.

Hardly a page-turner, I know. It was an extract from the annals of the learned Société Scientifique et Litteraire in Cannes, dated 1939-1941. But on closer look, I understood the relevance of the gift. The author was Edouard Muterse. The man who built Bellevue.

“He sailed a lot,” Jean said, giving the motivation behind the text. “He had many sailboats in his life. You could perhaps get up in the morning at a good hour, and you could look at how the wind rises, and the light … so he wrote this,” he said. “And it explains Lou Gargali – it’s a Provençal name – for the morning wind….”

Lou Gargali: That’s the name Edouard gave to Bellevue – until some unknown person decided to change it.

As I read the opening lines of Les Brises et Les Vents, Edouard’s character seemed to jump from the page. A colleague, he wrote, asked him to share his personal observations from his long practice of sailing navigation along this coastline, and “je n’ai pas cru devoir refuser.” He believed he ought not refuse. Edouard’s phrases were stately yet conversational, sweet yet erudite.

Jean flipped to the back of the booklet. “Et voilà!” he said. “The man who constructed your home!” It was the same black-and-white image Les Archives Municipales had given me a couple weeks earlier. Edouard was probably in his 30s, with a thick crop of dark hair, a straggly beard and long, twisted moustache. If he shaved off the forest he might be quite handsome.

Now Jean Aussel, Edouard’s grandnephew, and his wife were sitting in our living room. That the octogenarian was sipping from a chilled glass of whiskey only suggested that his stories might become more prolific.

We already had an inkling that Edouard Muterse was a generous man, largely through stories from Jean’s wife (see 30 July 2011). He’d kitted out Bellevue (or shall we now call her Lou Gargali?) with lovely china as part of the rental package (and oddly, that very set, through marriage and inheritance, has returned to Jean’s wife own kitchen cabinet). We also learned that Edouard offered his own property as home base for the local Girl Scouts.

Jean Aussel’s opening description of Edouard was as a “vieux garçon.” An old boy. That’s a way of saying that Edouard Muterse never married. He never had kids.

“Edouard Muterse was the brother of my grandmother,” Jean said. “He was a lawyer. He never married, but he was un homme trés raffiné, trés sympatique, trés agréable” – very elegant, very likeable and very pleasant.

He was born in 1878 at Le Bosquet, the house up the hill from our Lou Gargali, and the very place where Jean lives today. Edouard studied law in Aix-en-Provence, where he became a lawyer in the Court of Appeals.

“He was un homme trés attachant – a very captivating man,” Jean said. “You’re an intelligent woman” – he said this presumably because I hounded him with researched questions – “so you would’ve liked this Edouard. He had quite the sense of humour. He played cards – he played bridge. When my mother played cards with him, she’d come home at night and we’d ask her, “What did Uncle Edouard say?” He always had a joke.”

Chausseurs Alpins patrol during the Occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. — *Chausseurs Alpins* patrol during the Occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

When World War I broke out, Edouard was in his mid-30s. He served in the Chausseurs Alpins, an elite mountain infantry of the French Army, and was shot. While recovering in a military hospital in the countryside, the man recuperating beside him was the parish priest of Gonfaron, a little village in Provence. The curé was, of course, also a vieux garçon. The two men struck up an enduring friendship.

On occasion, the curé visited Antibes. He came here – and Jean indicated right here, the rocky beach just below Lou Gargali – where young men and women would swim and sail and basically make merry. The curé saw these young women in their bathing suits and, as a priest in the 20s might’ve done, he got anxious. He had to blot out these ideas. So the curé from Gonfaron found a nearby path with cattails growing on either side. The cattails formed a decent wall against women in risqué swimsuits. He perched there, gazing upward toward the Chapelle de la Garoupe, his Bible in hand.

Bellevue’s founder owned an early Hudson Terraplane. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Edouard and his sense of humour hardly let that image go. Jean gave a bit more background before continuing the story. “My uncle actually had a lot of money,” he said. “He had a very easy life, so he bought a nice sailboat and an American car – the first American car before the war – the Hudson (pronounced “HOOD-son”) Terraplane.”

So one time – this was the first half of the 1930s – Edouard and le curé drove the HOOD-son Terraplane for an aperitif in neighbouring Juan-les-Pins, a town that was making headlines for inventing waterskiing and inspiring Coco Chanel’s first suntan. It was here, too, that the current female fashion statement was les pyjamas.

“They were un scandale, les pyjamas, because they hugged the buttocks,” Jean said, curving his palms toward us in a polishing motion. So right there, in 1930s Juan-les-Pins, three pretty women wearing les pyjamas passed in front of the curé from Gonfaron with their buttocks bien moulées. Edouard didn’t miss a beat. He called out to the waiter, “Garçon! Garçon! The cattails! The cattails!”

“Like this, you see the life of Edouard Muterse!” Jean said amid our chuckling.

After serving in World War I, Edouard couldn’t bear the horrors of Aix-en-Provence. He lived close to the square that housed the city’s guillotine; the gruesome device was still in use. Worse, people kept asking Edouard if they could watch the executions from his home. It shocked him, so he moved to Marseilles.

But Edouard often returned to Antibes, to Le Bosquet, to visit his father who’d become a widower at a very young age. In this part of the world, family homes traditionally pass through the generations. Nowhere is that more true than at Le Bosquet, a provençal home that has remained within a single family since it was built in the mid-1700s. Edouard moved definitively into the storied residence when his father died in 1928.

That’s about the time that Jean Aussel put on Lou Gargali’s birth – the late 1920s or even the early 1930s. It was somewhat later than I’d expected. Edouard Muterse, he said, built our house with money he’d earned on the sale of land on Cap d’Antibes. While the Cap today is covered with apartments and villas, back then the peninsula was largely wooded and full of scrub. Sizeable tracts of this fallow land belonged to a few wealthy families.

But times were changing. It was the beginning of Le Front Populaire: Sweeping social reform within France brought the first, paid holidays. Meanwhile, Antibes’ mayor favoured development. In 1920, Edouard donated 460 square-meters of coastal land for the development of our neighbouring Port de la Salis. Between 1925 and the beginning of World War II, he sold great stretches of wooded properties between Lou Gargali and la Garoupe, another Cap d’Antibes shoreline.

As Jean spoke, the penny was dropping. Edouard Muterse never actually lived in Lou Gargali. He built our home for rental income. Part of me was glum that the man never had occupied our home. But at the same time, I was thrilled to occupy a small part of Antibes’ long and storied history, in a house built by one of the city’s most enduring and notable families.

Meanwhile, Edouard’s own home up the hill was always open. ”Because he wasn’t married and he was quite an engaging man, everyone – all the Antiboise – called him ‘Tonton Edouard’,” Jean said, “as if he was their uncle.” Uncle Edouard received lots of visitors. He had a trés belle library, Jean said, and he collected succulent plants that he exchanged with “the whole world.”

As if I needed to root Lou Gargali even more deeply into the history of Antibes, Jean described another of Edouard’s possessions housed within the welcoming Le Bosquet: the so-called Galet de Terpon. The oblong stone dated back to the 5^th century B.C. Inscribed upon its surface was the oldest Greek inscription found in the whole of France.

“C’est extraordinarire,” Jean underlined, as if I hadn’t already figured that out. It was Edouard’s father, Antibes’ historian, who helped bring the discovery to light. When Edouard died, his family contributed to their French inheritance tax assessment by selling the Galet de Terpon to none other than the Louvre.

Which basically brings us to the end of this tale. Or is it just the beginning?

Antibes’ Archeology Museum has become home to the enigmatic Galet de Terpon. — Antibes’ Archeology Museum has become home to the enigmatic *Galet de Terpon*.

The preliminary research and this encounter with Jean Aussel only has drawn me further into the Muterse rabbit hole. The name Muterse jumps off library book pages at me like the beacon of the Garoupe lighthouse, up the hill from Lou Gargali, pierces the nighttime sky. Antibes’ library holds more books written by Maurice Muterse, Edouard’s father – and even a couple entries by Edouard himself. There’s an Avenue Muterse up near the train station. The Galet de Terpon today resides in Antibes’ Musée d’Archeologie. Of course I’ve paid a visit.

The list continues. Each discovery is a celebration of connection. It’s a tribute to lives long past. Time paves over their stories unless we stop to unearth them.

A few days after the Aussel visit, Philippe lunched with a local friend at Le Plage Provençal in Juan-les-Pins. He mentioned my research of all things Muterse and the fact that Bellevue once was called Lou Gargali, supposedly after a particular morning wind. Moments later he met the Provençal’s boat master, a deeply tanned, local man of 60-ish. People here would call him “un vieux loup de mer” – an old sea bass. An old salt.

(The vieux loup de mer’s father, as it happens, was the previous boat master at the Hôtel Provençal. Rumour has it that he was the one who invented waterskiing. And so, quite relatedly, this tanned, 60-ish man that Philippe met began waterskiing at age six and instructing at 12. In his teens he was France’s national champion.)

Ben oui, the vieux loup de mer knew about lou gargali! It was a cold wind that arrived in the early hours, he said, when fishermen were pulling their nets out of the water. It didn’t come up often, but when it did, it scared them.

Philippe explained that the man who built our house also loved the water, and that he called the place Lou Gargali. But someone, sometime changed its name to Bellevue. General consensus that lunchtime was that Lou Gargali was a better name. Antibes and Juan-les-Pins already had too many Belle-’s.

So, Philippe asked me that evening as we prepared our meal, now that we’ve stopped to unearth the past: Should we switch the name back?