It was clear from his first words that Jean Aussel was a charming storyteller – exactly as Emilie, my contact at the Archives Municipales, had predicted.
Jean, his wife, Philippe and I made our introductions in Bellevue’s courtyard. The 80-something man had chosen a proper, long-sleeved, button-down shirt for the occasion despite the early evening’s thick, summer air. His baritone voice, resonating authoritatively yet warmly, complimented the exterior workmanship of our renovated Bellevue.
Jean’s wife was his perfect complement – a trait not uncommon in elderly couples who’ve been together longer than most people have been alive. Delicate, with a fair complexion and careful posture, she wore a white summer dress juxtaposed with a colourful necklace and earrings. Yes, she agreed with Jean’s assessments of Bellevue’s exterior, smiling politely all the while.
But as we stepped over Bellevue’s threshold, it was she who was breathless. Bellevue was beautifully open these days! The entry had been enclosed before…. She merged into the living room, a real-life Alice cascading into the rabbit hole. Memories flooded back. The living room had been the dining room – and there, turning toward today’s dining room – that had been the salon. But there were walls between the rooms.…
Lolo bounded into the room with Sabrina, our au pair. I prayed that “best behavior” would be as evident as it was supposed to be for our special guests. Jean’s wife stooped down to Lolo and asked her age.
“Six ans,” Lolo replied. Relief.
“Voilà! I was ten years old,” she said, “just a bit older than you when I lived here.” Her family, we learned, moved to Antibes from Normandy in order to escape the war. She had more to say, I was sure, but she hesitated, either out of character or politeness or both.
Philippe stepped up as MC. We were very excited to meet them both, he explained – particularly me. I wanted to learn the history of Bellevue. I wanted to learn about her founder. I wanted to write down her stories. Philippe mentioned my blog and (after explaining the concept of a blog) explained that I write about cultural differences between life in France and North America – about things like the rigidity of French classrooms compared with those in North America, or the way the French insist on saying “bonjour” before starting any interaction. Self-deprecation, he added, was always a plus in making these observations.
Jean caught onto the notion straightaway. “Cultural differences – like we’re surprised that a villa like this has shoes right here in the entryway – right out in the open!” he said. “I mean, it’s okay for a casual home, but here, in a nice villa…?”
Philippe delighted that his own personal gripe had been noted by a third party. My husband counted the neat line of shoes under the hallway table. “Fourteen pairs of shoes!” he said. “Fourteen pairs! Two belong to me. The other twelve belong to my wife and six-year-old daughter!”
And that, I explained, hoping to avoid that ongoing line of fire, was the perfect example of what Jean could write about in his own blog about crazy foreign folks who shack up on France’s good soil.
But Jean Aussel was a man of bigger ideas. What interested him at that moment was that we were connecting with local people and forming these insights. “I expect you’ve already started making des racines here,” he said expectantly.
Les racines – roots – are a big deal in France. Particularly among folks whose ancestral roots delve far beneath the Côte d’Azur’s sandy and sometimes transitory surface.
It was at about this point that I mentioned my tape recorder. The couple had no fear of recording their voices. And honestly, it was the only way – despite the painstaking revision – that I could understand all their enthusiastic words.
It was about this time, too, that I realized I didn’t know her name. Jean never offered it, nor did she, and cultural and generational mores somehow prevented Philippe and me from asking. And especially now, as sweet Alice floated further into her rabbit hole that was at once familiar – generating the spark of a faded snapshot – and then, in a single breath, entirely new, a dwelling that was totally disembodied from the space she knew as a child.
Here’s an evening view from our “loge at the opera of life.”
We moved onto Bellevue’s main terrace. Philippe explained that we call it our “loge at the opera of life” because honestly, there’s always some activity that we can spy on from the perch: boats and cars and motorcycles and planes, sun worshipers and picnickers, sailors and windsurfers, swimmers and divers and fishermen. And here, something – something among this hive of activity – set off a spark.
“We went fishing for les crevettes…,” Jean’s wife began.
Shrimp? Philippe and I were stunned. Today there were sea urchins – but hardly shrimp!
“Between the rocks – oui, oui, oui,” she said.
There was more. Her parents wanted to buy this house when they moved down from the north to escape the war. “I lived here from 1939,” she said, hesitatingly.
Jean finished her thought as she searched for words. “Her father left the north because he had four children,” he said.
“Et voilà,” she said. Exactly right. “And after, the Italians came to France…”
“The Italians,” Jean interjected, “they were allied with the Germans in the war.”
“They took the house and we had to leave,” she said. “That was 1941 or 1942…. All along the sea, all the houses were requisitioned, and we had to leave. The Italians moved in and the house was mined.”
“Mined?!” Surely I didn’t hear that right. My own mind raced to the builders and gardeners and pool installers who dug deep into Bellevue’s earth. It jumped to playdates in which half-a-dozen kids bounded through the gardens. And, like a good American brain, it rushed straight to the strength of our home insurance policy. All in a couple seconds.
“They put landmines in the garage…,” she said. Her memory was cut short by our clamour on the terrace, making me wonder, belatedly, what other areas of the house she was about to name. And then, as if to make sure we got her point, she said, “If we walked over them, they’d blow up.”
“There was a period,” Jean explained, “when people living on Cap d’Antibes close to the water were evacuated. They didn’t have the right to live here.”
Bellevue’s cylindrical staircase must have cut out one of its bedrooms.
When we headed upstairs, Jean’s wife became disoriented: Her bedroom was gone. Recognition of such a precious fact – the disappearance of one’s own, childhood room – was both slow and, I suppose, heartbreaking in its way. Rooms were smaller and more enclosed in earlier times. Where there’d been four bedrooms, today there were only two. The ceiling above Bellevue’s grand, cylindrical staircase – now rising three full stories – must’ve been a storey lower. The top part of today’s vaulting void was Jean’s wife’s bedroom.
But a second terrace that existed outside her bedroom was unchanged. Its views still must rank among the best on the Cap, sweeping from our own town of Antibes all the way – if you crane your neck – to Cap Ferrat, on this side of Monaco.
The delicate woman was delighted by a sudden memory. “I shelled peas here with my sister! During the war…we were happy!”
On reflection, it’s that last phrase that was so poignant. Something so simple brought great joy during the darkness of war.
George Milton salutes the crowd after singing in a grand Parisian boulevard in 1932. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
She then focused on the sprawling, white house next door, a shockingly modern residence in former days. She often played there with her good friend, the daughter of Georges Milton, a well-known singer and movie actor.
Jean galloped down memory lane, too. Soon we stood on a small balcony overlooking Bellevue’s garden, where his conversation clung to this notion of rootedness that I can’t seem to escape. Jean pointed across the road to La Collinette, a white villa with sea-green shutters. He played there as a child. The house next door? It was bought by his grandfather, a well-known horticulturist. And the house right up there on the hill, peaking out under the parasol pines? Jean was born there. Of course he was.
When we reconvened in Bellevue’s living room, I hoped that Jean Aussel’s nice glass of whiskey might fuel further stories. But it’s her stories that I’m focusing on now, and one of my favourites had to do with the dishes she used as a child. Edouard Muterse had purchased a pretty table service as part of the rental package.
“What’s funny is that I lived in this house, and then I married Jean,” she said, now offering her stories more freely. “He inherited the furnishings that were in this house. So now, the whole set of dishes came back to me!”
Her contributions continued. She returned to northern France with her parents, but after the war her family bought a holiday home in neighbouring Juan-les-Pins. (This town, if I may interject some history, was a hot spot during that era. It was the place that had invented waterskiing and where – if the story is to be believed – Coco Chanel had recently discovered the suntan.) The couple met each other through one of her sisters and married in 1953.
Fueled by the pause, and perhaps by the warmth of the whiskey, Jean began to tell stories about his own family, and to indulge my curiosity, particularly those about Edouard Muterse, the father of Bellevue. At one point, he played on the small-worldliness of this whole episode.
“My wife knew Edouard Muterse before I did,” he said. “She knew my uncle because her parents rented the house.” But there was something else.
“My uncle was trés genereux,” he said. His property Le Bosquet was a very large, wooded property with a separate cottage. He loaned this cottage to the Guides de France, the French Girl Scouts. Jean’s wife was a young member.
Fig trees continue to populate the Cap d’Antibes – like this one in our garden.
She continued the story. “Every Thursday, all the Guides, we’d play at Le Bosquet. It’s like this that I knew his uncle…. It was during the war, and the place was full of fig trees. We were tellement, tellement hungry, and so we stole figs from Edouard Muterse!” She added, “I don’t know whether he suspected or not.”
By the time Jean Aussel and his wife left Bellevue, my tape recorder had registered nearly two hours of conversation. That’s a pretty good indication of how long this blog post could be. So I will leave you, just as she was every Thursday, hungry.
French Lessons is on holiday next week in – of all places given its recent, shocking atrocities – Norway. Bellevue’s tale will continue in the following week with what’s left: Edouard’s story.
Having finally met Christian Aussel face-to-face in Le Bosquet’s front garden (see last week’s post), Philippe and I remained none the wiser whether Edouard Muterse really was the father of our beloved Bellevue. But speaking for ten minutes with Edouard Muterse’s great-grandnephew – largely through the formidable barrier of his motorcycle helmet – made us even more intrigued about the possible ancestry of our French Rivieran home.
I waited out the rest of that sunny afternoon in anticipation of an early evening phone call to Jean Aussel, Christian’s father and Edouard Muterse’s grandnephew. Antibes’ Archives Municipales helped me track down the octogenarian to Le Bosquet. He was “a charming man who always has a lot of things to say,” they told me. Alas, he was napping at the time of our visit.
Just before 6pm, Philippe and I convened in Bellevue’s library. It was the room with the best telephone connection – and the spot having the best Mediterranean views to keep six-year-old Lolo occupied. That said, jumping between the leather couch and a cushioned ottoman in the center of the room – which was what she was doing – wasn’t exactly the sort of occupation I had in mind.
Antibes’ Port Vauban attracts jaw-dropping yachts.
I tried to explain to our baboon that Mommy and Papa had an important phone call to make. A really important call to someone who was much older than we were and who might have to listen closely to what we said. I focused Lolo’s energies through a strong pair of binoculars aimed out the library window. From here she could inspect Billionaires’ Row in Port Vauban. The secretive, Qatari megayacht Katara had just floated in. The dazzling, white, 408-foot-long subdivision – bigger than Antibes’ Old Town, so it seemed – surely would keep her attention for a few minutes.
Philippe perched on the arm of the couch and took the phone. I sat, pen poised, facing him. It was an unfortunate state of affairs for my personal research, but Philippe was the one with the language skills – and the Quebecois charm. Between the two of us, he had a far better chance of engaging Jean Aussel.
One more thing. We chose against the speakerphone. I wasn’t thrilled about hearing everything after-the-fact, but throwing an 80-something-year old on speakerphone seemed rude. And anyway, there was that baboon in the room.
Someone answered. Very unusually for my husband – a man who, assuming he loved the stuff, could sell fois gras to a vegetarian – Philippe faltered on his introduction. He jumbled his name, Bellevue’s street address and what he wanted into one, sweeping breath.
I decided he was talking to an answerphone – a rarity in France, but still.
No, on second take, Philippe spoke to a person. That person went off in search of Jean Aussel. I figured it was an assistant, someone who helped the elderly man maneuver around his house.
My pen remained poised, but there was nothing to write. Meanwhile, our calm six-year-old daughter became bored with captivating Katara and started using the binocs to peruse the bay.
Jean Aussel came to the phone. Philippe’s posture straightened. His language became polished. The first piece of his introduction was – get this – that he was a Quebecois. To the French, this word is code for “long lost cousin”. The term immediately softens every French soul.
Philippe perched on the couch, listening intently. He was obviously intrigued by Jean’s conversation – amused even. My pen hovered expectantly, but Philippe only tossed me a few words. Jean was doing all the talking.
Author Guy de Maupassant knew Le Bosquet very well. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Finally – FINALLY – my husband brought me into the context of the conversation. He launched the question that went to the heart of our search. The Big Question that determined whether it was even relevant for us to connect with the fascinating family who lived in Le Bosquet – the one who had offered the celebrated Guy de Maupassant residence, the family called Muterse, and now Aussel, whose Antibois roots plunged widely and deeply into the good soil of this ancient city.
Dites-moi, Philippe said to Jean. Tell me, was it Edourard Muterse who built Bellevue?
My husband listened briefly and nodded. I think his eyes actually twinkled. He put his palm over the receiver and uttered the words I most wanted to hear: “Edouard built the house!”
I punched my fist into the air and declared a victorious “Yes!” “EM built home,” I scribbled – as if I’d ever forget that golden nugget. In that single phrase, my nascent passion to unearth all facts and stories and details Muterse suddenly sprouted legs. Real, firmly-rooted legs.
Philippe covered the telephone receiver again and threw me another, seemingly riveting morsel. “It’s the same family!”
Whatever that meant. “Same family?” I jotted on the page. If he forgot to explain, I’d ask.
Lolo suddenly was finished with Katara, the whole of Billionaires’ Row and the most mesmerizing bay in the French Riviera. She went back to bouncing between the couch and the ottoman.
Philippe repeated another phrase he just heard. “Mille cinq cents vingt.”
Numbers are the worst thing to understand in French. I wrote down the words and then translated them into figures: 1,520. And so?
The bouncing baboon was working herself into a frenzy. As I thanked God we’d decided against a chandelier in that room, Jean excused himself for a moment to check something with his wife.
His wife? I’d never thought of him having a wife. Philippe covered the phone and leaned toward me: “His wife – her family rented the house during the war years!”
Which was honestly incredible. It made no sense whatsoever.
The two men slipped back into conversation, talking quite delightedly with one another. I began to worry that Philippe was gathering all the best, firsthand information. All that’d remain for me would be his rehashing of Jean’s stories, an almost-precise remnant of their meandering telephone conversation. But finally – finally! – Philippe mentioned we’d like to meet up with Jean for an hour or so.
The Frenchman seemed open to the idea. The men were talking about meeting here? At Bellevue? Yes, yes, they were – tomorrow? 6pm? Philippe was offering to collect Jean and his wife, but Jean insisted he not worry. The elderly Antibois knew his way around this area pretty well.
At last my husband rang off. “Jean – he’s a real storyteller!” he said. “He’s incredibly lucid.” There went my vision of the frail 80-something who needed a home nurse. Then Philippe filled in the detail.
Edouard Muterse, when he built Bellevue, gave her another name. He called her Lou Gargali.
Lou Gargali still blows at the Port de la Salis.
While I’d been aware of this name, I never realised it was Bellevue’s original name. Exactly when the name changed – and by whom and for what reason – remained a mystery. But Jean unpacked its meaning. Lou Gargali was a Provençal term for a very unusual, morning wind.
I thought immediately of the tumultuous winter we’d endured in Antibes a few years ago. Living within Lou Gargali’s walls was like living inside a teakettle that was constantly approaching its boil.
Jean’s 1,520 number corresponded to – get this – the year to which he could trace his family’s land ownership in this area. (That “one-thousand, five-hundred twenty” was a year never crossed my mind. Think about it: Ferdinand Magellan was still alive.) What’s more, Jean Aussel’s seriously established family was his own, current project. He was writing a 500-page book about them. He had only three pages to go.
But the bizarre, small-world and entirely riveting thing about this whole affair was that, as a young girl, Jean Aussel’s wife lived at Lou Gargali. France is hardly a land of arranged marriages or family trees with no branches, so let me rephrase: The wife of Edouard Muterse’s grandnephew lived in the house that Edouard Muterse built. Her family rented Lou Gargali from Edouard during World War II, a grand travesty played out on Antibes’ very grounds. Jean didn’t know the young girl at this time, but it was through this connection – Edouard Muterse and Lou Gargali – that they met each other.
Lou Gargali and her founder were probably responsible – just doing the math here – for a 50- or 60-year marriage. At a minimum they deserved god-parenting rights.
And so it was she, Jean Aussel’s wife, who was the more interested in seeing Lou Gargali again. She hadn’t been here since the 1950s or so. Inside Lou Gargali – our Bellevue – lived her childhood memories of the war and, surely, of her parents and any siblings.
So tomorrow. What should we do? Tour the house and have a drink? Offer the Aussels dinner? What does a North American whip up for well-healed, French-to-their-bone-marrow guests without having to sweat over a stove?
A tape recorder! I need to find a tape recorder. Philippe believes Jean’s going to give me 90% of what I’m looking for, so I don’t want to miss a single one of his precious, French words.
But what am I looking for exactly? I need to clarify that, too. Facts. Characters. Connections.
In short, I’m seeking stories of the past. Stories that will make Lou Gargali – our darling Bellevue – come alive.
Bellevue: A Modern Link to Guy de Maupassant?, my post a couple weeks ago, has generated feedback from several readers – this, after Philippe told me the blog lacked a certain punch. He was right. It probably did fall a bit limp. But if the story lacked a certain punch, it offered a certain content.
The Port de la Salis remains a vibrant community within Antibes.
So, readers have been wondering, what happened next? Did I ever find out who built Bellevue, our beloved seaside villa in the Côte d’Azur that has attracted interest from passersby and celebrities alike? Was it the brainchild of Edouard Muterse, the man who looked back at me through wire spectacles in the photos from Antibes’ Archives Municipales – the guy who was Président in the 1930s of both the Bureau d’Hygiène Sociale and our neighbouring Port de la Salis, the one whose father gave accommodation and sailing lessons to the famed novelist Guy de Maupassant?
And not just facts, you wanted to know, but did I manage to track down any people with lucid memories and stories to tell?
The words of Emilie, the unusually helpful woman at the Archives, have rung clearly in my ears from the moment they arrived there. Antibes isn’t large, she said. There are a lot of people here who remember the past.
All data points gathered from the Archives Municipales were directing me, the guided missile, up the hill from Bellevue to a property called Le Bosquet – a place whose former name, when Maupassant stayed there in the winter of 1885-1886, was Villa Muterse. It was the home where, in his later years, Edouard Muterse lived – whether or not he was the one who actually built Bellevue. (I must not lose sight of this unfortunate possibility.) And Le Bosquet was the place where today, the Muterse family line lives on under the name Aussel.
“I don’t know if you’ll have the occasion to meet the father, Jean Aussel,” Emilie wrote to me in an email a few days after my visit to the Archives. She’d mentioned that the senior Aussel was in his early 80s these days, but as if in encouragement, her email described him as “a charming man and who always has a lot of things to say.”
Le Bosquet also was charming. But as much as I was drawn to the residence, I was also repelled. What would happen, I worried, if the current family knew nothing of their past? Worse, what if they didn’t want to tell it to some snooping American broad?
So I did what all curious people do at the birth of any particular interest: I googled it.
As it happens, Le Bosquet is partly a chambre d’hôte today. That’s to say it’s a bed and breakfast – with 4.5 stars, no less – run by Christian and Sylvie Aussel. I learned that the property’s bones date back to 1750, thanks to an ancestor who was the last Viguier du Roy (king’s magistrate, a position that survived until the French Revolution in 1789).
While the weight of Le Bosquet’s lineage only frightened me further, the online photos at least made the place look comfortable and charming. It had a flesh-coloured stucco façade, pale green shutters, matching green umbrellas and a rambling-but-tended garden. Exactly the kind of place you’d crave for some R & R.
This factoid about Le Bosquet being a B & B was incredibly fortuitous for someone who didn’t speak the local language perfectly. Francophone telephone conversations are a nightmare, contorting basic words into urgent-sounding jibberish – simply by removing the speaker’s face.
Is this the way to Le Bosquet?
So one early afternoon, I convinced Philippe to take a bike ride with me up to Le Bosquet. He has the language skills – and the Quebecois charm. The French surrender their espressos and morning croissants for their long lost cousins. And in truth, even if Philippe wasn’t exactly a fan of that earlier blog post of mine, he admitted to being curious about the story behind it.
Shortly we stood at the gate of Le Bosquet. Actually that makes it sound too easy.
Shortly, after circumnavigating the private and blocked streets that surround Le Bosquet (which, I remind you, was supposedly a charming bed and breakfast), we found ourselves in front of an iron gate having a good dozen call buttons. Inside the barrier lay a long, straight street lined with olive trees. But nowhere, inside or outside the gate, was there the slightest announcement of a chambre d’hôte.
Fortunately one of the call buttons was marked “Le Bosquet”. After several rings, a barely audible, male voice answered.
Philippe made his opening bid: Bonjour, Monsieur! We purchased Bellevue a few years ago and we’re trying to discover its history, and my wife’s a writer – behind us a dump truck mounted the road in low gear – and anyway, she’s led to believe that an Edouard Muterse built our house.
The almost imperceptible voice said we probably want to speak to its father.
Philippe continued: Oui, yes, that’d be great. We were wondering whether we could take a minute or two now and make an appointment and…. Allo?
The call box was silent. Philippe rang again. No answer. But what luck: The pedestrian gate was open! We scooted inside.
At the end of the straight, olive tree-lined road, we found it: Le Bosquet – just like its online picture, but with almost every shutter snapped tight. The residence looked inviting but unwelcoming. We sensed people nearby – there was that voice on the call box, and some garden tools were splayed out in the shade – but still, the area felt vacant.
Philippe and I called out. “Allo? Bonjour?”
No one came to meet us. We resolved to try again at the main road – but on retracing our steps we discovered we were now locked inside the gated community. So again, google. Reception via satellite on a Canadian cell phone proved the superior technology. Someone would arrive.
When Christian Aussel finally emerged from Le Bosquet’s stately entry, he wore a spherical motorcycle helmet. It seemed to me a clever way to confine conversations with interlopers. He had a compact, wiry build; dark, round eyes; and an olive complexion. I guessed he was 50-something – at least as far as I could gauge within that space helmet.
Christian reiterated that we probably wanted to speak with his father, Jean Aussel, who was taking a nap at the moment. The best time to reach him was between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m.
Oui – merci – but Philippe and I could hardly leave it at that. Here we were, standing beside (though shielded by the astronomical headgear of) a relative of Edouard Muterse, the man I thought and hoped was the father of our Bellevue. Part of me, indeed, was that meddling history junkie that Christian aimed to avoid.
But kindly, Edouard’s great-grandnephew wasn’t too reluctant to offer some of Le Bosquet’s history. Yes, this was the place where Maupassant spent one winter. It was only a winter stay, he said, because the Muterse family lived at Le Bosquet during the summers. In winter they’d decamp to their city home near the train station.
Let me put this geography in context. We’re not talking about a winter home in Aspen and a summer home in St Tropez. Non. We’re talking about a winter home in Antibes and a summer home in – you’ve got it – Antibes. The distance between the two spots is about three kilometers. Of course airplanes didn’t exist in the 1880s (and for that matter, Aspen was basically a newborn, silver mining camp). Le Bosquet itself would’ve lain in the wilderness outside Antibes, a city that was still fortified (though not for much longer) by rampart walls and a vaulting access door that snapped shut each night at 8:00pm. This sort of country property was only comfortably inhabited during the summer months.
So I launch my million Euro question. Did Edouard Muterse build Bellevue?
He may have built Bellevue, Christian said, but when his father died (already having outlived Edouard’s mother), Edouard came to live in Le Bosquet. Christian had to spell out French tradition for us: Parents always live in the big house. When they die, the house belongs to their children.
Quick, mental arithmetic spun the arrow away from Edouard’ role as father of Bellevue. A few years ago, someone told us that his uncle laid Bellevue’s plumbing in 1923. Information at the Archives Municipales told me that Edouard’s father died in 1928. The brief, five-year interval between these years hardly supported the idea that Edouard Muterse would’ve created a grand, new home – one that at the time was described as a virtual castle – only to move out a few years later.
Edouard himself had no children, Christian said. We were still focusing on Le Bosquet. The fact seemed to explain the property’s current situation. In Edouard’s time the estate was a single, sprawling unit. Edouard’s niece (who married an Aussel) inherited the place in 1948, the year Edouard died. Her son Jean, now in his eighties and presently taking a nap, restored the property and today occupies the verrière, a vaulting, glass-roofed portion at the western end of the property. Christian runs the imposing, central part of the house as a chambre d’hôte, while his brother Denis lives in the eastern section of the building, once a fig séchoir (drying room).
Around this time the motorcycle helmet came off. Maybe Christian was enjoying our conversation more than he’d expected. Or, from the sweat pouring down his cheeks, possibly he was just hot. He was busy working out which house was our Bellevue. The one with the library and tower?
Yes.
The one on the water. It was more statement than question.
I have the drawing for the front door, Christian said. The guy who made it, Monsieur Mondini, is still alive.
Philippe was visibly floored by this revelation. I was a few sentences behind, still taking the word porte (i.e., “door”) to mean our neighbouring port. Soon, though, I realized the two men were talking about the magnificent, thick slab of walnut at the front of Bellevue that has intrigued us for years. It groans on its hinges, Adams Family-style, and still took an eight inch-long, iron key until our modernizations.
Philippe underlined the door’s beauty. In the early days of our renovations, he explained to Christian, Bellevue had no surrounding gate. A Russian actually stopped by and offered something like EUR 14,000 for our door. Just the door!
Christian laughed. A Russian? If the guy offered 14, he said, we should’ve asked double!
Of course Philippe and I never sold Bellevue’s door. Surprising and interwoven as this connection over Bellevue’s porte sounds, Christian now owns Monsieur Mondini’s woodworking shop. Woodworking is his own trade, he explained. Bellevue’s plans were simply part of the business he purchased.
The stonework surrounding our groaning door contained another, possibly related mystery. The initials “RC” were engraved into the keystone at the top of the arch. Philip, our builder, had told us such initials traditionally belonged to a property’s original owner.
But “RC”, no matter how you morphed it, looked nothing like “EM”. Perhaps Christian held the answer to another of Bellevue’s mysteries?
Edouard’s great-grandnephew was now interested that we were interested. Do we know any local families in Antibes? he wondered.
Yes, I said, explaining that because our daughter attended school here for a year, we have the privilege of knowing local families. We don’t just hang out with expats, I told him.
We are lucky to know these people, Christian said. There aren’t so many of them.
In a city of 70,000 year-round residents, this last comment seemed strange to me. But Philippe understood. As ever with me and the French language, I was talking cross-purposes. (Philippe later explained that Christian referred to a different sort of local family: those with roots in Antibes. The true Antibois have lived here for generations. It was all about that deep-dwelling, French passion for le terroir – the land, and the values and mores rooted into it. The real Antibois represented fewer and fewer of Antibes’ population. And Christian was obviously one of them.)
Philippe and my “two-minute visit” was well and truly exceeded. But our connection should endure. Christian will come by to look at our door. We don’t want him to fix its endearing moan, but it’ll be useful if he could look at the little bug problem. I won’t mind a glimpse at the original drawings either. More importantly, Christian gave us the telephone number for his father, Jean.
As Philippe and I biked back down the hill toward Bellevue, I punched the air in victory. We found Le Bosquet! We talked to a real person who was related to Edouard Muterse! And we’re on the way to linking up with the fabulously interesting Jean Aussel!
And yet. And yet, I can repeat the closing line from that prior blog post called Bellevue: A Modern Link to Guy de Maupassant? I have yet to officially link Bellevue’s creation with the Muterse family. But now, more than ever, I’m keen to do so.
The French Riviera is renowned for its rambling estates and sumptuous villas. Take Domaine la Dilecta. So grand is this 10-bedroom, 10-bathroom, 19,375 square-foot (1,800 square-meter) residence and its 4.5-hectare park, it deserves the designation of Domaine.
Domaine la Dilecta has intrigued me, more any than others, since my family began coming to Cap d’Antibes in 2005. Part of it is proximity. There’s something enthralling about the place just up the road, the one you stumble on during an innocent tour of your neighbourhood.
I first stumbled on Domaine la Dilecta while biking through the Cap d’Antibes.
I happened upon Domaine la Dilecta in this way, while biking the winding roads just behind Bellevue, navigating their circuit enclosed by high shrubs and fences on both sides, all the time climbing toward Cap d’Antibes’ working lighthouse. But at one crossroads, the fences came to an abrupt halt. Smack in front of me stood a crescent of 12-foot, black-iron spears with golden tips. Their rods formed an artful fence fitted with golden lettering announcing, with determined majesty, the entrance to Domaine la Dilecta.
The estate’s downright grandeur is the other part that has kept me bewitched. Peering between the black iron posts, the size of this single property on the Cap d’Antibes is truly breathtaking. I could spy (and by the obviously-placed security camera, I was certainly spied upon) the sprawling residence, an exquisite example of 1920s, boxy architecture painted Mediterranean white, set nobly within a verdant, English lawn (or more precisely, an expansive park) at the end of a long, winding drive.
Next door, the Aga Khan’s former residence was set to receive more than the government-approved, minor facelift.
Rumour has it that an Italian family has owned this estate since the 1940s, which I’m guessing means they got it for a decent price just after the war. Right next door to the Domaine is the Aga Khan’s former residence – now a famous ruin after one Russian oligarch tried to “improve” it (i.e., to grotesquely enlarge it, so the estate agents’ rumours go), when the mairie put the kibosh on unapproved works. The property has remained vacant ever since, gaping chunks blown out of its beautiful, stone bones, its grounds growing wild for six years and counting. Neighbours like this only enhance the mystique surrounding life at the top of the Cap.
In the past, I’ve parked my bike outside Domaine la Dilecta to photograph her and her imposing entryway. But all that changed with some vague invitation on the Fourth of July.
Our Austrian neighbours here invited this Canadian-American family to a party on Monday night. The fact that Monday was the 4th, as in the Fourth of July, was hardly part of the invitation. The Austrians insisted we must meet their good friends the Pritzkers, who rent out the delectable Domaine la Dilecta for the summer. The Pritzkers were – as many Americans would know – scions of a storied, fellow American family.
Naturally, we accepted. Putting two and two together, I thought about wearing red, white and blue to the event – but Philippe encouraged me into teal and pink, something sleeveless and silky and precisely Côte d’Azur.
At 7:50 p.m. sharp, on an oddly drizzly July evening, Philippe, six-year-old Lolo and I link up with a small convoy of black vehicles emerging from the Austrians’ home. We wipe sprinkles of rain from our windscreens as the parade weaves upward toward the Domaine.
This time, the first time for me, Dilecta’s black iron gates open. Our parade sweeps up the long drive to reach the magnificent, white residence. At the same time, caterers run tables and chairs from a poolside marquee into the main house. The weather has prompted last-minute changes.
The fleet deposits our brigade at Domaine la Dilecta’s doorway, adults and children in about equal number. Our Austrian neighbour is there, glittering in chunky bijoux, frizzy hair running wild down her back. The Pritzkers, I learn, charged her with populating their party.
“I’ve brought 23 people!” she says proudly. Her friends are Swiss and Norweigian, British and Austrian and – thanks to our threesome on this US holiday – Canadian and American. Plenty of sequins populate the entry hall, but there are no red-and-white stripes or blue stars to be found.
Lolo maintains her usual, 45-second routine of shyness, hiding behind my legs. Then she bounds off full-throttle with a troop of six-to-nine-year-old girls. They gallop freely through the stately Domaine la Dilecta like it’s Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyworld, each room an open invitation to be explored. Lolo darts back into view momentarily wearing a blue, sparkly top hat. She’s headed to the disco cave, she tells me, and disappears again.
Meanwhile, the adults congregate in the Domaine’s salon, an airy room paved in black-and-white-checkered, marble flooring and graced by an oversized marble fireplace. I weave between the other foreigners trying to determine how they, like us, have ended up in the Domaine tonight.
But I want to be a child! I want to run through the rooms and halls of Domaine la Dilecta to see her splendor rather than being cooped up in a single, though spacious and justly grand, sitting room with arching windows over an undulating, green lawn.
A mother has a right to check up on her six-year-old daughter, right? Especially one that’s gone off to a “disco cage” (which is – I swear – how I heard it from my sweet, baby child’s tongue)?
Younger guests enjoy their own dining room.
Vigilant mommy trots off to discover Domaine la Dilecta’s library, its wood-paneled walls decorated with frescos and intricate carvings. She finds a dining room with an enormous, crystal chandelier and walls covered by mirrors that are mounted with rows of vibrantly coloured plates. Vigilant mommy works out that the handle on an antique-mirrored wall in the hallway leads to a hidden bathroom. She dodges caterers in a utilitarian butler’s pantry and goes in search of the disco cage, a musty building across the back driveway complete with black lights, full bar and leopard-motif carpeting. (Here, I find my daughter dancing to rock music, quite innocently.)
I’m not meant to be playing nanny, I know. Reluctantly at first, I return to mingle with the sequins – and to work out this enigma of Independence Day on the Cap. Does anyone here but me (and my long-suffering Canadian husband) realize today’s a Big Holiday? Earlier today, Yankee greetings flew into me via email from Ohio and Colorado, from England and up the road in Biot. In London, a 10-foot statue of Ronald Reagan was unveiled outside the US Embassy.
The Fourth of July, I am quite sure, remains a major holiday. But here, the only evidence I find of red-white-and-blueness are a few little girls running around in blue, sparkly top hats. I strike up conversation with a Brit. I ask him, isn’t this the day the Brits like to call “British Thanksgiving”? But conversation drifts away from any notion about the sort of independence that’s celebrated on the First by Canadians, the Fourteenth by the French and – does anyone realize it? – on the Fourth by the Americans!
At the dinner buffet table I catch up with my fellow American host. It’s a marvelous party, I say to Mr Pritzker. Tell me: Monday night is honestly as good a night as any to throw a party, but is this party meant to coincide with the Fourth of July?
The evening’s red, white and blue, it turns out, is out in the marquee by the pool house. Yes, whether anyone else realizes it, this is meant to be an American Independence Day celebration! And at that moment, it’s as if every other Yank at Domaine la Dilecta emerges from the gorgeous woodwork in one fell swoop. Philippe and I share a dinner table with the Pritzkers’ American houseguests.
“To the Fourth of July!” we say, chinking our French glasses filled with Austrian wine in the royal splendor owned by the Italians.
Suddenly, not far away, fireworks explode outside Domaine la Dilecta’s arched windows. We drift into the humid, nighttime air – the Americans, Canadians, Austrians, English, Swiss and Norwegians alike – and spread along the graceful terrace. An expansive pool and fully equipped pool house is situated to one side of the grounds; the black, iron entry gates lie miles off in the other direction. But our eyes are directed over the rolling greens, above a mask of surrounding trees and into the nighttime sky.
“Just on time!” Mr Pritzker announces with grandiose and comic charm.
Fireworks on the Fourth surely would’ve been included for guests of the renowned Hôtel du Cap.
Truth be told, the fireworks are probably going off at water’s edge for clients of the opulent Hôtel du Cap. Or maybe, if I have my directions confused, it’s an extravagant Russian celebration emanating from Roman Abramovich’s Château de la Croë. Or quite possibly, these fireworks are part of some festival d’art pyrotechnique, one of an endless stream of firework shows, usually set to musical scores, that sparkle and pop along the Côte d’Azur during the celebrated summertime.
But who cares whether these fireworks are French or Russian or the glittering backdrop to some Wagnerian aria. For this single moment, we pretend the celebration is just for us, a small band of Americans who, sprinkled among the world, populates Domaine la Dilecta on the Fourth of July. Rarely do I feel so patriotic as when I celebrate an American holiday on foreign land!
The fireworks end and we head indoors. The caterers are collecting plates and setting the tables for dessert. Now – finally – evidence of the evening’s intent comes to light.
On the tables are paper dessert napkins. They’re red, white and blue – and in the design of the good, ol’ stars and stripes.
My new campaign would begin simply – with a read of this classic French novel…
Last autumn I took a French class in Toronto in which we read Bel-Ami, a novel by Guy de Maupassant. At the time, I hardly knew that the author ranked among the most famous authors of the Belle Époque.
Nor did I realize that he spent the winter of 1885-1886, right after Bel-Ami’s publication, in our summer hometown of Antibes.
Nor – and I figured this piece out with a great deal of luck – that the famed de Maupassant stayed that winter in Villa Muterse, just up the hill from Bellevue, before our house was even built. And Villa Muterse, I should add, was the ancestral home of Edouard Muterse, the chap who built our Bellevue in the early 1920s.
At least I think that’s the case anyway. It’s the truth according to a booklet written about our neighbour, the Port de la Salis.
Whatever the reality, the history behind Bellevue’s birth appears to be an interesting one. Throughout our five years here, the house has generated a good deal of interest from long-time Antibois, hopeful acquirers and mere passersby. So I figured our grande dame was ripe for a bit of genealogical probing.
…written long ago by this storied Frenchman. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Wednesday afternoon I found myself in the lofty, brightly-lit Archives Municipales d’Antibes. On the welcome desk two stems of pink orchids gave life to a space otherwise stacked with books and files.
The receptionist immediately called for assistance. A young woman appeared from the doorway at the back of the room. She wore a tank top and jeans and thick, rectangular glasses, and had a tight, stubby ponytail.
I was hoping to discover the history of our house, I tried to explain. My French sounded more halting than usual, probably because I expected this French bureaucrat to shoo me back home for some non-existent paperwork before agreeing to talk further.
On the contrary, Emilie was happy to do some research. And here, without an appointment or any documents related to Bellevue, I managed to swamp this young woman’s Wednesday afternoon. She was either innately helpful or, I thought excitedly, keenly interested in my case.
My countless hours begin at Antibes’ Municipal Archives.
Emilie consulted that same booklet on the Port de la Salis. She dipped into digital maps. Armed with preliminary details, she headed into the back room.
“The documents are heavy,” she said. “I’ll only return if I find something interesting.”
I flipped through books at the back of the Archives Municipales while the raspy-voiced receptionist and her colleague played videos at the front of the room. As time passed, I discovered that Edouard Muterse, my supposed father of Bellevue, was the son of Maurice Muterse, Antibes’ historian – and small world, I already knew it was Maurice, way back in the 1880s, who taught the novelist de Maupassant how to sail his yachts.
Conversely, Edouard Muterse was into the social services. In the early 1930s, he was Président of the odd-sounding Bureau d’Hygiène Sociale. Then again, I learned, the years between the wars were tough ones in Antibes. At times, running water was a rare privilege in this city by the sea.
History seems to breathe from this map of the former pasturelands situated behind Antibes’ modern-day beaches.
Eventually Emilie returned with two enormous, fabric-bound books. Their spines were broken, and their yellowed pages were soft and torn. She opened one of the volumes to a page entitled “Mallet”. The text was handwritten, inscribed with exacting flourishes in old-fashioned ink. She shared her notes:
In 1824, the parcel of land on which Bellevue stands was part of a large holding by a farmer called Jonche. He sold it a couple years later to a gun maker called Rey. The land passed through the ages in this way, eventually belonging to Rigal, the storied banker from Cannes who swept into the Cap in the early 1880s with grandiose ideas. Five years later Mallet, a diplomat, bought the property. He still held it in 1914, a fact that corresponded with the tattered tome on the table. But then the thread disappeared.
Could the lack of information relate to the beginning of a world war? I asked Emilie.
Only the shape of the Cap d’Antibes’ peninsula remains the same today.
“Non,” she replied quickly, pursing her lips. I should have no worries about the administration of this data. She skipped out for a cigarette break and returned to suggest that we look at photos given to the Archives Municipales by the Muterse family.
A black-and-white photo of Edouard himself popped up on the computer screen. Taken around the turn of the century, he was in his early 20s, seated on a straw chair with his hands resting on a cane. He had a thick crop of dark hair, a straggly beard and long, twisted moustache. A pair of metal spectacles balanced on his nose. If he shaved off the forest of facial hair, I thought, young Edouard might actually be a good-looking guy these days.
The photo’s caption labeled him as the stately Jean Baptiste Joseph Edouard Muterse. He was born in Antibes and died here, too, in his villa Le Bosquet – the very place up the hill that welcomed the novelist de Maupassant all those years ago.
Emilie returned to the handwritten volume of land listings that lay open on the table. “I’m fed up,” she said. “I’m missing something.” But the end of our day had come. I thanked her profusely. It was nearly 5:00pm, and the Archives Municipales closed at 5:00pm. Sharp.
The next morning I returned to the Archives with Bellevue’s compris de vente, the sale agreement. Oddly enough, Emilie was pleased to see me. She still wore jeans and a tank, her hair pushed back tightly from her head, thick rectangular glasses bisecting her face.
The compris didn’t help one bit, so she returned to the original booklet about Bellevue’s neighbouring port. At the back was a list of contributors. Emilie pointed to Denis Aussel‘s name.
“He still lives in Antibes,” she said. “His father’s about 85 now. He might be able to fill you in.” In fact, Antibes isn’t large. There are a lot of people here, Emilie said, who remember the past.
She made a couple phone calls – the people on the other end of the line were obviously intrigued – and returned to say that that Aussel lived at – get this – Le Bosquet. The home Edouard owned, just up the hill from Bellevue. The building once called Villa Muterse. The very place where de Maupassant stayed one winter. It turns out that through marriage, the Muterse family line lives on in Le Bosquet today, under the family name Aussel.
Again, the end of our time had come. It was noon, and Emilie’s work at the Archives Municipales ended at 12:00pm. Sharp.
I have yet to officially link Bellevue’s creation with the Muterse family, but I’m keen to do so. They’re an interesting cast of characters who are engrained in Antibes’ own family tree. The Muterses are a breathing example of the French passion for le terroir – their land, and the centuries of culture, tradition, ideals and beliefs that are churned into this land.
And the deeper I dig, the more profoundly the Muterse roots sink into le terroir just up the hill. Guess which door I’ll be knocking on next.
One thing I’ve not discussed much here is the whole matter of “to tutoyer or not to tutoyer.”
How can such a little word be so complicated?
On the surface, the choice seems clear. My handy Collins French-English dictionary says that tutoyer quelqu’un (or tutoyer someone) is “to address somebody as ‘tu’.” Tu is simply “you” when you’re familiar with that person.
Which all sounds easy enough. Tutoyer your friends. Address everyone else with the more formal “vous”.
The whole tutoyer issue came to the fore again Saturday evening as we hosted a sea of six-year olds and their parents. One invitee was our friend Laurent, a guy who’s more business than beach, with his wife and six-year-old daughter. In his first few words to me, an innocent “tu” flew out of his mouth. I didn’t understand what he’d said – and actually asked that he repeat himself.
“Mais je m’excuse!” Laurent said kindly. “Je vous ai tutoyé.” Or as we French-speaking Anglos say, he tutoyer-ed (TOO-twoy-ehd) me.
I apologized immediately for not recognizing this sign of friendship and said something stupid, like that tutoyer-ing me is great.
Polly Platt has been teaching me the rules…
So why the big deal about the you-word? Because we Anglophones are taught it’s a big deal. Polly Platt’s book French or Foe? is like DeBrett’s A–Z of Modern Manners for foreigners trying to understand the French. In it she writes, “The whole subject of “tu” for “you” is a can of worms. Don’t open it if you can possibly avoid it.”
Platt explains it quite simply. “Tu is for children and dogs – and other relationships that don’t apply to you, a foreigner: close family relatives and school friends.”
I can unpack this last line for my patch of the Côte d’Azur. Here in Antibes, only some locals are truly locals. The rest of the French residents are like foreigners. Yesterday I had lunch with Olivier, Antibes’ head of communications, and at one point I asked him where he was from.
“Le Dordogne,” he said and proceeded to explain exactly where that is.
So when did you move to Antibes? I asked.
“Quand j’avais six mois,” he said. At the ripe age of six months.
Yes, six MONTHS. I triple-checked this statistic, but it was true, he didn’t consider himself a true Antibois because he wasn’t BORN here.
Put in this context, Polly Platt’s designation of me as a foreigner is pretty black-and-white. Tu does not apply to me. Ever. The easy answer suits me fine. Wretched French verb conjugations are different for tu and vous, so sticking with vous basically cuts my work in half.
But suddenly I was standing there in my own garden with Laurent, a friend for the past two-and-a-half years (most of which I’ve lived on a different continent), and he was opening this verbal corridor that’s supposed to be shut tight to people like me. All our prior conversations, and my emails with him and his wife, had always been conducted in the polite, vous context.
…which can be more tortuous than the codes dictated by this British standard.
Platt’s corollary to this vous-tu rule of engagement floated menacingly into my brain: Once you start tutoyer-ing someone, there’s no going back – unless you want to make enemies.
I should mention that a handful of other friends I know in the same context – as parents of six-year olds who attended school with our Lolo a few years ago – jumped onto the tu train a while back. To be sure, they were less formal sorts, more beach than business, and I’m sure I’ve been mixing my tu’s and vous’s with them ever since. And honestly, who really cares but me? Maybe I should just dive right in like Judy, my effervescent American friend who lives here. “I mix them up all the time – by mistake!” she told me. “But I can get away with it. No one gets angry.” Maybe I should pull the American card, launch my tu’s, end up with vous’s and worry about it later.
It works for some. For me, I’ve simply tried to avoid the vous-tu divide with most French friends. To start, I’ve tried to never use the word “you” when we speak or email. Which, of course, can get a bit tricky.
Alternatively, the French have a pronoun “on” that’s completely impersonal but inoffensive. It means “someone” or “anyone.” On goes to the beach on a sunny day. In polite company, on never helps herself to more than three varieties of cheese. I always expect using on sounds pompous – like “One goes to the beach on a sunny day” – but the French don’t hear it that way. Still, I can hardly summon on for every sentence.
My final trick is to dream up a way to implicate more than one person in my “you”’s. “Vous” is the only way to say the plural “you,” whether for the closest relatives or complete strangers. I often say vous les deux (you two) to a couple, shifting my eyes between them.
The easiest thing is to stick to vous until I hit direct confrontation. Someday, I hope, I’ll become a full-on, two-you person, mastering twice the verb conjugations and donning them out liberally. The biggest game now is remembering which friends have extended my right to tutoyer (because, of course, once I start I cannot go back), and which friends remain more comfortable with the proper vous (because I, the foreigner, am ill-equipped to make the first breach of this boundary).
Standing in the garden amid the flock of children and their parents, Laurent was hardly apologetic about his foray into the tu world. “Nous sommes des amis maintenant!” he said. We are friends now! And I must admit, hearing him say this felt pretty ace.
As the evening rolled on and I recovered from my cultural fumble, Lolo bounced by me, giggling with a six-year-old friend. Her soprano voice rang clear, “Est-ce que tu veux nager?”
“Do you (tu) want to go swimming?” she asks. It’s too easy when you’re six.
Visiting your local mobile phone service provider is the perfect way to rile up your nerves – even on a perfect day.
It’s our first full day back in the sunny, glorious South of France, and I find myself inside the France Telecom store in central Antibes, right next to the commissariat de police. A few paces into this well-windowed store on the corner of a busy intersection lies a welcome mat. Overhead hangs a sign saying something about getting en ligne for service.
I’m here this Friday afternoon to find out whether France Telecom is able to offer me a SIM card to fit my new iPhone 4. The iPhone 4 is Canada’s trendy, new gadget. I purchased it at Toronto’s Apple store a couple weeks ago with strong assurances from the salesman that its new, smaller SIM card would be available in France. The iPhone 4 was the phone everyone wanted, he reassured me. France would not be left behind. I should definitely buy my iPhone 4 in an unlocked format – that’s to say, free from a fixed service contract. All I needed to do once I was overseas was slip a small French SIM card into my iPhone 4, and away I’d go. Sure, I’d pay a fair whack for the phone upfront, but the money I’d save on international roaming charges would be well worth it.
The Apple salesman and I googled a few of France’s mobile providers like Orange and SFR, and yes, their websites were conversant in iPhone 4. Moreover, I reckoned, the sales guy was Canadian – a kind and gentle Great White Northerner who was a few steps removed from Apple’s hyper breeding ground of the US. He wouldn’t try to sell me something I couldn’t use.
My first visit to a mobile phone shop in France, just a few minutes back, was completely useless. Orange, one of the conversant providers, didn’t carry the small carte de SIM. This is how I find myself inside the larger France Telecom shop trying to figure out whether the en ligne sign applies to me.
Est-ce qu’il y a une ligne pour attendre? I ask a balding man in shorts and a t-shirt who stands beneath the sign. Is there a queue?
“Yes,” he says.
“Oh, do you speak English?”
“Non, pas du tout.”
Which is precisely what he shouldn’t say to someone who’s trying to speak his hyper-complicated native tongue. It’s rude. Basically he’s telling me my accent sucks. But if he cannot speak my language, don’t pretend to.
So I continue in my richly accented, Anglophonic French (making a mental reminder of the phrase une ligne d’attente for next time). By his kind eyes and gentle smile (a French rarity), I honestly don’t think the man meant any harm. He agrees that I can jump the queue and ask my quick question to the France Telecom rep. If they don’t carry the new, smaller carte de SIM, I won’t wait en ligne.
Shortly a tall, thin salesman of North African origin confirms that yes, indeed, France Telecom does carry the smaller carte de SIM for the iPhone 4. Several hundred dollars worth of relief sweep my soul. I confirm that yes, I will attendre.
The rude-but-kind Frenchman soon passes me heading the opposite direction. “Bon courage!” he says with another smile and walks out the door.
Courage. That is literally what I need. But I know the phrase actually means “good luck.” I need that, too. The existence of a smaller carte de SIM is surely only a tiny step toward getting French mobile phone service. I am, after all, standing in the shop of a mobile service provider, in France no less, and I’m doing my best not to get all riled up.
The North African salesman beckons me toward a high stool in front of a computer screen. I’m actually getting personal service in a mobile phone shop within, say, ten minutes of entering the store. What luck! He returns with a new, small-form carte de SIM for my phone. We whip through the merits of a permanent subscription versus paying as I go. We determine my new telephone number, charge my phone with payment credits, and figure out exactly which buttons to switch off so that I don’t chew up the entire EUR 155 in a single day. (Due to some particularly greedy French downloading rules, I do not exaggerate.)
Meanwhile I’m pretty ecstatic that it’s all working out. I manage to have adequate identification with me to get my new telephone number. I actually remember the PIN for my French Visa card. I get EUR 50 credit “for free” on my phone. And I understand the vagaries of cell phone usage in France – all en français!
Vous avez beacoup de chance parce que votre français est meilleur que mon anglais,” the North African says. I’m lucky that my French is better than his English. (Where did that receptionist go?)
I also have beaucoup de chance, he says, because la ligne d’attente is often out the door. On Saturdays – if I’d waited one day to come in – le monde (as in the whole world) tries to cram itself into this France Telecom shop.
So I’m fixed up and ready to go. I let the salesman know again how relieved I am that everything’s working – that France Telecom was able to provide the smaller carte de SIM, it being the new style and all. I was afraid the small SIMs wouldn’t be available in France – but hey, he has proven me wrong.
“We only received the shipment of les cartes de SIM this morning,” he says. “You’re the first client to buy one in Antibes.”
Which only makes me relish my bonne chance more enthusiastically. I wish the salesman un bon après-midi – a good afternoon – andturn to go.
“Bon après-midi,” he replies. “Et bon courage!”
I think I’ve just used up my entire allotment of bon courage for this coming summer in France. Courage, I fear, is precisely what I’ll need to survive.
Autumn was coming in the Côte d’Azur as we packed our bags a couple weeks ago. You could feel it. The crowds were somehow thinner (though still managed to surprise our friends from the Leiceistershire countryside). It rained now and then. Autumn fashions took the shop window spotlights. Even Le Blue Lady Pub, the yachtie hangout near Port Vauban, began massive construction, closing its doors for some time.
Friends – from France and Canada alike – began asking whether I was ready to return to Toronto. “Yes and no,” I told them. “Yes,” in that whenever a change looms, you may as well get on with it. “No,” in that, well, why leave the French Riviera? Ever?
The place is special. A couple days before we headed back to Toronto, I found a pretty envelope in Bellevue’s postbox with a handwritten address: “The Owners of ‘the beautiful yellow house’, Antibes.” Inside was a postcard of a lavender-ridden landscape. The same handwriting appeared on the reverse:
Dear Sir / Madam,
We have been visiting Antibes for many years and admiring your beautiful house. For the last 4 years we have stayed in Antibes with our 2 sons for holidays in a small apartment. Next year – 2011 – we would like to bring my ‘special cousins’ as a surprise for their 40th anniversary. We wondered if you hire out your house and that we could rent it for 2 weeks in August . . . We would take great care of it . . .
Many grateful thanks, The Ellis family
A charming enquiry. But lovely as this family may be, I am pleased to report that my family will live within Bellevue’s stone walls during August next year.
Locals appreciate the place, too. A couple hours after discovering the Ellis family’s note, I walked through Old Town Antibes with five-year-old Lolo in search of a host gift for our neighbours across the street, who’d invited us for a glass (or five) of wine that afternoon. It was Lolo who spied a small oil painting by Marylène Souverain, a local artist, along the rampart walls. The scene depicted a small piece of the local Salis area – the Port de la Salis’ jetty with its hoisted, French flag, and two adjacent homes – the neighbour’s and ours. We bought the painting.
This summer my family and I solidified what we knew from our prior, year-long venture into the Côte d’Azur. We re-visited our old stomping grounds and forged new memories. We renewed relationships, underlining with folks that yes, despite the distance, we do want to remain in touch.
What better way to wrap up this series of French Lessons – at least until next June – with my own “best of” along the storied Côte d’Azur? But first, a warning: Some of these highlights are definite tourist-ing options. Others are better suited for armchair travel. Consider them at your own discretion.
Monte-Carlo is a superlative… (Photo: Steve Muntz)
Best People-Watching: Has to be at the Café de Paris and its neighbour, the Casino de Monte-Carlo. Meander through the Ferraris, Rolls and Lamborghinis, and if (admittedly like me) you don’t recognize the Kardashians, watch everyone else who’s gawking. They’ll clue you in.
Club 55 in St Tropez is probably runner-up, though we missed the famous faces – except for possibly Liz Hurley’s. That said, our local host told us that Nikki Beach has become the “in” spot. Next time, we said.
Best Gossip: Take Bernard and Angela, our real estate agents, to lunch. We usually head to Café Kanter in Antibes for lobster salad and emerge bursting with stories of wealth gone wrong. (They were the sources, incidentally, of the best Madoff information in my earlier blogs – January 22, 2009 and June 11, 2009.)
…in many ways. (Photo: Steve Muntz)
What we learned this year:
The Aga Khan’s former property, a 2.5-hectare plot on the top of Cap d’Antibes, is back on the market. Once a grand estate, the property had turned over to Leonid Rozhetskin, a billionaire Russian financier and lawyer and outspoken Putin critic. Rozhetskin proceeded to demolish most of villa, only for the French Government to halt everything. Then in 2008, Rozhetskin’s body was found back in his homeland, pickling in a bath of acid. (This last bit is Philippe’s contribution, which he heard through business connections; for my husband’s sins he twice dined with the Russian. Truth be told, Mr. Rozhetskin’s whereabouts are a mystery. The Russians claim he’s living in California under the Federal Witness Protection Program. Western news reports mentioned finding Rozhetskin’s blood at his Latvian home on the night he disappeared in 2008, and noted that his private jet then went missing for 48 hours before turning up in Zurich with no passengers.)
Meanwhile, alongside the morbid backstory, the Aga Khan’s old pad on the Cap remains a wrecked half-shell. But in the last six months or so, our estate agent friends said, a developer has bought the property and has been tidying the debris. (You can spy the work behind the estate’s opaque wall if you hop off your bike and scale the stones.) Even with no sea view, the asking price is a cool EUR 25 million. Offers have been forthcoming for EUR 14, 15 and 18 million. The big hitch, according to Angela: the rebuild must mirror the original Aga Khan house – windows, turrets and all.
Villa Pamplemousse – the 4.5-or-so-acre property on Cap d’Antibes that sold for somewhere between EUR 21 and 25 million three years ago (and the property at which Angela had suggested Philippe toss EUR 21 million) – is back on the market. The purchaser tarted up the mediocre house, adding a lick of paint to four-decade-old style, and now rents the place for EUR 300,000 – 400,000 a month. He’s offering the estate for EUR 50 million – and already has turned down an offer for EUR 40 million.
Château de la Croë, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich’s palace at the tip of the Cap, is being remodeled. Again. Angela has rented out a flat for the chef and new construction crew. But heh, styles have changed since the château’s facelift done a couple years ago for EUR 300 million. (No, that’s not a typo.)
Volupté serves up some of the best cappuccinos in the Côte d’Azur.
Best Coffee: Volupté on Rue Hoche in Cannes. The cappuccino is becoming famous along the shoreline, and the trendy barista tells me it’s all in the milk. I’m thinking it’s his swirling motion before the pour. The Italian owner says it’s the full-cream latte they import from Italy. While you’re seated in this casual cafe, try a Volupté salad with home-cured salmon, or a sundried tomato-provolone-avocado-arugula sandwich, or a peach iced tea, or a homemade fruit crumble – or basically anything on their freshest-of-the-fresh menu. The people-watching isn’t bad either.
Best Rosé Wine: Rosé is the wine of a Côte d’Azur summer. For the price – and for a good French rosé, you needn’t tear out your pockets – we like Château Rasque. Château Minuty was our fave last year.
You can hardly go wrong with this choice in a Côte d’Azur summer.
Best Ice Cream: Has to be where the heart is, and this would be Lolo’s heart. Her self-declared boyfriend is the cupid-winged Eros, and his parents own the Gelateria Pinocchio franchise in Juan-les-Pins. The gelato is scrumptious, and they arrange it in a cone in the shape of – get this – a rose. It’s sweetness that goes straight to the heart.
Best Pan Bagnat: It’s basically salade Niçoise on a bun. Try Chez Josy, the beach kiosk with a blue-and-white-striped awning on Antibes’ Plage de la Salis. The boulangerie across the street (on l’Ilette) does a bang-up job, too, but a pan bagnat tastes better with sand between your toes.
Best Baguette: Depends what you like. We like crusty on the outside, chewy on the inside, so I head to our local Boulangerie de l’Îlette in Antibes for une baguette du grand siècle. Bread made the old-fashioned way. But get there early.
Best Brioche aux Raisins: Ditto. The under-baked ones are especially luscious.
Best Pain au Chocolat: Boulangerie L’Epi d’Or, the boulangerie along Old Town Antibes’ Rue de la Republique. Or as Lolo would say, try absolutely anywhere.
Best Breadsticks: Yes, crackers. They’re not what you’d expect to find in a fresh, French boulangerie, but these sticks are a bit chewy and very tasty – and frankly, it’d be a shame not to mention Boulangerie Hasselbach, a favourite Old Town Antibes boulangerie where you can’t make a bad choice.
I worry: Is it all about food?
Best Choquettes: Taste these sugar-crusted, airy, two-bite pastries (dubbed “posh Timbits” by one Canadian visitor) from the boulangerie on Rue Chabaudin Cannes. If they don’t make choquettes on the day you stop in, try their gorgeous craquelin. Then quick, get on your bike.
Best Pilates : Conveniently located from Volupté’s famous cappuccinos and the boulangerie with the ambrosial choquettes, Lucille at Cannes Pilates on Rue Hoche makes exercise bearable. Guys even do it.
Hiking the Sentier Touristique de Tirepoil is one of the best ways to glimpse Cap d’Antibes’ sumptuous villas…
Best Hike: I’m going local with the Sentier Touristique de Tirepoil, or sometimes called the Sentier du Littoral, which is basically a hike around the tip of the Cap d’Antibes. Start at Plage de la Garoupe and hike a stone pathway along the sea with glimpses into grand estates. Pass alongside Abramovich’s Château de la Croë (you’ll know it by the helicopter windsock and the burly guard patrolling the sea wall.), and avoid taking the obvious path inland (called, interestingly, Chemin des Douaniers, or “Path of the Customs Officers”). Instead twist along the coastline as far as possible into the next bay called Anse de Faux Argent (“Bay of False Money”, which has been re-titled on tourist maps as the more appealing Baie des Milliardaires, or “Bay of Billionaires”). Glimpse what you can before returning to Chemin des Douaniers and winding through back streets to complete the loop.
Best Way to Feel Local (albeit briefly): Be on the receiving end of this line: “Bonjour, Madame. Est-ce que vous connaissez cette ville?” Do you know this city? And then answer with a sure (but, critically, a short), “Oui.”
This summer a French woman asked me this question in Old Town Antibes. The exchange began perfectly. I looked like a local – one of them! Then it all fell apart. The actual directions came out in stumbling French. The visitor couldn’t believe her bad luck. She listened briefly, watched my hand wave, and then galloped off in that general direction.
…such as Roman Abramovich’s storied Château de la Croë…
Best Way to Know You Haven’t Totally Succumbed: Visit our neighbours.
Okay, this excursion is aimed at armchair travelers rather than real-life ones, but the scene is too good not to share. And it does remind me that while our family adores the Rivieran lifestyle, we don’t actually go the whole hog. Hearteningly so.
The H’s live across the street from Bellevue. They’re a Vienna-based family of six, plus nannies and housekeepers and a driver. He’s an über-quick private equity chap. She’s a former doctor with a full figure and long, unruly hair. During our last weekend in Antibes, the Austrians invited our simple family of three for a pre-dinner drink. (It was here that we brought the Souverain painting.) The H’s 13-year old son popped the champagne cork. Their tiny, eight-year old daughter carried wine and glasses to a table on their balcony that overlooks our own Bellevue. Then the boy disappeared, and the girl and Lolo scampered into the house to play.
…before continuing your journey onward to the so-called Bay of Billionaires.
The H’s hadn’t realized we were in residence – our shutters facing them remained closed – or else they would’ve invited us to meet their American friends earlier this summer. Do we know the Pritzkers? (You mean the family that owns the Hyatt and has placed cornerstones at both my alma maters?) Well one branch of the famed Pritzker family rented out the Domaine la Dilecta. (You mean you can rent out the castle on the top of Cap d’Antibes? The place with grounds as vast as an amusement park?) Mind you, Mrs H said, there’s no breeze up there, and no ocean view, so the family ended up sitting by the pool all day or else visiting the H’s home.
Another nearby family joined us on the second (or was it the third?) glass of champagne. He’s a New York investment banker; she’s a drop-dead Czech. They’d recently met their Russian oligarch neighbour, who brought them a nice bottle of wine and told them, “You can’t choose your neighbours.”
Mrs H and the gorgeous Czech lit cigarettes. They were upwind. They’d met a few years back at Plage Keller. Did I go often? (Never.) I should join them! Do I like going to the beach? (Um, occasionally. Very occasionally. But if you mean frittering away every day on a lounger, getting pink and pickled while smoking like an old deux-chevaux, um, non.)
Domaine la Dilecta has intrigued me since I first stumbled on it at the top of Cap d’Antibes.
We should stay for dinner, the H’s insisted – all six adults and six kids of us. Never mind that the family would fly back to Vienna the next day, their driver following with the bags. The kitchen was stocked. Out came a platter of John Dory filets. Out came a side of beef. Out came hot dogs and tuna casserole and shrimp and Caesar salads, all whipped up in a jiffy. Out came six bottles of wine. Really, they insisted, we must stay.
We all accepted their generosity. Surely, I thought, as the family was closing up the house, they wanted to deplete their stockpile. (Mrs H explained they habitually keep this volume of food in their kitchen. Russian friends come knocking without notice and demand dinner.)
Conversation meandered among German bonds and French tax laws. (The New Yorker shares a Monaco banker with French-tax-disgraced Michael Schumacher.) The other women went for smokes. The men and I moved onto yachts and Russian oligarchs. Abramovich, I learned, dines out in Old Town Antibes with his bodyguards at Le Broc en Bouche. (Quite fluent myself in Antibes’ restaurant scene, I’ve never actually heard of this spot. The New Yorker described it as “very expensive” but said nothing about the quality of its food.) We drank more wine and the world shrank.
Wasn’t it nice how the kids played! Mrs H suggested a pottery outing next summer in nearby Vallauris. And no worries! We could pop all the kids in one car, and her driver would take them. No need for us to join! (Surely then we could while away the hours at Plage Keller….)
That night I stumbled back home and did a load of laundry.
Sometimes the Maltese Falcon graces the seas off the Côte d’Azur.
Best Way to Feel Poor: Walk along the so-called “Billionaire’s Row” at the furthest reach of Port Vauban in Antibes. The views change daily but might include the three-masted, 289-foot Maltese Falcon, Abramovich’s 282-foot Ecstasea megayacht (complete with GE gas turbine – think of a commercial jet engine stuck on the back of the boat for extra power),or Russian billionaire Suleiman Kerimov’s 295-foot Ice (with colour-coordinating helicopter). Or come back again and find Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s 301-foot Tatoosh, or German heiress Heidi Horten’s 318-foot Carinthia VII. Strut around like you own the place – even though you clearly don’t.
Best Beach Restaurant: Our favourite, anyway, is Vegaluna on La Croisette in Cannes. We head there most Sunday lunchtimes for the freshest tartare de saumon or carpaccio de daurade – and there’s even an animator to entertain the kids while we sip our rosé.
Most Overrated: The beaches – if you know anything about Florida, Acapulco, the Seychelles or Australia. Forget the notion of powdery, white sands, though the people-watching is top-notch.
Also overrated is the romantic notion of driving in the Côte d’Azur during the month of August. It’s hardly a surprise with everything on offer. A local friend showed me a short cut from Antibes to Cannes that avoids the congested seaside road. It involves maneuvering one-way circuits, scaling a cliff, and dodging bicycles and baby buggies in the city of Vallauris – and sometimes, yes, it is faster.
Best Freebies: Sachets and miniature tubes of toiletries from the pharmacies. The French adore their creams – and they have one for every ailment, from cellulite to split-ends. Ask a couple questions chez le pharmacien and emerge with gifts.
Best Market: I have to hand it to our local one in Antibes. Le Marché Provençal is abundant, varied and regular: it operates every day in summertime. A great place to find tapenades, squash blossoms, marinated garlic, figs, donkey sausage, chick-pea based soccas – and more normal things like carrots, apples and cheese.
Best Cheese: Special mention in le Marché Provençal must go to the fromager, my so-called Cheese Man, the guy with a full, bushy beard who’s situated midway through the market along the street side. I don’t know his name, nor he mine, but we both know that my family adores enormous hunks of his Parmigiano-Reggiano. Among his array of 40-odd goat cheeses, he’ll always find me the perfect, leaf-wrapped chèvre that’s oozing from its crust.
Best Rotisserie Chicken: In Antibes, our favourite is Miam Miam, at the top of Rue Vauban. In Cannes, and especially for the price, visit the Tunisian man’s hole-in-the-wall on Rue Jean Jaurès, opposite the SNCF parking garage.
Okay, maybe the good life could be measured by food….
St Tropez’s carousel is the stuff of fairytales.
Best Carousel: The one in St Tropez, next to the port. It’s double-deckered and nearly as much fun for adults as kids. (I would know.)
Best Kid Activity: They all love Marineland (pronounced as Mah-reen-LAHND) between Antibes and Biot. There’s a killer whale show in the main park; waterslides at Aquasplash; pony rides and climbing frames at La Petite Ferme du Far West (the Small Farm of the Far West); and miniature golf – all linked by the same parking lot. Just expect to be in Satellite Parking 5 if you go when everyone else does.
Encroaching on Marineland’s enduring success – it celebrated its 40th birthday this year – are four adventure parks: le Bois des Lutins, Pitchoun Forest, Labyfolies and Canyon Forest. The ziplines and mazes suit kids and adults alike, all within shaded woods north of Villeneuve-Loubet.
Best New Discovery: TheJazz à Juan musical festival. It’s a seducing, two-week celebration of jazz – by the stars and under the stars – in Juan-les-Pins. (See entry dated July 30, 2010.)
Best Sunset Drink: On the cliffs of Èze Village. Weave on foot through the cobbled village built into a rock face and settle onto the terrace of the five-starred Château Eza for sundowners overlooking Cap Ferrat and the endless Mediterranean.
St Paul de Vence is home to alluring cobbled streets.
Best Touristy Trip:St-Paul de Vence. At some point, you’ve gotta visit this medieval, perched village that hosts the region’s leading contemporary art scene.
Best Day Out: Rent a boat in Antibes’ Port Vauban for a slow cruise eastward. Pass planes landing at Nice Airport, pedestrians parading along Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, and cruise ships anchored in Beaulieu’s deep bay. Tour around Cap Ferrat’s peninsula of homes with personal funiculars. Drop anchor off Paloma Beach and hail the restaurant’s water taxi for an afternoon of swimming, dining and relaxing on the pebbly beach.
Best Way to Get Away: When you’ve had enough of the high life, pop over to les Îles de Lérins. A short ferry crossing from Cannes, Golfe Juan or Juan-les-Pins, you can meander through the islands’ shaded pathways. The hustle of the Riveria vanishes. On the larger of the two inhabited islands, Île Sainte-Marguerite, you can visit Fort Royal and its cell that housed The Man in the Iron Mask in the 17th century; you can visit the Musée de la Mer to learn about the area’s shipwrecks (fascinating); and you can enjoy a simple meal. The smaller island, Île Saint-Honorat, is even more memorable in my mind. Bring a picnic and wander the vineyards tended by the island’s resident monks. And if you get your timing right, climb an 11th-century fortified monastery, or hear Gregorian chant at the monastic community’s mass.
St Honorat Island has served as home to a monastic order for more than a millennium. The monks still live there today.
By the end of August, Canadian friends began dubbing my family as “les bons vivants.” Ready or not, it was time to return to North America. To real life.
Toronto has welcomed us with outstretched arms. Philippe’s back doing deals, and Lolo’s school year began with gleeful reunions. For me, too, there’s an energy about the place – a productive energy – that doesn’t exist in the long-lunching, celeb-studded French Riviera. And it’s invigorating.
Do I miss these best-of-the-best bits of the Côte d’Azur? Well, let’s say I’m doing my best to overwrite them with Canadian equivalents. A couple cafés down Yonge Street could rival Volupté’s creamy cappuccinos, and I must confess to re-familiarizing myself with Timbits. They’re pretty, darned delicious. What’s more, Toronto is enjoying its own moment in the celebrity-soaked sunshine with the kick-off of the Toronto Film Festival.
I’m still looking for the quintessential beach restaurant, though. And Canadian cheeses are sold in sanitary, plastic-sealed hunks. The French baguettes are, well, not French. Of course the gossip is less global – with a decline in the price tags by a factor of 200. And just a week into September, I’m already longing for the Côte d’Azur’s boring weather forecast (“it’s sunny again today, folks”).
Last week I was sitting in a quiet hotel bar in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, drinking gin-and-tonics with my friend Abigail. What better place, in the heart of mosquito-ridden Africa, to swap stories about the French?
Abigail, an American, sold French bonds in the 90s at a leading French bank in Paris. Life is intense within any trading arena, but hers was additionally buffeted by cross-cultural expectations. A male trading colleague once looked her petite figure up and down, for example, and asked, “Why is your shirt buttoned up so high?”
But this Wharton graduate had business to do. One day a client from Putnam, the Boston money manager, rang Abigail at 1:00 p.m. Back across the Atlantic, it would’ve been 7:00 a.m., smack at the bell of Boston’s trading day. The client wanted a quote.
Abigail looked over at the trading desk – the same arena where her buttons were scrutinized – to get a price. At least one of the bank’s two traders was meant to occupy the desk at all times, toilet and smoke breaks included. This day Abigail was stunned. Both traders were gone.
On investigating, she found a note: “Fermé. Au dejeuner.” Closed. At lunch.
Abigail returned to her Boston-based caller. Call Goldmans or First Boston in London, she advised. Surely there a trader would be chained to his desk.
In this market outside Lilongwe, business thrives…
My husband Philippe and I joined Abigail last week in Malawi and Mozambique to visit some microfinance projects that we sponsor through Opportunity International. On each trip we are heartened by the entrepreneurial spirit of the poorest Africans. By lending these people just a tiny bit of capital, they somehow transform their business ideas into enduring ventures – and thereby transform their own lives and those of their families.
Not that the African orange seller becomes Tropicana in one day. No, there’s a certain custom of slowness that pervades much of Africa. A certain recognition that, while time might be money, the rules are different on the Dark Continent.
One afternoon, an hour-and-a-half into a bumpy journey into the Malawian countryside, Abigail, Philippe and I wanted to know how much longer we’d travel until meeting our agricultural client. It was nearing 4:00 p.m., and we knew darkness fell quickly this close to the equator. The roads had no lights. Ten minutes earlier, the local lending officer who led our journey had announced that we were “here” – but we continued to drive deeper into the countryside.
…in spite of the simpler circumstances.
As our van swerved down this pothole-ridden lane at 15 kilometers per hour, Philippe finally asked the loan officer a simple question: “I’m just curious. How far is ‘here’ from ‘here’?”
“About 20 kilometers,” she said. (We did a quick calculation and turned around.)
This mentality of slowness – of life happening at a pace dictated by the day’s circumstances – is hardly surprising in a land where walking is one of the main forms of transportation. But on reflection, the mindset isn’t so different in France.
Take a recent report on the (lack of) usefulness of “gross domestic product,” a standard, globally-accepted, economic measure. It was French President Nicolas Sarkozy who, back in 2008, commissioned a study of GDP’s appropriateness in measuring prosperity, and it was he who unveiled the results (with a note of victory) last September.
GDP could be improved, he announced, by including factors other than pure market measures in calculating the statistic. By recognizing that more holidays and better government services (health care, education and child care, for example) contribute toward personal well-being.
And guess what? In making these adjustments, France’s real GDP per person (using 2005 figures from the study) zoomed from 73% of America’s to 87%. Measured in this way, the gap narrowed between French and American household incomes.
Of course it took the French – the folks who have been known to close trading desks for long lunches – to put this spin on the real world. If you think about it, it’s a bit like Nestlé’s scientists reporting, as they did in February, that eating chocolate increases your metabolism.
Interminable lunches – it is true – are a marvelous piece of French life. Peter Mayle writes about them with masterful wit. Enjoy the set menu! Chat with your friends! Knock back a glass of rosé. Maybe six!
And no matter what, you have to admire the French adherence to la belle vie. But have you ever tried to get your shopping done under this regime? I mean, shopping – American-style?
A couple days ago I popped by the dry cleaner’s with an armful of dusty clothing from our African suitcases. Despite the fact that Antibes rocks with double its resident population at this time of year, the dry cleaner’s lights were out. A scrawled note was stuck to the inside of his door. Fermé. Congé annuel.
The dry cleaner’s holiday had begun on August 11. He would return to his post on September 11. A full month later.
The laid-back lifestyle comes in smaller doses, too. A couple years ago I discovered that some shops advertise that they’re open “Non-Stop.” At first I rejoiced in the newfound efficiency of my days. I remembered back to the late 80s in Chicago when my local Dominick’s grocery store stayed open 24/7.
But wait. This is France. “Non-Stop” simply means that a shop doesn’t close up in the middle of the business day for a two-plus-hour lunch break. This is the land of the Adjusted GDP.
And store hours, even when they are advertised, can be flexible. One Friday morning in July, I stood with Toronto visitors in front of En Sortant de l’École, an adorable toy shop in Cannes, at 10:55 a.m. The lights were out. Friday store hours were posted on the locked door as 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. (probably with a long lunch break in-between).
We returned to the store just after noon. The lights were on, and the small shop buzzed with young families. Hilary, our guest, overheard one shopper complaining to the proprietor about the late opening that day.
The proprietor’s simple response? She’d been up late the night before. (And with the answer, I imagine she shrugged her shoulders.)
It all stacks up to this: France has an enduring devotion to personal time. Our family sees it markedly through Sabrina, our French au pair.
Sabrina does magnificent work with five-year-old Lolo; that’s hardly the point. But overtime – anything beyond the standard, French 35-hour working week – well, that’s not her bag. Not that she wouldn’t do it if we asked, but left to her druthers, work is a capped portion of her days. Extra time, even paid at 150%, is hardly the juicy, bankrolling enticement that our former (American) nannies enjoyed.
Anyway, the Government caps annual overtime hours (and overtime pay). Even if you wanted to work them, 220 extra hours are all you legally can do here in a year. In a year! Let’s see, on average that would push the standard 35-hour work week up to a whopping 39.25 hours.
As hard-wired as the 35-hour week is, so is the idea of working for the French Government. According to the OECD’s 2009 statistics, 22% of the French labour force works for the State. That’s a full 8 percentage points higher than the OECD average.
And why not? Government work in France is a coveted role, swaddled in enticements, like juicy retirement plans that shield workers from the brutality of market forces pummeling the private world. Conversely, North American graduates tend to avoid Government jobs, seeking the upside potential in private industry – or even starting out their own.
Which means that profits are overrated here, too. France is, in fact, one of the few European countries to impose an annual “fortune” tax on bigger assets, giving its citizens the incentive to earn less. The whole play of demand-and-supply becomes theoretical jibberish. But then again, this is the land that’s re-writing Economics 101.
Take our local Boulangerie de l’Ilette. Their choquettes – two-bite puff pastry creations, lightly glazed and sprinkled with pearled sugar – are ambrosial. Our bakers could sell choquettes to the world. But no. You want to taste the feathery sweetness of a choquette? To let its fine pastry melt in your mouth as you sip a coffee? Then make sure you’re at the front of the boulangerie’s queue by 10:00 a.m. No later. Oh, and it had better be a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday.
Of course France has its exceptions. There are folks here who mirror Agnes Lipita, the former Malawian schoolteacher who quit teaching in order to build a school that serves hundreds of poor children. Or the 22-year-old Mozambican man I met who continues to enlarge his provisions shop in a dusty Maputo market with a third, consecutive loan – while supporting his wife and child on the side.
Here in the South of France, we have a friend Lorenzo, a high-tech specialist whose ambition actually frustrates him. He regrets not accepting Job X in Saudi Arabia. Now Job Y is a dead-end. He wants a house, not an apartment. He wants to work harder. He wants to get ahead. But here in the sunny, laid-back Côte d’Azur, it’s tough to do so.
Oops. I forgot. Lorenzo’s from Sicily. He’s actually Italian.
But Lorenzo makes me realize that ambitious people, ones who aren’t satisfied with the status quo, should holiday in the French Riviera. Even retire here. But they should hardly pass their prime working years on its easygoing shoreline. It’s the steady-as-you-go regime who can fulfill their happiness indices working in the area.
Nor am I complaining. Truth is, our family can hardly get enough of this place. For all its oddities – all the hiccups that the French lifestyle deals to my days – I’m here by choice. So are the planeloads and carloads who rock up on these celebrated shores in the summertime. And I know a lot of other people who’d join us on the next flight, given the chance.
The indices agree. Every January, publishing group International Living creates a Quality of Life Index that ranks the attractiveness of living in 194 different countries. In its 2010 rating, the group reveals that the winner is . . . France. For the fifth year in a row.
When you’ve got a good thing going, keep it going.
There’s a certain irony about France’s winnings. Living here is hardly easy. It’s hardly just an issue of lunchtime store closures. Grocery shopping is an almighty schlep. Finding parking can be a fury. Try opening a bank account without a friendly contact and you’ll chew up months and phone cards seeking the correct documentation.
But it seems that all the other things about France – the romantic stuff that carries you away with the place, as well as its first-world standards – are worth more than all the troubles combined. Sure, International Living’s Quality of Life Index considers straight-talking things like the economy. It also assesses each country’s cost of living (and in tax-ridden France, that’s a consideration).
But the Quality of Life Index also puts significant weight on more nebulous concepts like culture and leisure, the environment, freedom, health, infrastructure, safety and risk, and climate. Stick all these factors into the blender, churn vigorously, et voilà!
Out pops France, on top of the milkshake. Again.
The Anglos – outside the Aussies and Kiwis – didn’t make the top five. The US came in 7th, offering top-notch infrastructure even if its health care and freedom points fell below what’s typical among its competitors. Canada ranked a close 9th. The UK, hit by a very high cost structure, ranked 25th.
Compared to this motley club, France’s cost of living was its only laggard (and still fared hugely better than Britain’s). Everything else – except for its economy, which was hit like everyone else’s in 2009 – was pretty stellar. France’s health care even was declared the best in the world.
A swift trip to southern Africa reminds me there’s even less reason to complain about French idiosyncrasies. Mozambique scored 151st on the index. Slammed for its health care and an (unjustly labeled) utter lack of leisure and culture, its final score tied with Uzbekistan, Cambodia and Iran.
Malawi came in a relatively decent 115th, with no major glitches and a lovely, equatorial climate. Its final score placed it alongside Thailand, Russia, Lebanon and Bahrain.
Still, it’s a long way to the top for these countries.
Do France’s winnings add up? The country is the best place to live (and from this statistic, I’m extrapolating the best place to visit, too). It has the best health care in the world, surrounded by a top-notch infrastructure, climate, environment and sense of safety and freedom. And it offers oodles of leisure and culture to boot.
But take all this delectable goodness – and set it against the 35-hour working week with restricted overtime. Set it against long lunches and flexible store hours. Against the overwhelming Government workforce. Toss in, too, the State restrictions on competition – such as centrally controlled rules about when stores can have sales (see blog dated 11 February 2009).
It’s a bit like the coveted French diet. Lots of foie gras and red wine, croissants and dark chocolate, and still the French don’t get fat. It’s all a bit too good to be true.
Which is probably the case with the economy, too. Today’s France has a lot to offer its inhabitants and its visitors. Some of the bounty is thanks to its climate. Some of it flows from the legacy of Louis XIV. But France’s advantages in the world will wear thin as the country lives beyond its means. Things are likely to change.
And they are. Slowly. France’s 35-hour work week and overtime rules are more flexible now than they were five years ago. Government pensions are becoming less juicy and more market-oriented. The regulations governing store sales have eased up a bit. France is actually home to more Fortune 500 companies now than Germany is. Competition will rise.
Which, frankly, could be a good thing for France’s Quality of Life rankings. Assuming that the nation can retain its national character – the feted French lifestyle that the President evangelises amid the new GDP calculations – then greater competition in France will be a win-win for locals and visitors alike.
The country’s cost of living should fall. Stylish French clothing, sachets of lavender and jars of marinated garlic could tear smaller holes in our wallets. Eventually we may even discover more “Non-Stop” signs in shop windows.
Some day we might even be able to buy choquettes on Fridays.
And, with reasonable assurance, bonds at lunchtime.
I’ve been asking myself a simple question lately: What makes the Côte d’Azur so special?
I mean, the world has fallen head over heels with nearby Provence, thanks to Peter Mayle and his endless (and hilarious) tales about pigs, truffles and the five-hour lunch that rolls straight into dinner. Meanwhile, across the border in Tuscany, we’ve rebuilt an Italian villa – and a shattered life – with the celebrated Frances Mayes.
And yet the Côte d’Azur is hardly relegated to the shade alongside these destination superstars. Far from it. Already this summer at Bellevue, we’ve hosted visitors who have declared undying love for this place. Folks who have delayed their return flights. Others who have launched into song at her aura.
The world is drawn to this southeastern corner of France – as are the French who don’t already live here. On certain days, starting July 9 this year and focusing on the weekends, the Bison Futé, a French government website, has warned that the roads are “red.” The A8 and A9 motorways from Paris and along the southern coast are so plugged that you may as well turn around and go home – or stay on holiday. Today is one of those days.
What increases the intensity of this Côte d’Azur phenomenon is that the French pretty much take their holidays in unison. Starting around Bastille Day on July 14th and ending just before La Rentrée, the very beginning of September when schools start up and the rest of the working world gets back to their desks, the number of inhabitants surrounding Bellevue swells. It took Philippe and me a full hour and 40 minutes to drive 28 kilometers on Monday night. On Monday night!
Sure, weather is a draw in the CDA. We’ve barely seen a drop of rain in a couple months now. The sky is always sunny – and the forecast constantly expecting more of the same.
But you could say the same thing about the Sahara Desert. There’s obviously more going on here. A whole lot more. And every now and then, I’m fortunate to get a special insight to the Côte’s enduring appeal. I stumble on the perfect 10.
(Yes, sure, we’ve welcomed Bo Derek to lunch at Bellevue – see blogs dated June 9, 10 and 11, 2007 – but at the moment I’m talking about experience. Not curves.)
One of the most seducing things about the Côte d’Azur in summertime is its wealth of music festivals. Jazz à Juan, in our neighbouring Juan-les-Pins, is one of them.
This year was a first for Philippe and me. For the several years we’ve journeyed to this part of the world, we’ve never attended Jazz à Juan. Instead we’ve chosen to hightail it out of Holidayville while the roads were red. Jazz à Juan is a reason to stay.
One of this year’s featured artists was Diana Krall, so we learned in June, and the remaining tickets to see Vancouver’s jazz diva were basically on the climbing structure at the adjacent Pinède playground. Philippe typed a quick email to one of his connected, Vancouverite buddies.
The next morning he received an email from a kind man called Darrell: two complimentary tickets to see Diana would await us at the box office on the night. There were no references to the avenue that had connected Darrell and us – but if we should run into any problems, here was the Danish phone number for Diana’s Tour Manager and the Swedish one for her Production Assistant.
Voilà. Things don’t always happen so perfectly – I do realize this – but we’re living in the marvelous, magical Côte d’Azur during the balmy summertime. All things are possible.
But perfection in the CDA isn’t all about glam. I should point out that our perfect 10 evening also summoned the slower, more personal side of life that is evident in much of France – including its Riviera.
A few days before Diana’s concert, Philippe had lunched with his friend Jean-Louis, the head of Antibes’ Musée Picasso. Here he met Jean-Jacques, Jean-Louis’ forever friend and the new proprietor of La Brasserie, the Antibes restaurant where they dined.
(The French, I must explain, may take a while to create relationships, but once born, these connections endure. Jean-Louis’ description of his long friend Jean-Jacques reminded me of our friend Walid, whose conversations are splattered with friends’ restaurants that we must try (“We were in school together!”), or even their plumbing businesses that we must use.)
Philippe’s new acquaintance Jean-Jacques, as it happened, formerly managed the famed Hôtel Belles Rivesin Juan-les-Pins. Now, in addition to La Brasserie, he’d begun a second restaurant, a beach restaurant smack between the Belles Rives and the Jazz à Juan concert venue. Why didn’t Philippe and I dine there before the Diana Krall concert?
And so that night, Jean-Jacques reserved a seaside table for two, draped in white linen and set with its own bottle of golden olive oil and two different balsamics, on the dock of his new Le Provençal Beach restaurant. As the sun began to set behind the bay, the proprietor organized two glasses of champagne. And while other concertgoers helped themselves to a luscious buffet, Jean-Jacques frequented our table and ensured we could order from his gastronomic menu – and still make the concert on-time.
(Which we could have, except that Philippe and I adore dessert. We chose to invoke French time, which is more elastic than in North America, where my relatives would arrive bewilderingly early to gatherings. Here if we turned up partway through the opening act to Diana’s concert, we reckoned, it’d be just like the French turning up to dinner parties a socially correct, 15-or-so minutes late.)
On our own time, Philippe and I ambled to the venue. Adding to our wonder on the perfect evening, two comp tickets actually showed up for us in the box office. And a couple “Krall After Show” passes to boot.
Kyle Eastwood enraptures the Jazz à Juan crowd (as caught on a forbidden iPhone).
Our seats were at the very top of the center section, in the so-called Loge area, directly looking down onto the stage. We scooted to them during a pause in the warm-up band headed by the son of Clint Eastwood on bass, with trumpet, sax, keyboards and drums.
Eastwood was dressed all in black. His face filled two large, onstage screens. His hair was sandy blonde and tousled. The rest of the screen showed a young Clint.
The French, I soon observed, don’t keep Mediterranean time when it comes to concerts. All rows at this Jazz à Juan concert already were filled, except for our Loge section. Crowds stood like penned sheep at the right of the stage. Given the virtuosity of this ensemble – which was much more than a group of musicians riding on the glory of a famous father – we maybe should’ve skipped dessert.
The backdrop was equally enthralling: this glorious golf teeming with pleasure craft; Abramovich’s glitzy new, 377-foot Luna megayacht; and a virtual painter’s palate scattered in the Mediterranean sunset. Traffic hummed softly behind Philippe and my seats on the sultry evening, while an occasional, musical refrain from nearby beach restaurants tinkled into the arena during the quieter moments on stage. But the world buzzed superfluously to its own beat while the concert crowd tuned in perfectly to the stage.
As Eastwood and his crew shared the lead, I realized the seats in the Loge weren’t just top-notch; they were at the center of this musical world. A few spots over stood the production platform, housing the handful of backstage types who wielded an enormous spotlight, monitored the sound balance and laughed into headphones with crew members hidden elsewhere within the arena.
Between our seats and this platform was a small section three seats wide. In that section, one row back, was a female fan club for Eastwood and his gang. They bounced up and shrieked after every piece. They snapped forbidden photos – venue staff were guarding a tableful of confiscated cameras at the entry door – and then stuffed the cameras back into their handbags.
I whipped out my iPhone and snapped a couple shots myself. Here’s one of them:
Eastwood dedicated his second-to-last song to his fille – using this single, French word in an otherwise English discourse. His fille likes funk, he said.
The audience murmured. They seemed to say, “Nice try with the French, Eastwood. But fille?” Did he mean his daughter, as the French word indicated? Or did he refer to his girlfriend? (I later learned that audience interest probably related to the paparazzi-style debate about who, exactly, Eastwood is dating these days.)
Eastwood’s bass rocked as he punched out a jaunty tune. When he began to improvise, the woman next to me, seated in that narrow section of seats, came to life. She treaded her slender fingers against each other. Her left ring finger was stacked high with mod, silver rings. Her narrow shoulders hunched over as she fidgeted, as if she was trying to get closer to the music. Her feet tapped the offbeat.
The musician’s offbeat. While audiences tend to tap out beats 1 and 3 in a song, musicians encourage 2 and 4. It doesn’t drag the tempo. The slender woman next to me knew music. She was involved.
When Eastwood swapped his lead to the trumpet player, the woman’s fingers stopped moving. She pulsed a handheld fan in front of her face. The funk piece finished to grand applause, and the three women in the back row of that narrow section jumped up. They hooted louder than ever. The woman with the silver rings – and I now glimpsed more closely her angular face, her long, dark hair and her strappy, black dress painted with large flowers that showed the back of her black bra – this woman remained in her seat. She spun in my direction and said to the woman behind her, “Kyle and I were playing with this song in his front room, and I said you have to put it on your record.”
I peeked at our complimentary ticket stubs. Kyle was Eastwood Jr’s first name.
“She’s the fille!” I said to Philippe, as if I’d just solved some mystery. Suddenly I was filled with regret. Had the fille overheard my earlier comments? When, as Eastwood’s face filled the screen, I asked Philippe how old the musician would be? How I said that close-ups like that do no favours?
Smack at the end of the set, the fille in black jumped up and shot, presumably, backstage. Eastwood and his gang returned for an encore. The back row groupies snapped liberally with their cameras.
A security guard bounded toward the woman closest to us. He scolded her in French and then, presumably because she looked puzzled, he asked, “Est-ce que vous comprenez le français?” Do you understand French?
The woman stammered in English. Yes, she understood the rule, she said with a lilting Southern drawl, but what did this man think she was going to do with the photos anyway? “I’m his mother!” she declared.
Maggie Johnson, a former swimsuit model, was Clint Eastwood’s first wife, the one who lasted 25 years with him and bore two children. Kyle was the elder. His sister was Alison.
The guard held his dignity in the face of Clint Eastwood’s former wife by explaining that, okay, she wasn’t a problem, but if the rest of the audience saw her taking photos, they’d think it was okay for them to do so, too. (My hand floated to check that the iPhone was tucked well into my handbag.)
In the fluster, Maggie lost a lens from her glasses. I helped her scour the floor. She was beautiful, with gentle facial features and shoulder-length, snow-white hair clipped away from her face. She wore a shapely, white cotton shirt and a light pink skirt that would’ve twirled if she spun circles.
A woman two down from Maggie – another one of the groupies – found the lens. She thanked me and passed the lens to Maggie. “Here,” she said. “Just put the glasses away, Mom.”
Alison, Kyle’s sister, was a pretty blonde who wore a navy sundress that was more structured than the fille’s. Between Alison and her mother sat a teenage girl with a high, dark ponytail. “That was great!” was all I heard her say when she began climbing down the stands. But Philippe overheard more. The dark-haired girl was Maggie’s granddaughter. Kyle’s daughter from his first wife. Perhaps even the fille he had mentioned.
Maggie put her glasses in her purse. As she started down the staircase next to me, presumably to find her son, she turned to say with her gentle drawl, “Thanks for being so understanding.” A proper belle to the end.
Diana Krall’s concert – the headline act – was equally enthralling, if only for the right reasons. She came onstage at 10pm, when the Juan-les-Pins sky finally had darkened. Luna and her nautical neighbours sparkled in the bay. Just up the coastline, the green light of Port Gallice’s lighthouse flickered three times on each revolution.
Playing alongside a guitar, bass and drums, the celebrated jazz pianist and singer from Vancouver seemed to use 12 fingers to craft improvisations on a Steinway. Even more stunningly, her mellow, cabaret-style voice sang along to an entirely different rhythm.
Diana wasn’t one to tell stories into the mic, but her love of Canada was clear. She introduced one song saying that it reminded her of Vancouver – even while she bathed in the Riviera’s bliss. Philippe and I quietly praised the Vancouver connection who’d sourced our tickets.
At one point, Diana wove a fleeting phrase of “O Canada”, the national anthem, within a song whose repeated refrain was “Oh, you’re in my blood like holy wine / Tastes so bitter / Tastes so sweet.” It was as if the diva was singing directly to Philippe and me.
On reflection, I’m sure she wasn’t, but all things are possible in the Côte d’Azur.
The concert ended near midnight. Back at Bellevue, we realized that a five-year old doesn’t understand that her parents stayed out late the night before. It is for that reason alone that I still have the Krall After Show tickets on my desk, souvenirs of a perfect evening.
The night of Kyle’s and Diana’s concerts, preceded by a delicious new friendship in Jean-Jacques, shows why the French Riviera, sandwiched between Provence and Tuscany, is so enticing. At least it’s part of the answer. The Côte d’Azur offers both of these bewitching sides of France: a slower pace that’s personal and real – and a hive of activity where you can feel, if only for a moment, that you are at the center of the universe.
The only unfortunate factor in this love affair is that it’s hardly exclusive. The Côte d’Azur’s admiring flocks continue to stream in. The Bison Futé website is forecasting that tomorrow, August 1, will be the worst day of the year for France’s roads – mostly thanks to traffic between Paris and the south.
The government website pronounces that tomorrow’s roads will be “black.”
A few hours after the Moccio family arrived from Toronto, Stephan and I stood at the meat counter in central Antibes’ Carrefour supermarket.
It was hardly the glamourous start to a Côte d’Azur holiday you’d expect for the guy who, just days before, was personally greeting and playing piano for the worlds’ head honchos at the G20 dinner in Toronto. Barack and Michelle, Nicolas and Carla, Silvio, Angela, Dmitry Medvedev, Hu Jintao, Cristina Kirchner, Jacob Zuma, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz are among his newest friends.
No, instead of soaking in the rays on some trendy beach, Stephan Moccio spent his first afternoon in the French Riviera chatting with Carrefour’s butcher, a young man wearing a white smock and wielding a convincing knife. As he wrapped up bits of pure beef for Stephan, the butcher labeled our pianist-composer friend (who I wrote about in Maclean’s magazine) as un cousin. The French adore the Quebecois like Stephan – and his accent gave him away in an instant.
Our musician friend then handed the butcher a package of pre-wrapped chicken breasts. Could he dice these, too, with his clean knife? Stephan didn’t mention the cross-contamination he was trying to avoid.
No problem for un cousin! The butcher declared his love for the most famous French-Canadian, Celine Dion. Stephan mentioned the hit song he wrote for her. It was the beginning of a friendship that would flourish during the Moccios’ two-week stay at Bellevue.
It was simple, unassuming peanuts that brought these two men together.
Philippe and I have welcomed oodles of visitors to Bellevue over several years, but we’ve never dealt with a nut allergy in France – much less over an extended period. Stephan and Hilary’s daughter Elle Sophie, a gentle and engaging five-year old with sparkling brown eyes and cascades of curls, has this allergie mortelle – an anaphylactic (or fatal) peanut allergy.
No peanuts – not even a trace of them – can enter her mouth.
Peanut allergy is hardly uncommon in the US and Canada, particularly among children. Health Canada estimates that up to 6% of the country’s children, and 3 – 4% of its adults, are affected by a food allergy, with peanuts being one of the largest contributors. The Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network says that peanut allergy doubled in US children over the five years to 2002. And there’s no known cure.
Like any food allergy, peanut allergy is life-altering – for everyone involved. The Toronto school where Elle Sophie and our daughter Lolo attend allows no outside food, even for birthdays. Nut-free cupcake shops have sprung up around town and do thriving business. And now our kitchen in Antibes had to be peanut-free, too.
“We used to lead normal lives,” Stephan told me that first afternoon as we waited on the butcher. With peanuts outside his lens, I bet his first holiday visit would’ve been to a fashionable stretch of sand.
In France, on the other hand, hardly anyone discusses peanut allergy. According to L’Allergie Alimentaire à l’Arachnide, a February 2005 study of peanut allergy at the Université Paris XII – Val de Marne, this allergy is increasing rapidly in France, especially in children – but today it still touches only 0.5 – 0.7% of the population.
As such, there’s little awareness here of the peanut issue. Restaurants aren’t used to discussing it. Ditto schools. Two years ago when Lolo attended École St-Philippe in neighbouring Juan-les-Pins, parents coordinated daily snacks for the 33 maternelle classmates with little guidance. Birthdays, practically a weekly celebration, were studded with chocolates and munchies that would’ve been riddled with horror for any nut allergy sufferer.
In fact, I was so clueless about the issue that for Lolo’s fourth birthday party here in France, I prepared peanut butter and jelly sandwiches – an unusual, American treat – for her little invitees. Philippe and Lolo, my peanut butter gourmands, bought into the idea and agreed to share their precious jar of imported, Skippy’s smooth for the party. (Personally I cannot stand the stuff.)
I still remember one little guest Lisa, at the encouragement of her mother, politely placing a dolly sandwich of PB and J on her plate. The four-year old looked up at me with enormous green eyes and then wrinkled her nose. “Qu’est-ce que c’est ça?” What’s that?
I’m genuinely happy to report that no one discovered a peanut allergy at that party. (Truth be told, no French person actually liked the sandwiches either.)
But now, with the arrival of Elle Sophie at Bellevue, our family suddenly faced this North American overlay – the peanut allergy – in France. Surely there’d be little problem, Philippe and I had advised the Moccios as they planned their trip. Everything is locally grown. Locally prepared. There are fewer processed foods in France.
But days before Elle Sophie’s arrival, a quick survey of the local supermarket’s plain chocolate bars – ones we’d use for s’mores or frozen banana treats – warned otherwise. The peanut issue would be less straightforward than we’d hoped.
Elle Sophie scored the top shelf in Bellevue’s refrigerator, where her food remained segregated from the rest. Her stockpile contained those meats from the Carrefour butcher, along with eggs, vegetables, goat milk, prepared couscous salads – every morsel handpicked by her parents. Her meals would be different from ours.
It had to be that way – and we understood completely. Our family doesn’t deal with a fatal food allergy. I can hardly imagine the endless worry and responsibility of those who do.
A couple mornings later as I dressed Lolo in her bedroom, a cloud of garlic wafted in. Beneath her room lies the kitchen. We went to investigate. Stephan was stirring the contents of a frying pan on the stove.
“We’re not usually this hardcore,” he said, but the family had a long day’s car journey ahead, and Elle needed something to sustain her: eggs, mushrooms, a couple cloves of garlic and – what are those green bits? I asked. Hilary produced a bag of dried kale chips that she’d brought in her luggage from Canada.
Stephan hovered over his daughter’s bowl and tasted the concoction. “It’s delicious!” he said.
Yes, sure, but for breakfast? And for a kindergartner? (Until that moment, I’d thought I was the difficult parent, allowing Lolo only half a bowl of chocolaty Chocapic cereal for breakfast and insisting that the remainder be sensible.)
The Moccio family straddled two worlds during their first week of holiday: the intensity of hometown Toronto, a place of work and hub of peanut-sensitive consumers; and the anything-goes of Antibes, a Rivieran town where a constant hum of cicadas serenades beachcombers and “peanut” is hardly an offensive word.
The Marché Provençal is an irresistible attraction to locals and visitors alike.
Leaving this charged world behind – even when he wanted to – was particularly difficult for Stephan. Shortly after arriving in Antibes, he, Hilary and Elle Sophie strolled through the Marché Provençal to pick up some produce and local foods. As Stephan handed the burly cheesemonger a EUR 50 note, a middle-aged woman approached him.
I’m so sorry to bother you, she said, but I can’t help it…. You’re Stephan Moccio, right?
Stephan nodded. The woman lived in Ottawa. She’d just seen his piano concert. She was a fan – and what do you know? Here was Stephan Moccio, the real deal, right here in the produce market of Antibes, France! Could she please have his autograph?
A Frenchman overheard Stephan’s name. He was a fan, too. He’d listened to Stephan’s music for a couple years now. How about another autograph?
It’s tough to make a bad choice. (photo: Steve Muntz)
The cheesemonger wanted Stephan’s attention, too. Your change, Monsieur! Your change!
It’s difficult to be seduced by the Côte d’Azur, to come fully under its carefree spell, when the real world comes along on the journey. Unsurprisingly in hindsight, it was during this more intense half of the Moccios’ stay that Elle Sophie ate from her shelf in the refrigerator – supplemented by dried kale chips, quinoa sticks, peanut-free chocolate and other goodies that Hilary had packed in her suitcase. Restaurant food was cooked ultra-simply, as prescribed by her parents.
And no bread. Definitely no bread for Elle. No pastries or ice creams. Even gelato was a risk. As restaurant and gelateria owners weren’t used to the peanut issue, they erred on the conservative side. Elle Sophie forewent – necessarily so – but she also missed the gourmand experience that makes France, well, France.
Midway through the Moccios’ stay, Philippe and I offered to cook one evening. We’d do our best to ensure everything was peanut-free. We purchased a couple large turbots from our favourite poissonnier in Cannes. We selected des artichauts, des tomates, la salade roquette,and des coco plats (enormous green beans) from a nearby, local marché. I checked and double checked the ingredients of a box of so-called blé gourmand: 100% natural durum wheat. Everything would be cooked simply, using only water and olive oil. Elle Sophie could eat what we ate.
All that remained was the question of bread, the staple of any real, French meal. I headed into Boulangerie Hasselbach, a favourite, family-owned boulangerie in Old Antibes. Unusually for this bakery, no one queued behind me as I made selections.
One of my guests, I explained to the young attendant, has un allergie mortelle aux cacahuetes. Aux arachides, I said, using the alternate word for peanuts. Were Hasselbach’s baguettes peanut-free?
“Je ne comprends pas,” she said.
Of course. When an answer isn’t readily available, no French person understands my French. I explained again, more slowly, more loudly. A queue began to form behind me.
Eventually the young woman made a phone call. Indeed, everything at Boulangerie Hasselbach was peanut-free, she reported. I smiled at ten waiting customers as the attendant wrapped two baguettes à l’ancienne and tartes aux abricots.
That night, Elle Sophie had turbot. She ate blé and coco plats – and her first morsel of French baguette. And I sighed in relief.
Saint-Paul de Vence: The cobbled town of St Paul de Vence perches on a nearby hillside. (photo: Steve Muntz)
The next day the Moccios headed to the artsy, medieval town of Saint-Paul de Vence, about 45 minutes’ drive from Bellevue. At the very peak of this perched, stone village is a church. Across from the church is a gelateria. The Moccios knew disappointment, but it was becoming hard to bear – particularly as the bad news always hit their five-year-old daughter the hardest. Stephan entered the store alone.
Is your gelato peanut-free? He was ready for the usual ho-humming.
It was. The gelateria owner was delighted to report there were absolutely no peanuts in his shop and, in fact, a Canadian family had asked him that very same question one day earlier.
Stephan barely let the man finish his sentence. He bounded out the door and urged Hilary and Elle Sophie into the shop. As the curly-haired girl let the sweet coldness melt on her tongue, she asked her parents quite simply, “Can we drive here every day?”
Buoyed by success, we dined out that evening at Crêperie du Port in Old Antibes. I’d asked about peanuts when making the reservation. Stephan checked again on-site.
No, the crêperie folks insisted, there were no peanuts in their shop (though Stephan and Hilary spotted Nutella, the chocolate-and-hazelnut spread that’s married to crêpes like jelly is to peanut butter).
Pedestrians streamed past our outside table in the cobbled street. Stephan sucked in the cooler night air and flushed it out of his lungs. It was as if he finally was allowing the essence of the Med to soak into his big-city psyche. The charm had begun to work.
“Je suis Antibean,” he said airily.
It sounded a bit like he dubbed himself an amphibian, but Philippe and I understood. Stephan began to feel like someone from Antibes. Like a real Antibois. He belonged here.
“Antibes, je vous aime,” he said, stretching his hands upward in a theatrical plea to the night.
As Stephan – Hilary, too – began to relax into the Côte d’Azur’s arms, they began to trust the area with peanuts, too. Not in an irresponsible way, never, but as their comfort level increased, so did Elle Sophie’s culinary adventures.
The sparkly-eyed girl ate a spinach and cheese crêpe that night.
The next morning Philippe and Stephan scooted out to our neighbourhood Boulangerie de l’Ilette. No peanuts in their shop, they said. The men returned to Bellevue with pains au chocolat, brioches aux raisins, une brioche au sucre, un croustillant aux pommes, and about two dozen choquettes – small, lightly-glazed puffs of French pastry encrusted with nuggets of sugar.
Elle Sophie tasted a choquette. Her dark eyes, already sparkling, could have illuminated the boulangerie’s entire wall of ovens.
That night Chef Emmanuel took up residence in Bellevue’s kitchen. I’d already explained the peanut issue to him – several times. He always told me not to worry. He didn’t cook with peanuts. Even his chocolate, he said, was just chocolate. Pure chocolate.
As we sat for our meal, Hilary launched the bread question. Did the chef know whether the baguette was peanut-free – meaning, devoid of all peanut traces?
Emmanuel grinned. “Mais, c’est la France!” he said. We don’t put peanuts in bread! He was amused by this endless discussion about peanuts.
Hilary persevered. But the boulangerie where you bought it – is it peanut-free?
Emmanuel shook his head. He’d never asked that question. The French aren’t used to dealing with this issue, he said – or as he was implying, this non-issue. “C’est la France!” he said again.
I am sure Elle Sophie missed out on baguette that night. But she did dive into Chef Emmanuel’s most decadent and intense chocolate tarte. And it was legendary.
At bedtime, Hilary asked Elle her favourite part of the evening. There were many highlights. Elle Sophie put her own timeframe on the question. “The sugar breakfast,” she said. Les choquettes. Emmanuel’s chocolate tarte came a close second. The girl with the peanut allergy had tasted her first French pastries, and they were unforgettable.
Les choquettes became a ritual during the Moccios’ last days in France. We mourned Friday when the boulangerie didn’t bake them. Come back tomorrow, they advised. We did – and bought out their supply.
The following day Elle Sophie (reluctantly) returned to Toronto. Today she serves as the city’s most compelling advertisement for fresh French pastries.
My own revolution has been more subtle. From here on, I will praise the simplicity of food in France – its freshness and its lack of industrial processing. And whenever I am fortunate to taste the luscious sweetness of a fresh choquette, I will do so thinking of Elle Sophie – and the extra sparkle in her brown eyes.
My new awareness of nuts in France will hardly go to waste either. Just a few days ago I corresponded with Kathleen, another Toronto friend. She and her family will visit us at Bellevue tomorrow. As an afterthought – just to be sure – I launched the allergy question.
None in her family, she told me. Except for seven-year-old Veronica.
A couple weeks ago Judy, an enthusiastic American friend in Antibes, suggested we enroll in a sailing course at l’École Française de Voile.
The École Française de Voile surely would make us this competent – or are these folks being towed?
It wasn’t the first time I’d entertained the idea. Bellevue overlooks the bay where Club Nautique d’Antibes bases its sailing school. With the hub of Old Antibes as the backdrop, one of my favourite views from Bellevue’s wide balcony is the daily parade of children in tiny, blue-and-white striped sailboats that streams through a busy bay into open waters, the boats linked up by cords and pulled by a motorized dinghy.
As the line of little boats slices through a hive of pleasure cruisers and megayachts, jet skis and water skis, fishing vessels and kayaks, swimmers and scuba divers, I think Babar: the mommy elephant navigating her kids, trunks tied to tails, through the wilds of the African jungle.
As a kid, my experiences with sailboats largely consisted of my brother dumping me overboard on any puff of wind. My few sailing attempts as an adult have been more satisfactory – both calming and exhilarating at the same time. And I wanted to know more.
Fortunately l’École Française de Voile also ran classes for an all-embracing, 14+ age group. Judy and I could take on the Hobie Cat 16 Catamaran, a wholly new experience for me. I accepted her proposal with nearly matching gusto, and joined last week’s class for four afternoons of training plus an all-day sail and pique-nique.
Judy and I were not the only adults enrolled in the course. In our class of 17, a whopping six of us were something other than lanky adolescents or flirting mid-20-year olds. Aurélien, our tanned and sporty, mid-20-something instructor, assigned Marc, another grown-up, to Judy and my catamaran. We would be a team.
Straight away, I knew two things about Marc. First, he liked to eat, as evidenced by a sizeable paunch. Second, he spoke French. Just French. Judy rolled her eyes.
The first thing we had to learn was our ship. Aurélien gathered our group at the edge of a Hobie Cat 16. As we baked in the Côte d’Azur’s humid sunshine, he barked the basics and began rigging the machine.
Aurélien pounded one of the Cata’s two hulls. “La coque,” he said. He cast an eye at Judy and me and made some joke about how the word translates to Anglophones. I smirked back.
La barre (literally a bar) controls the two safrans (rudders), and this contraption – the steering mechanism of our boat – would be governed by le stick.
Of course une coque would have un stick. And le stick is always in charge.
Aurélien moved on to the sails. As he hoisted the smaller, front sail – the one we’d call the jib in English – he barked its name: “Le foc!”
Of course it is.
Sailing is a cinch for Judy and me – at least during these five seconds.
I looked around. No one else smiled. Education is serious stuff in France. And now I began to get serious, too. I wondered how I possibly could go about sailing this week, saying these words to Judy, my American ex-cheerleader friend?
And to Marc, this new Frenchman who would hardly let me resort to more civilized words like “hull” and “jib”?
What would Aurélien say to us as we shoved off into the sea? Mount la coque?
And to get moving – what? – we grab le stick?
Once sailing the high seas, would I summon that ever-useful French verb faire (meaning “to make” or “to do” – the verb used in a huge variety of combinations), and call out to my teammates that I’d fais le foc?
When Aurélien finished his introductory lesson, Judy, Marc and I headed to our stripped Cata. My two sailing mates had taken this course a year earlier, so they scrambled to arrange a mind-boggling array of lines and pulleys, cleats and eyelets. I was still stewing over la coque, le stick and le foc – like it was some big, bad joke, totally on me.
Was le foc like une otarie? I asked Marc. I clapped the back of my hands together like a seal.
Une otarie, I’d discovered last year at the local Marineland, is a sea lion. It looks much like a seal, the poor, unsuspecting species that’s been dubbed by the French as un phoque. When my young daughter was learning her French animal words, I always avoided that flashcard.
Non, Marc told me while rigging the main sail. The jib sail is not like a sea lion. He could’ve ended his sentence with a frank, “Stupid,” but he didn’t. Instead he gave me a moment to explain the linguistic gymnastics going on inside my head between un foc, un phoque, and une otarie. (I waited a day or two to venture into the Anglophone take on le foc.)
Meanwhile our coque was headed into the water. Aurélien gathered the group for a quick explanation of sailing. He spoke in familiar, local French, slurring the Parisian language that most students learn in overseas language schools. Between his accent and my pre-occupation with the Cata’s nomenclature, all I could grasp were two important rules:
(i) Le stick rules everything.
(ii) Le foc should always follow.
Which aren’t bad rules for sailing actually. But I hardly plan to pass them along to my daughter.
Needless to say, my first day of sailing was less than world-class. Aurélien’s sole chance to watch me with le stick held tightly in my fingers brought him motoring alongside our boat, yelling something about the sea and the earth. Even in slight winds and a calm sea, all I could yell back to him was, “Je ne comprends pas.” I don’t understand.
I couldn’t sail. I couldn’t communicate. I couldn’t rig the boat – or unrig it either. I was bottom of the class.
Abramovich’s new boat looks pretty welcoming.
Things improved on Day Two – including my attitude. I learned how to stop the Cata midstream. (Who knew a boat had brakes!) I learned that Marc was an affable man, a retired mathematics and computer teacher from the international high school in Fountainbleu who wished he was more gifted in foreign language. A special treat, our team even grabbed a few close-up looks at Roman Abramovich’s newest beauty, Luna, a 377-foot megayacht complete with aft-deck beach club, that had swanned in to Antibes’ bay.
On Day Two I also grasped the derivation of the word, le boom. It’s the same sailing term in English, just pronounced with a French twist, and denotes the heavy, swinging arm at the bottom of the main sail. (Fortunately in French sailing terminology, le boom hasn’t morphed into le bang.)
Midway through our afternoon aboard the boat, as I kept my left hand firmly wrapped around le stick’s circumference, I let my right hand drift between the main sail’s rope and the top of my scalp. An egg had sprouted but there was no blood.
Day Three brought a Thermique Force 3 wind. The air had become stronger and more changeable. Aurélien, who’d taken to flirting with a couple blond twenty-somethings in the class, aired his concerns about our fleet of six in these seas. As we gathered in the bay, he introduced the concept of sailing into the wind, one of the trickier maneuvers for beginners. He barked orders from a floating dinghy; I strained to hear any phrase. Aboard our Cata, Marc translated Aurélien’s words graphically for Judy and me, creating diagrams with ropes on our boat’s wide trampoline.
Doing is often the best way of learning. That day, when it was my turn to hold le stick (and as we know, the holder of le stick makes the rules), I deviated modestly from Aurélien’s agenda. This was school, I was the student, and I wanted to discover how to manage an oncoming wind from different approaches. I would attack my education from a North American perspective, and specifically the method used at my daughter’s pre-school. I had a curriculum to achieve by the end of the week, but I’d get there in my own, investigative way.
My approach to Aurélien’s assignment ended up putting our Cata scotché – the Frenchman’s delightful term for saying that our boat was completely stuck – in the middle of the sea.
Aurélien sped up to our sailboat. Before he could ask me something I didn’t understand, I simply explained, “J’ai essayé de faire quelque chose, mais il marche pas.” I tried to do something, but it doesn’t work. Aurélien said little and jetted off to another sailboat.
Day Four, as we rigged our craft, Judy tried out her keenest smile and asked Aurélien if our group could take out one of the newer Catas. Each day one or two teams sailed newer boats, ones that were suitable for competition. They were better treated than the typical classroom models, whose coques were dragged daily over a pebble beach by students like us.
Judy shared the outcome of her request with Marc and me. “Aurélien said we didn’t follow his orders yesterday, so we don’t get the good equipment.”
Of course. I’d forgotten. This was French School. In France, education is about following the rules. It’s about learning good habits that will allow students to fit into society. It’s serious business with little room for individual investigation or colouring outside the lines, even in pre-school. And it didn’t matter that the teacher was half my age: Teachers deserve respect. Period.
I had a new appreciation for my ebullient daughter. For once, I understood firsthand why her teacher regularly sent her au coin during her year of French maternelle. Or at the other end of the age spectrum, why a couple French adults I know have long memories of being dubbed nulls (zeroes) in front of their classmates.
Judy looked at Marc and me. “So today we’re going to follow the rules, right?” she said. We’d do whatever Aurélien asked so that we might get good equipment on the last day?
Marc and I agreed, but half-heartedly. Compared with a couple boatloads of younger, more agile classmates, there was little chance we’d be among the best sailors for the day.
Day Four’s biggest challenge came at the end. As Aurélien towed our line of craft back into the school’s beach, he commanded us to unrig the boats completely. Onboard our vessel Marc complained this was a senseless exercise. Judy, on the other hand, remained resolute in her campaign to follow each and every one of the teacher’s orders. As if to underscore her resolve, our task was made more difficult by the dodgy main sail we’d chosen for the day. Being relegated to student equipment on Day Four actually decreased our chances for better gear on Day Five.
Judy stood on the trampoline tugging at the main sail’s line. It was stuck. The main sail wouldn’t budge. She walked out onto the moving boat’s right coque in a bold attempt to free the sail.
“À terre, à terre!” Marc yelled from the trampoline bed. Get down, get down!
“It’s not you who’s my teacher this week!” Judy shouted.
“What do you call this exercise, anyway?” Marc muttered. (The maneuver actually proved useful on Day Five as we unrigged in a neighbouring bay before heading ashore for un pique-nique.)
Judy prevailed. During that 10-minute tow into shore, our threesome managed to unrig the wretched Catamaran. As we came ashore, Aurélien surveyed the teams’ varied rates of success.
Day Five: Judy, Marc and I scored the only competition-level Cata that headed onto the water. What’s more, it was the full-day class! (We later realized that ours was the last team to use the better Cata, but it hardly took the wind from our sails.)
As light winds eased our Cata toward the Plage de la Garoupe in a neighbouring cove, the subject aboard our competition-grade Cata was food. More precisely, it was cheese. Judy maneuvered le stick and I fait le foc. Marc lay back on his elbows and delighted in the beauty of brebis, the saltiness of reblochon, the creaminess of different chèvres, and the universality of comté. He reveled in their pairings with olive tapenades and fig jams. We talked Dutch gouda. We mentioned America’s black-wax encrusted cheese (which I later identified as Bergenost) but agreed it wasn’t a taste contender. Of course we joked about American “cheese food,” too.
Thanks to this read, I realize Marc is showering us in the glory of pure Frenchness.
Food is among the dearest topics to a Frenchman. “The French…have surrounded food with so much commentary, learning and connoisseurship as to clothe it in the vestments of civilization itself…,” writes Richard Bernstein in Fragile Glory. Here Judy and I, two Americans, were fortunate to witness a grassroots and heartfelt exaltation of this veritable, French form of art.
As I described the creaminess of my favourite bûche aux cendres, a chèvre rolled in ash, I realized that in the past week, our threesome had become a real team. Together we rigged and unrigged. Together we analysed Aurélien’s educational offerings. Together we’d mounted la coque, shared le stick, and fait le foc. And now we were discussing food. I knew I’d miss my teammates on Day Six.
Aurélien bothered us less on Day Five, too. Better equipment allowed us to sail faster (or was it our perfected technique?). We set the course for the class. Marc and I commended Judy for her doggedness on Day Four.
The wind shifted mid-afternoon, emanating from the land and pushing boats back into the sea. It meant that our final approach to l’École Française de Voile was less than exemplary: Our competitive Cata was towed behind a motorized dinghy. But so was the fate of the rest of the class.
Attention shifted to report cards. This was French school, after all, and rules and reports mattered. Aurélien distributed a transparent folder to each pupil. Inside were two booklets: Le Certification des Niveaux et Experiences (basically a summary of how the student performed in class) and La Carte Progression (on which the instructor ticked off prescribed achievements).
I was an adolescent all over again, opening the envelope that contained summarized feedback of a grueling semester. Judy looked over my shoulder. On Le Carte Progression, Aurélien had passed me through Level 1. He’d ticked three boxes in Level 2.
Inside Le Certification des Niveaux et Experiences, he’d made no comment about my mastery of the French language. He’d hardly mentioned my more investigative approach to French schooling. “Bonne volonté!” he wrote. “Good enthusiasm! You progressed well through persevering. Continue in this way and you will progress further! See you soon.”
Our team said a fond farewell, and I walked back to Bellevue swinging the report card in my hand. I was tired and sun-drenched. But I was pleased: The teach thought I did okay. And yet, that’s hardly what matters.
What matters is that I became something of a better sailor. As a bonus, I had a firsthand crack at the French educational experience.
And now, sailing even interests my husband. Always intent on my acquisition of good French terminology, he says he wants to embark on a private course.
