The Perfect Meal (18 page)

It didn’t, though it was a damned close-run thing, and I only just stopped someone from turning the hose on the
éclade
and ruining it completely.

Once the fire died down and the ash was fanned away, we found that the mussels were cooked through. Well, mostly anyway. Those around the edges didn’t so much burst as vaporize, the shells turning to ash. Elsewhere, in patches, the heat had been too mild, so the mussels remained uncooked. But where the clustering effect protected them from the worst of the heat, they gaped invitingly, their meat juicy, resinous, and quite pleasant, if you didn’t mind ash grating between your teeth.

Next day, our friends rang to thank us. As I should have anticipated, they reacted exactly as the guests at my
shashlik
barbecue had done. “
Quel spectacle! Etonnant, vraiment
.” Everyone agreed it had been, literally, a roaring success.

But that table-tennis table never gave a decent bounce again.

Thirteen

First Catch Your
Socca

Here silver olives shine

On terra-cotta earth

And fields of lavender

In the still, burning air

Have all their scent distilled.

The sky’s so primary blue

The halftones disappear:

Each color its most true,

Each object its most clear.

May Sarton,
Provence

A
t the end of its five-hour journey to the farthest southern corner of France, the railway line swings sharply east to run along the Mediterranean in the direction of Italy.

Waking from a doze, I blinked at a panorama of dark-blue sea washing over jagged rocks, brick-red. “I’d never seen rocks like them,” my mother-in-law, Claudine, had told me, the memory of her first visit still vivid after more than sixty years.

Back then, this had been
Le Train Bleu
(the Blue Train), and as famous as the Orient Express. Between 1922 and 1947, it collected passengers off the boat at Calais and carried them in luxury to Ventimiglia, on the Italian Riviera, stopping on the way at Paris, Dijon, Marseilles, Toulon, Saint-Raphaël, Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, Antibes, Nice, Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Menton.

Film stars, industrialists, and diplomats were regular passengers. Professional gamblers heading for Monte Carlo played high-stakes bridge in its club car while
poules de luxe
loitered, poised to fleece the winners of their loot. A beautiful woman traveling alone on the Blue Train was instantly cloaked in mystery, usually well deserved. Maurice Dekobra gave such women a label when he called his 1927 bestseller
The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars
.

Artists loved the Blue Train. Director Michael Powell, who grew up in a hotel his father owned in Antibes, celebrated it in
The Red Shoes
. Moira Shearer’s Vicky Page, doomed by her love of dancing, even dies under its wheels. In the 1930 film
Monte Carlo
, Jeanette MacDonald sings “Beyond the Blue Horizon” as she races across France toward the only blue that really counts: the blue of the Côte d’Azur.

In 1924, Darius Milhaud wrote a ballet called
Le Train Bleu
for Sergei Diaghilev, a frequent passenger. The script was by another regular, Jean Cocteau, with costumes by a third, Coco Chanel, and a backdrop by a fourth, Pablo Picasso. Into his script, Cocteau slyly incorporated details of a Riviera holiday’s special pleasures. Illicit lovers, instead of sneaking in and out of bedrooms, could retire, as do couples in the ballet, to the cabanas that lined the beaches of the better hotels. During 1937 and 1938, on the grounds of the Hotel du Cap, Marlene Dietrich dallied in such tents with movie mogul and diplomat Joseph Kennedy. When Kennedy’s twenty-year-old son, John, paid a visit for a ball, Marlene ensured that the event would never be forgotten by the future president of the United States. As they danced to that year’s big hit, Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” she slipped her hand into his pants.

A
ren’t you going to include Provence?” Marie-Dominique had asked as she reviewed my progress with plans for the banquet.

“I did,” I said. “Remember the bouillabaisse?”

“But you didn’t eat bouillabaisse. You just tried to eat it. Also, Provence is huge. The Côte d’Azur is just part of it.”

She was right, of course. Most of the Mediterranean coast of France from the Italian border halfway to Spain could loosely be called Provence, since it had once been a province of Rome, hence the name. And while Provence might, technically, end where the Alpes-Maritimes rise behind Cannes, others will tell you it continues north to Avignon, 115 miles up the Rhone. No Mason-Dixon Line marks the border. Provence isn’t a region so much as a state of mind.

For more than a century, Britons and Americans have dreamed of living out their fantasies in the warm south. In the 1990s, British writer Peter Mayle’s
A Year in Provence
and its follow-up,
Toujours Provence
, sold in the hundreds of thousands. Mayle wrote about his attempts to convert a house, frustrated at every turn by the Provençal people, whom he draws as well-meaning but disorganized, inclined to stop work for extended lunches, prone to hypochondria and superstition, friendly toward those outsiders who accommodate their ways but stubbornly resistant to change.

No Anglo-Saxon reader was discouraged by Mayle’s difficulties. Rather, they made them even keener to find a tumbledown villa and hire their own maddening Frenchmen to fix it up. Today, every hilltop village below 43˚ north echoes to the pounding of hammers and the whine of saws as ancient houses become holiday hideaways with four bedrooms, each with a bathroom en suite. The noise of construction competes with that of onions and tomatoes being chopped, garlic crushed, and all three sizzling in olive oil. Louder still is the clatter of keyboards as would-be Mayles document each nail driven and meal cooked, in the hope that they too will hatch a bestseller.

T
he rich are very different to you and I,” Scott Fitzgerald famously is said to have told Ernest Hemingway.

“Yes,” Hemingway replied. “They have more money.”

More important, they have more houses. The history of how Provence was colonized by foreigners is actually the history of houseguests.

After World War I, the Côte d’Azur languished. Co-opted during the war as convalescent homes, the great hotels, the Negresco and the Carlton, the latter with perkily pointed cupolas inspired by the breasts of courtesan La Belle Otero, fell on hard times. A significant part of their clientele had been Russian aristocrats and their servants, so numerous that Nice built an Orthodox cathedral for them. But the 1917 revolution swept them away. Grand Dukes, once the hotels’ best clients, now worked for them as waiters and doormen or drove cabs.

Postwar Provence was abandoned to its original inhabitants. “At that time,” said American expatriate Gerald Murphy, “no one ever went near the Riviera in summer. The English and the Germans who came down for the short spring season closed their villas as soon as it began to get warm in May. None of them ever went in the water, you see.”

Colette, author of
Chéri
and
Gigi
, bought a house in the fishing village of St. Tropez in 1925 with her third husband, Maurice Goudeket. Other than a few painters, no outsiders lived there. “In the evenings, in the genuine bars,” wrote Goudeket, “the young people of the country would dance to the tunes of mechanical pianos, the boys with each other and the girls with each other.”

At the same time, Gerald Murphy and his wife, Sara, visited Cole Porter at his villa near Antibes, and fell in love with the emptiness of the area. A nearby beach was so little used that a meter of seaweed blanketed the sand. The Murphys excavated a corner in which to enjoy the sun, and later bought a house nearby, christening it Villa America. It became an ad hoc hostel for their creative friends. Eric Newby credits the Murphys with transforming the Côte d’Azur.

Without realizing it, they had invented a new way of life (or one which, if it ever existed, had not done so since pre-Christian times), and the clothes to go with it. Shorts made of white duck, horizontally-striped matelots’ jerseys and white work caps bought from sailors’ slop shops became a uniform. From now on, the rich, and ultimately everyone else in the northern hemisphere, wanted unlimited sun, the sea, sandy beaches or rocks to dive into it from, and the opportunity to eat al fresco.

In 1923, when Coco Chanel stepped ashore in Cannes from the yacht of her lover the Duke of Westminster, her all-over tan and simple, comfortable clothing signaled a trend. “I think she may have invented sunbathing,” sighed Prince Jean-Louis Faucigny-Lucinge. “At that time, she invented everything.”

Riviera style and the rediscovery of the sun induced rhapsodies of vanity and self-love in the pale intellectuals of the north. American composer Ned Rorem, staying with the Comtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles in her Mallet-Stevens-designed villa at Hyères, wrote in his diary, “In my canary-yellow shirt (from Chez Vachon in St. Tropez), my golden legs in khaki shorts, my tan sandals, and orange hair, I look like a jar of honey.” That evening, the surrealist poet Paul Éluard and his wife came to dinner. “He is deeply suntanned,” noted Rorem, “(they had spent the afternoon on Ile de Levant, the land of nudists).” After dinner, they sat on the terrace and Éluard read to them from Baudelaire. As Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.”

S
cott and Zelda Fitzgerald discovered the Riviera through the Murphys. Between April and October 1928, they lived in the Murphys’ Paris apartment, next to the Luxembourg Garden, and spent the summer at Villa America, part of a revolving cast of celebrity freeloaders that included Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Cole Porter, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, and Jean Cocteau.