Postcard From France: Now And Then In Nice

by Don George on

June 27, Cours Saleya, Nice, France:

It’s my last day in Nice, this vibrant capital of pleasure and art and ease on the Cote d’Azur, and I’m sitting in the Cours Saleya, site of the fruit and flower market where I was 11 days ago, at the start of this glorious re-immersion in the riches of the Riviera. There’s a cold glass of vin rosé du Provence on my table, the sand-colored awning of La Storia restaurant on my left, the mustard-colored house where Matisse lived in front of me, and an archway framing palm fronds and the incomparably blue Mediterranean on my right.

This is the same centuries-old square where I sat and wrote 20 years before, on my second visit to the Cote d’Azur, and I am thinking about how things change and how they stay the same.

Back then I wrote:

I’m having a café crème and a croissant at a Cours Saleya cafe that looks right onto stalls selling a colorful collage of flowers, fruits and vegetables. As I sip and scribble in my journal, elegant older women with well-coiffed dogs smell melons and prod glistening red and yellow peppers. A trio of breezy, baguette-bearing beauties in floppy T-shirts and espadrilles buys peaches and peonies; housewives in sun hats and long-sleeved dresses stuff garlic and grapes and guavas into woven baskets. ‘Bonjour!’ and ‘Merci!’ peal through the morning air, past the graceful shutters and grillwork balconies on the salmon- and peach- and wheat-colored apartments that overlook the stony square.

I could have penned those same words today.

%Gallery-161308%Last night, I strolled for an hour along the broad, seafront Promenade des Anglais. The air was moist and warm, the palm trees rustled in a light breeze, and the whole city seemed to be out in easeful embrace of the balming night. Kids rattled by on skateboards; teenagers smoked and joked and simulated the French version of cool; American parents pushed strollers and exclaimed at the softness of the air; young couples kissed in passionate oblivion, and silver-haired couples strolled hand-in-hand, lost – or rather found – in their own reveries. And the moonlight flickered on the scraping sea, proffering a little piece of destiny, a midnight lesson for them and for me – the moonlight flickering on the ceaseless sea.

I wrote that too 20 years before.

From the Promenade des Anglais I wandered here last night, and the scene was amazingly vibrant: the square crammed with tiny tables showered with lamplight from the surrounding cafes, and resonant with excited conversation and leisurely laughter – the music of people with no morning duties or deadlines, of people wrapped, rapt, in the endless enjoyment of the moment.

The night oozed sensuality – the wine and the lamplight, the caressing air and the laughing, lilting patrons in T-shirts and sandals, shorts and short dresses. Later, when I returned to my room in the storied Hotel Negresco, about to celebrate its own buoyant 100th birthday, I reread what I had written about the residents of the Riviera on my first visit in 1976:

If they were blessed enough to grow up here, they have it in their bones, but if they have come here from elsewhere, they have knowingly abandoned whatever they have abandoned because they want what this region cultivates: a reasoned abandonment to sensual pleasures.

This spirit has stayed the same: The essential sensuality of Nice grows lush in the sunlight that illumines things to their core and the soft air that swaddles the skin like a benediction. It has plucked my heart and soul again as it did 36 years before.

What makes this place so seductive for me? The sunlight and the air and the colors certainly, the Mediterranean palette of beach and sea, the ochre, mustard, wheat, and terracotta walls; the bobbing boats and Belle Epoque facades; the fresh-grilled fish and succulent lé gumes farcis; the bubbly-beaded glasses of vin rosé; the stony plazas, stylish shops and splendored musées; the labyrinth of winding cobbled alleys, by night a magical medieval moonlit maze; the centuries-old cathedrals and just-opened galleries; the swish of the salt-tinged breeze; the terracotta roof tiles and green hillsides sloping to the sea; the legacy of art and history …

I sip and slip back in time. Oh to have been here in the 1920s with Gerald and Sara Murphy on Cap d’Antibes, partying on La Garoupe beach with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, dos Passos, Cocteau, and Man Ray. Or to have sipped and supped with Picasso and Matisse, Chagall, Braque and Léger …

On my first two visits here, I was filled with a sense of soaring potential: The possibility of a life of sensual celebration and artful appreciation stretched before me like the glinting sea.

I know that feeling – and yet, and yet … Somehow today I don’t feel transported in quite the same way … Perhaps I have become too old, or la vie est devenue trop compliquée? “Life has become too complicated,” is what I meant to say. (Do I dare to eat one of those peaches? What would Monsieur Prufrock say?)

Now I have become the age I innocently imagined back then. I am the map, know the route I tread. Am I straining too hard for epiphany?

Sigh. Scribble. Take another sip of rosé.

Around me people lick gelatos, smile for photos, exclaim over hot slices of socca. Beauties in bikinis bike breezily by. Elegant older women with well-coiffed dogs smell melons and prod glistening red and yellow peppers, and housewives in sun hats and long-sleeved dresses gather garlic and grapes and bushels of lavender and thyme.

I think of the surprise feast I savored on a country terrace three nights before, the almost deserted beach on St Tropez where I impetuously plunged into the crystalline sea, the kindly gallery owner who closed his shop for an hour to sip coffee and talk art with me. I think of the stories still to write, the places still to be seen. And something stirs inside me; a fragile tendril greens.

It’s evident all around me, if I just open my eyes, my heart, my mind. The gift of Nice is this sense of celebration that infuses every day, celebration of sun and cypress, plane tree and plage, lavender and olive and pungent fromage; celebration of art, celebration of sea, celebration of cobble and tile and tranquillity.

It’s a lesson to cherish on this lamentably last day.

And a souvenir I’ll nurture as I move away.

Paradise Regained: Revisiting La Colombe d’Or In St.-Paul-de-Vence, France

by Don George on

June 28, 2012; at La Colombe d’Or, St.-Paul-de-Vence:

Conjunction of memory and moment: Nineteen summers ago I sat in this limestone-terraced restaurant in the medieval marvel of St.-Paul-de-Vence, experiencing a time-stopping, life-enlarging afternoon that has become iconic for me. Now I am back, my journal opened to a page as white as the brilliant sunlight that splashes over everything here, and then to a much earlier page, all blue scribbles and a fading blush of Provencal wine.

I am ensconced under a white parasol at a red bouquet-brightened table, looking out on a somnolent scene of green hills and straw-colored houses with terra-cotta roofs.

I have just finished a truffle salad – so redolent I felt transported before taking even a bite – and now I’m sipping a chilled vin rosé, eating buttery bites of crusty-tender baguette, and sliding ineluctably into heaven once again.

I feel like I’m in a Matisse canvas – bright white flagstones and sun umbrellas, green hills, red roofs, blue sea and sky. Then the sun dapples and it’s an Impressionist scene, a Renoir moment as the maitre d’ ceremoniously ushers diners to their tables and they exclaim at seeing old friends – “You’re here! Yes, you too!” – kiss-kiss, take their seats, and sigh. The rosé flows, and time slows.

The waiter appears and – just as nineteen years before – places before me with a flourish an artful platter of grilled sea bream, dauraude royale.

“Bon appétit, monsieur,” he kindly purrs, and pours some more wine.

Around me is a symphony of sounds: the clink of silverware on china, the splash of wine into glasses, the mellifluous laughter and multilingual chatter of diners in summery clothes.

An American family of three sits at the table in front of me, and I lean forward to recommend the truffle salad. They are from Napa Valley, it turns out, an hour’s drive from my home, and we exclaim at the wonder of meeting people so close so far away – and the sheer joy of sharing such a singular place on such a singular day.

The family to my left joins the conversation. They are from Newport Beach, in southern California, and have made the pilgrimage here from a cruise ship docked in Monaco for the day. Soon a woman appears at my shoulder, smiling. “Ojai,” she says, and then from the table behind me, a voice trills, “San Francisco!”We are all caught up in a buoyant bubble of bonté and bonhomie – a celebration of life’s bounty and of our own good fortune to be sharing it on this sun-dappled summer terrace in the middle of one of the most blessed places on Earth.

I take another sip of rosé, savor the perfect daurade with green beans and watch the choreography unfold – a ballet of white-shirted waiters bearing bottles and platters, the maitre d’ surveying the scene, calls for flutes of Champagne here, moans over delicate bowls of luscious red framboises there, kiss-kiss and sit and sigh.

To my right is a vibrant Leger mural, wrought into a section of the terrace’s streetside wall. And as I have just reaffirmed on a rambling restroom detour, the rustic interior rooms here still house an astonishment of modern masterpieces – canvases by Picasso, Dubuffet, Dufy, Miro, Chagall, Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, among many others, all given by the artists when they were still struggling unknowns to the generous and perspicacious owner, the late Paul Roux, in lieu of payment.

This place is an enchanted little world, I think – reluctant to take fork to fish, reluctant even to move, wanting to hold and savor this moment forever.

Awaiting me, I know, is a medieval meander through the cobbled alleys of St.-Paul; an espresso at the Cafe de la Place, where I will watch local gentlemen enact their afternoon rite of pétanque; and then a serene stop at the exquisite Chapelle Folon, which had not even existed nineteen summers before.

Some things change, and some things stay the same.

But for now the world is wondrously reduced to this: the sunlight catching in the canopy of branches above and blessing the hills beyond, the murmuring music of the diners behind me, the perfume of the flowers mingling with the scents of the chef’s seasonings, the exuberant atmosphere of artwork all around, the cobbled stones beneath me, the fish and bread before me, the wine as red as the flowers, the tablecloth as white as the parasol; an ineffable moment of ease and artfulness, a soul-fulfilling scene of life lived to the full.

The platter of now absent daurade has been whisked away and replaced with an ebullient bowl of fulsome framboises. Slowly, dreamily, the California fan club rises, smiles, waves, exchanges cards, prepares to go their own way – and the afternoon shimmers and sighs, as ephemeral and endless as this last glass of rosé I raise in my hand, in toast to the marriage of memory and moment in this blessed land.

In San Francisco, savoring a slice of heaven on France’s Cote d’Azur

by Don George on


September 20, 2011 — I’m sitting on the sun-washed terrace of La Terrasse restaurant in San Francisco‘s gorgeous green Presidio. It’s a spectacular Indian summer day, with the rays warming my bones and the bay sparkling in the distance under a cerulean sky. All around me, California Mission-style buildings – pale yellow walls, curving arches, terra-cotta roof tiles – shine.

I’ve been eating escargots and poulet roti avec pommes frites, and sipping a crisp Loire Valley Sancerre, celebrating because in a week I’ll be in la belle France, exploring the regions of Burgundy and Champagne. Moments ago I was poring over the itinerary, giddy at the prospect of traveling once again in the country that changed my life decades ago. Suddenly this combination – the frisson of anticipation, the dejeuner francais, and the sun, roof tiles and glinting waters beyond — concocted a terraced time machine-magic, and I was transported to a sunny scene 18 summers before, and a time-stopping, life-enlarging afternoon at the singular – and to my mind, sacred – restaurant called La Colombe d’Or, in St.-Paul-de-Vence, on France‘s Cote d’Azur….

I am ensconced under a white parasol at a red bouquet-brightened table, looking out on a somnolent scene of green hills and straw-colored houses with terra-cotta roofs.

I have just finished a plate of green melon and jambon de Parme, and now the waiter has placed before me with a flourish a platter of grilled sea bream, known locally as daurade.

Around me is a symphony of sounds: the clink of silverware on china, the splash of wine into glasses, the mellifluous laughter and multilingual chatter of diners in summery clothes.

We are all caught up in a buoyant bubble of bonte and bonhomie — a celebration of life’s bounty and of our own good fortune to be sharing it on this sun-dappled summer terrace in the middle of one of the most blessed places on Earth.

Little slices of lemon float in the pitcher of water on my table, and as I take another sip of wine and contemplate the still life — “”Daurade with green beans and rice” — before me, I feel a little like floating, too.

To my left is a vibrant Leger mural, wrought into a section of the terrace’s streetside wall. And straight ahead are the rustic interior rooms of this celebrated hotel-restaurant, where I wandered a half hour ago in search of a restroom and instead found an astonishment of modern masterpieces — canvases by Modigliani, Bonnard, Dufy, Utrillo, Chagall, Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Miro, among others, all given by the artists when they were still struggling unknowns to the generous and perspicacious owner, Paul Roux, in lieu of payment.

This place is an enchanted little world, I think — reluctant to take fork to fish, reluctant even to move, wanting to hold and savor this moment forever.

Awaiting me, I know, is a medieval meander through St.-Paul; an espresso at the Cafe de la Place, where I will watch local gentlemen enact their afternoon rite of boules; and then the piney Fondation Maeght, with its incomparable open-air display of modern art.

But for now the world is wondrously reduced to this: the sunlight catching in the canopy of branches above and blessing the hills beyond, the murmuring music of the diners behind me, the perfume of the flowers mingling with the scents of the chef’s seasonings, the exuberant atmosphere of artwork all around, the cobbled stones beneath me, the fish and bread before me, the wine as red as the flowers, the tablecloth as white as the parasol; an ineffable moment of ease and artfulness, a soul-fulfilling scene of life lived to the full — the whole afternoon floating like a lemon in a pitcher of Evian, a little slice of heaven on the Cote d’Azur.

[flickr image via Wolfgang Staudt]

Photo of the Day (8.9.09)

by Jeremy Kressmann on

Imagine renting a seaside studio in the South of France. Each morning, you throw open the windows of your balcony to a jaw-dropping view of the seaside village below, punctuated by tiny sailboats and the luminous yellow-orange glow of the early morning sun. If this was your vision, it’s been fulfilled by Flickr user Michael Joseph Goldst …etc. My favorite element of this image is the sunlight – that surreal fiery orange color gives everything a magic glow.

Have any photos of the South of France? Or maybe just from South Florida? Why not add them to our Gadling group on Flickr? We might just pick one of yours as our Photo of the Day.