Exploring the beauty and artifice of the French Riviera at Fitzgerald’s seaside hotel | Canada Voices

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud hotel named the Belles Rives. That’s where I stayed at the height of a hot, sticky July while visiting Juan-les-Pins, a luxe seaside neighbourhood in the town of Antibes – the very spot where writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife Zelda and their daughter Scottie vacationed exactly 100 summers ago, when the hotel was a rental property called the Villa Saint-Louis.

So forgive this next indulgence. In the South of France – a place so synonymous with glamour that it has earned a preposition in the manner of dukes and duchesses – it’s easy to start seeing the world in revealing scenes, in the style of one of its most famous visitors.

As retirees paint on smiles to ask a beachside employee about their delayed Diet Cokes, and then grumble afterward on their loungers, one realizes that people are their truest selves once the waiter walks away. At breakfast, a boisterous family of Americans share crude jokes and recite tweets around their white-cloth table, proving that Empire doesn’t mean civilization. Nearby, a woman in a dramatic sun hat sips coffee with an uncreased Fitzgerald novel conspicuous under her palm, like a Bible at an inauguration. And one cannot help but admire the sincerity of the Buddha-shaped man, his skin baked brown like bread, eating his lunch alone as he faces down the Mediterranean wearing the navy stripes, ecru linens and prominent timepiece that have formed the Provençal look for a century. (You’d be right to suspect that this all feels like The White Lotus; nearby Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat is reportedly being mooted for the next season of the HBO show.)

This is Fitzgerald’s South of France, the glittering, jittering vacation hotspot steeped in the decadent energy of the Jazz Age – or more specifically, the author’s cherished French Riviera, his “escape from the world.” To be even more accurate, it’s the Riviera of Gerald and Sara Murphy, the American expat socialites who defined that Provençal style and spent the 1920s and 1930s hosting friends at their verdant compound, Villa America, along the Cap d’Antibes. Those friends just happened to have mononymous levels of fame: Hemingway, Picasso, Porter, Stravinsky and, of course, Fitzgerald. After falling for the area the year before, Scott and Zelda were regulars at Villa America by 1925; the Villa Saint-Louis was just a half-hour’s stumble away.

But if, as Fitzgerald wrote, the bon-vivant Murphys “invented” the glamourous South of France summers that still occupy the popular imagination, it was the intemperate author who immortalized them in Tender Is the Night. He began writing the novel he considered his masterpiece – about the disintegration of a swish Riviera couple as the wife’s mental illness surfaces, in a near-biography of the Murphys with a heaping dash of Zelda’s tragic later years – at Villa Saint-Louis, which was renamed the Hôtel Belles Rives in 1929.

Much of the Riviera still sells itself like this: as a motherlode vein of culture-defining inspiration, a place out of time, the untouched haven that dazzled Fitzgerald and his Lost Generation compatriots. The Belles Rives leans in to this, too, with its Old World hospitality honed over four generations of family ownership and its pastel art deco geometries accentuating the lapis ocean lapping at its back – a loving tribute to the Fitzgeralds and the American century.

Fans de siècle can sip a cocktail from the gleaming Bar Fitzgerald’s delightful, if not on-the-nose menu. (I enjoyed an elderflower-champagne concoction called, of course, The Great Gatsby.) There, a pianist plays jazz standards, a nod to the night when Scott was said to have locked a local band in a Villa Saint-Louis room to play for Zelda all night, to prove he was worthy of her love. Since 2011, the Belles Rives has also handed out the annual Prix Fitzgerald, throwing a Gatsby-esque garden party for authors whose works embody his “spirit, elegance and art of living.”

A plaque in the lobby quotes a letter Fitzgerald wrote to Hemingway about his time in Antibes: “With our being back in a nice villa on my beloved Riviera (between Nice and Cannes) I’m happier than I’ve been for years. It’s one of those strange, precious and all too transitory moments when everything in one’s life seems to be going well.”

“People come here to be inspired,” owner Marianne Estène-Chauvin tells me. “It’s like going to see the pyramids. Of course, they are more important, but it’s the same feeling – it connects people to something in the past.”

The Belles Rives channels this idealized Riviera with genuine care. But it can feel like the South of France at large sometimes tries a little too hard to do the same, like it’s angling its face in its famous light just-so to deliver the mythic experience of a golden-era Riviera preserved in amber. It can give the odd sensation that people are doing Côte D’Azur cosplay – pastiche, with a side of pastis – and leave visitors wondering what of Fitzgerald’s fabled Riviera really remains.

This side of secret paradise

Few places are as committed to the bit as the South of France. Plaques are studded across even the smallest of towns to mark even the slightest of connections: Dickens in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Chekhov and Joyce in Nice, Graham Greene in Antibes. Guides invite tourists to walk in the footsteps of Van Gogh in Arles or Nietzsche in Èze, as if we, too, might have the right mix of wisdom and syphilis to speak to Zarathustra today (though the Èze hike did teach me plenty about nihilism). Major museums devote themselves to the likes of Picasso, Miro, Giacometti and Renoir. Curiously, acknowledgments of artists born and raised in the Riviera itself are rare.

But many of the conditions that attracted these icons no longer exist there – including the relatable detail that they liked how affordable it was. Somerset Maugham liked to boast about buying a nine-acre Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat compound once owned by a Belgian king for US$8,700 (around $227,000 today). Fitzgerald himself first decamped to the Riviera in 1924, after a friend told him he could eat meals “fit for a king” for all of 61 cents. There, at a US$79-a-month (around $2,000 now) villa in Saint-Raphaël, he worked on The Great Gatsby and the essay How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year, in which he wrote that he was “off to the Riviera to economize” – a sentence that cannot be uttered in good conscience today. No one is spending months in a seaside castle on the cheap any more, as Picasso did in 1946.

But Fitzgerald became disenchanted just a decade after first visiting, deeming the region a played-out playground out of step with the times. When Tender Is the Night was set for publication in 1934, he asked his editor to avoid marketing it using references to the resort lifestyle: “Not only does it sound like the triviality of which I am so often accused,” he wrote, “but also the Riviera has been thoroughly exploited by … a whole generation of writers and its very mention invokes a feeling of unreality and unsubstantiality.” Its main character Dick Diver gives voice to Fitzgerald’s disdain as the Roaring Twenties crashed into the Depression, and his beloved South of France became another tourist haunt: “The pastoral quality down on the summer Riviera is all changing anyhow – next year they’ll have a Season.” Fitzgerald died in 1940, 11 years after he’d last visited the place where it was all going so well.

Selling down the Riviera

But what happens to a place when influential outsiders define it? After all, so many of the plaque-feted artists weren’t even French.

For one, homegrown heroes can get overshadowed. This summer, the postcard-perfect city of Aix-en-Provence honoured the painter Paul Cézanne, a native son. Yet, it served as a reminder that, for decades, Cézanne was spurned by his hometown, and viewed as radical in his painting and politics. A director of Aix’s Musée Granet even once decreed that no Cézannes would hang there in his lifetime. Now, as it hosts the city’s landmark exhibit, the Granet has been forced to borrow from galleries around the world, flying the canvases back to where so many of them were painted.

And in Antibes’s old town, I met the Shanghai-born, Paris-trained artist Ho Lui, who playfully turns found objects and local walls into sculptures or single-line sketches. “Here, there is art everywhere,” he tells me in cheerful Cantonese, while carving a face from a small glass bottle with a pocket knife. Fitzgerald never wrote a character like him.

After all, things do change – even on the Riviera. Before the Murphys’ arrival, winter was the South’s peak season; British and Russian aristocrats would visit, inexplicably avoid swimming and then leave before it got hot. Before that, it was a Greek colony, a Roman trading post, a target for Spanish raiders. “It was always a habitat for strangers,” said hotelier Estène-Chauvin.

And while Belles Rives has earned the right to artfully purvey the idealized past, the hotel has changed, too. Its most fabulous feature is also among the newest: the elegant Michelin-starred restaurant La Passagère, which is gorgeously softened at night by a taffeta hush that’s crinkled only by the hiss of champagne, the lapping Mediterranean and the skittering of cutlery on plates. The prolific tasting menus by its executive chef, Aurélien Véquaud, channel his upbringing in coastal Vendée with dishes like a verbena-frilled spider crab and a geometric, crisp garlic préfou loaf.

No one understood the haunting impossibility of reliving the past more than Fitzgerald. But that’s what made his time in the Riviera so special: it gave him the gift of recognizing that he was in an “all too transitory moment” of happiness while it was happening, as if he’d caught water in cupped hands. Tragically, as biographer Andrew Turnbull wrote, Fitzgerald’s time there was the closest he would come “to finding perfection in the real world, and in a way the rest of his life was a retreat from this summit.” But his experience is something that the South of France can promise you still: If you’re lucky enough to be able to commit your resources and time, you might catch yourself noticing that you’re happy, no matter what you’ve written or painted.

Maybe it happens in the peach-pink alleys where locals play pétanque, or while watching a citrus sunset melt into the Cap d’Antibes, where flashing green lights along the shore warn ships about the future receding before them. In this way, the South of France beats on against the current, even if it’s borne back ceaselessly into the past.

If you go

Hôtel Belles Rives is on Boulevard Edouard Baudoin. Juan-les-Pins is a 30-minute train ride from Nice. Rooms start at €200 ($328) in low season; the hotel is closed from late October until late March or early April. bellesrives.com

The writer was a guest of the hotel. It did not review or approve the story before publication.