“Oh, but I couldn’t go there now. I so loved it then. I couldn’t bear to see it changed.” How often have I not heard that said; yet personally I keep returning to the places where I lingered in the thirties. It is not, it is very far from being, a masochistic search for the bittersweet lacrimae rerum—“the heartbreak at the heart of things”—in the discovery that the meadow where I picnicked is cluttered with council cottages, that the view of a far headland from a hotel bedroom has been blocked by a many-chimneyed factory, that I now have to pause for breath on the steep path from the railway station up which I hurried so eagerly for a pre-prandial Pernod, that the swim to the lighthouse on the rocks is beyond my powers. On the contrary, for me the return to familiar landscapes is more than anything a stocktaking of myself, and nowhere do I get that sense of reassessment more acutely than on the French Riviera between Cannes and Monte Carlo, particularly in Nice and Villefranche.
I started going there regularly in 1929. Villefranche, with its pastel-colored houses, cut back into the rock and rising steeply from the waterfront, was then a quiet fishing village except when a man o’ war—French, American or British—was anchored in the harbor. It has been described in Glenway Wescott’s Good-by Wisconsin and it was in its Welcome Hotel that the lovers in Tender Is the Night paused on their drive to Monte Carlo. Then only a short succession of bars lined the short road that ended abruptly a hundred yards beyond the Welcome, beside a seawater tank where the fishermen kept their lobsters. If you wanted to get to the beach below the railway you had to climb back into the town. No cars were allowed along the waterfront. The fishermen spread out their nets to dry there, and in the evening the local girls with their dark hair worn loose upon their shoulders would stroll in couples, while on the wide steps beside the Welcome the young men would sit in silence, watching them.
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