Delectations by Alec Waugh

This year the PEN Club is holding its congress in mid-September in the South of France. After the congress I am booked to spend a week in Villefranche at the Hotel Welcome. It will be forty years to a week since I went there first. During that forty years it has meant a great deal to me. It has meant a great deal to a great many others—particularly to writers, painters and musicians.

In the first edition of Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, there were pen and ink sketches at the head of every chapter. Over one was a sketch of the Villefranche waterfront. The Welcome was the hotel at which the guilty lovers broke their drive from Juan les Pins to Monte Carlo, and there is an account of a lady of the town waving goodbye to her French sailor as he leaves to join his battleship. There are descriptions of the Welcome in Glenway Westcott’s Goodbye Wisconsin and his more recent Images of Truth. In front of the Welcome, the old Tribunal de Pêche which was never used as a tribunal in my time has been converted by Jean Cocteau into a chapel dedicated to the patron saint of fishermen. In the lounge of the hotel hangs one of the sketches that he made for its frescoes. It is inscribed “à mon cher Welcome où j’ai passé le meilleur de ma vie.” Beside it is a canvas by Graham Sutherland—in settlement of an unpaid bill perhaps. In the 1920s Paul Morand and Monroe Wheeler had villas on the slopes above the harbor. They both used the Welcome as a club. Across the bay Somerset Maugham was sumptuously installed in the Villa Mauresque. When his friends arrived in Villefranche, they would announce their presence by note or telephone. It was not unlike the routine in a small West Indian island, where you sign the book at Government House and await an appropriate invitation. Indeed there was something of an island’s atmosphere about Villefranche then. You were cut off from the main current of Riviera life. There was a railway station but the fast trains did not stop there. If you wanted to go into Nice, you had to climb the hill to the lower corniche road, to what is still called the octroi, though it is many years since any customs dues have been collected there, and catch a trolley. That trolley was like a ferry connecting an island with the mainland.

AW

About the Author

Alec Waugh

Featured Tags

This year the PEN Club is holding its congress in mid-September in the South of France. After the congress I am booked to spend a week in Villefranche at the Hotel Welcome. It will be forty years to a week since I went there first. During that forty years it has meant a great deal to me. It has meant a great deal to a great many others—particularly to writers, painters and musicians.

In the first edition of Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, there were pen and ink sketches at the head of every chapter. Over one was a sketch of the Villefranche waterfront. The Welcome was the hotel at which the guilty lovers broke their drive from Juan les Pins to Monte Carlo, and there is an account of a lady of the town waving goodbye to her French sailor as he leaves to join his battleship. There are descriptions of the Welcome in Glenway Westcott’s Goodbye Wisconsin and his more recent Images of Truth. In front of the Welcome, the old Tribunal de Pêche which was never used as a tribunal in my time has been converted by Jean Cocteau into a chapel dedicated to the patron saint of fishermen. In the lounge of the hotel hangs one of the sketches that he made for its frescoes. It is inscribed “à mon cher Welcome où j’ai passé le meilleur de ma vie.” Beside it is a canvas by Graham Sutherland—in settlement of an unpaid bill perhaps. In the 1920s Paul Morand and Monroe Wheeler had villas on the slopes above the harbor. They both used the Welcome as a club. Across the bay Somerset Maugham was sumptuously installed in the Villa Mauresque. When his friends arrived in Villefranche, they would announce their presence by note or telephone. It was not unlike the routine in a small West Indian island, where you sign the book at Government House and await an appropriate invitation. Indeed there was something of an island’s atmosphere about Villefranche then. You were cut off from the main current of Riviera life. There was a railway station but the fast trains did not stop there. If you wanted to go into Nice, you had to climb the hill to the lower corniche road, to what is still called the octroi, though it is many years since any customs dues have been collected there, and catch a trolley. That trolley was like a ferry connecting an island with the mainland.