There’s a sudden commotion on the beach. People are waving their arms and shouting as if they’ve seen something alarming in the water. Perhaps a swimmer is in distress – although the lifeguards don’t seem the slightest bit concerned.
On closer inspection, the gathering swell is all smiles. What’s more, there’s plenty of jewellery on display, plunging necklines and expensive hair-dos – and that’s just the men.
This is a wedding reception Cannes-style, and the bride and groom are about to arrive on a sleek, polished speedboat. They’re in for some party.
It’s business as usual in the Cote d’Azur, this fabled, recession-proof honeypot. We’re talking high-octane wealth, grandiose glamour and a salutary lesson, if needed, that the divide between the super-rich and those who, as Teresa May once put it, are ‘just about getting by’, has never been wider.
I’ve always wanted to visit Hotel Martinez, the oldest five-star on La Croisette, where a seaview room starts at about £1,800 and the four-bedroom suite on the seventh floor, with its own terrace the width of the whole building, costs £50,000 a night.
On a tour of Provence, Mark Palmer visits the St Paul de Vence commune (pictured), which has been home to its fair share of famous artists
There are Ferraris on the forecourt, Damien Hirst art on the walls in the atrium (or suspended from the ceiling) and much of the luggage coming and going has a whiff of LA’s Rodeo Drive about it.
The cantilever staircase is a marvel. How on earth it supports itself is baffling, but it’s here that the movie gods and goddesses practice walking down the red carpeted steps during the Cannes Film Festival.
I’ve persuaded the management to let our disparate bunch (ranging in age from two to 62) have lunch across the road at the hotel’s beach club. Full disclosure – I’m not paying the full whack. If I were, it would be £60-£90 per day for a sunbed (prices rise the closer you are to the sea) or £800 for a cabana on the pier, with a bottle of bubbly thrown in.
In Cannes, Mark dines at Hotel Martinez’s ‘deliciously informal’ beach club restaurant
And, yet, the beach club restaurant (‘The best lunch of my life,’ says one of our group) is deliciously informal – light on pretension, heavy on irony, with the names of film stars on the back of the director-style chairs. Mine belongs to Grace Kelly and I’m next to Paul Newman and Yul Brynner.
The next day, the juxtaposition could not be more stark – though just as rewarding – as we take the 20-minute shuttle from the old port of Cannes to Saint Honorat, the smaller of the two Iles de Lerins.
No Ferraris here. No cars of any kind in fact, although we spot a tractor and trailer in among the vines which produce half-decent wines and help sustain the 20 Cistercian monks who live a life of solitude and prayer, perhaps putting a word in on behalf of the hedonistic crowd back on the mainland.
There’s been a monastery here since about 405, though the French Revolution interrupted matters. This was until Saint Honorat was bought in 1869 by the Bishop of Frejus, who oversaw its rebirth.
Cool spot: Marks stays at Villa Jasmina (pictured) near the hilltop hamlet of Opio
Mark enjoys a ‘celestial day out’ on Ile Saint-Honorat (above)
It makes for a celestial day out. There’s no beach but you just pick your spot and clamber over rocks into the water. Then treat yourself to a long, lazy lunch at the Torraine restaurant – also owned by the monks.
Villa Jasmina, our rented CV Villas’ house, about 40 minutes inland near the hilltop hamlet of Opio, is the colour of honey and surrounded by cypress, eucalyptus, pine, olive and fir trees, all of which defer to the big old oak on the terrace. Sitting under it for dinner at the stone table is a joy.
There are three bedrooms in the main house, plus an annexe with two more. The swimming pool is long and thin – and alarmed in case little ones should tumble into it.
It’s the ideal base for exploring this gilded region of Provence, which over the years has attracted the superstars of art. They came (including Winston Churchill) and continue to come for the light – a brilliant, bright light, whereas in Tuscany it’s softer, less sharp, more pink.
The commune of St Paul de Vence basks in its artistic associations. Marc Chagall bought a house here in 1949. As a Jew born in Belarus, he had been granted French citizenship in 1937 but was forced to flee German occupied France during the war. He was later made an honorary citizen of Vence.
Matisse, Picasso and Leger, among others, took up temporary residence in this 16th Century town perched on a hill, with its one main, narrow street, appropriately called Rue Grande, where Parisian-style galleries are happy for you to saunter in, take one look at the prices and hurry out.
The arty crowd used to gather at the Colombe d’Or at the entrance to the town. It was a humble inn in those days. Now it’s a five-star hotel, with two beefy, suited security men standing outside to deter people like me from wandering in for a snoop.
Mark travels to Grasse, the ‘perfume capital of the world’, where he is greeted by hundreds of pink umbrellas (pictured)
TRAVEL FACTS
Seven nights at Villa Jasmina, sleeping ten, costs from £3,751 including a welcome pack and maid service two days per week (cvvillas.com). EasyJet flies from London to Nice – about 40 minutes from Cannes – from £102 return (easyjet.com). Car hire can be arranged via Holiday Extras, picking up and dropping off at Nice airport (holidayextras.com). More information about Provence at France.fr.
Valbonne is terrific, too. Here, it’s the art of French living which is on display in a village built beside the Chalaisienne Abbey in 1199 on a Roman, rectangular, grid-system. At its heart is the Place des Arcades, a fabulous little square with restaurants on three sides.
A man in a bright yellow shirt seems to be acting as a maitre d’ for rival establishments, only for us to realise later that three of them are owned and run by the same family. There are no cars here either – so children scamper around while their parents tuck into escargots and steak tartare.
Then there’s Grasse, the so-called ‘perfume capital of the world’. When we arrive it’s raining so hard that traffic is brought to a standstill. The good news is that we are greeted by hundreds of pink umbrellas – the bad news is that they are all out of reach, hanging from wires attached to lampposts.
The sophistication of the South of France is hard to beat, but what I also like is the way old men with faces lined like a London Underground map still spend hours sitting at cafe tables, smoking and, hallelujah, reading newspapers. In the evening, they might adjourn to the nearest dusty boules track and then back to the cafe for a pichet of red wine and a moan about President Macron.
But, my goodness, the French can be surly. On one of our Carrefour supermarket runs I ask a member of staff as gently as possible if she could direct me to ‘les oeufs’ (eggs), where upon, without looking up, she stabs out an aggressive finger and barks: ‘au fin’ [‘at the end’]. And their road manners are appalling. By the end of the week we ditch games of I-Spy with the younger children in favour of Spot The Smile as we drive around, offering grateful waves if, on the rarest of occasions, we are given right of way. We find they are seldom reciprocated.
The French can be belligerent, chippy and aloof. They are our nearest neighbours and yet forever distant. But to have this fascinating, infuriating and captivating country on our doorstep is one of our great privileges.
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