French Lessons

Bringing Out the Family China

It was clear from his first words that Jean Aussel was a charming storyteller – exactly as Emilie, my contact at les Archives Municipales, had predicted.

 

Jean, his wife, Pierre and I made our introductions in Bellevue’s courtyard.  The 80-something man had chosen a proper, long-sleeved, button-down shirt for the occasion despite the early evening’s thick, summer air.  His baritone voice, resonating authoritatively yet warmly, complimented the exterior workmanship of our renovated Bellevue.

 

Jean’s wife was his perfect complement – a trait not uncommon in elderly couples who’ve been together longer than most people have been alive.  Delicate, with a fair complexion and careful posture, she wore a white summer dress juxtaposed with a colourful necklace and earrings.  Yes, she agreed with Jean’s assessments of Bellevue’s exterior, smiling politely all the while.

 

But as we stepped over Bellevue’s threshold, it was she who was breathless.  Bellevue was beautifully open these days!  The entry had been enclosed before….  She merged into the living room, a real-life Alice cascading into the rabbit hole.  Memories flooded back.  The living room had been the dining room – and there, turning toward today’s dining room – that had been the salon.  But there were walls between the rooms.…

 

Laurelle bounded into the room with Sabrina, our au pair.  I prayed that “best behavior” would be as evident as it was supposed to be for our special guests.  Jean’s wife stooped down to Laurelle and asked her age. 

 

“Six ans,” Laurelle replied.  Relief.

 

“Voilà!  I was ten years old,” she said, “just a bit older than you when I lived here.”  Her family, we learned, moved to Antibes from Normandy in order to escape the war.  She had more to say, I was sure, but she hesitated, either out of character or politeness or both.

 

Pierre stepped up as MC.  We were very excited to meet them both, he explained – particularly me.  I wanted to learn the history of Bellevue.  I wanted to learn about her founder.  I wanted to write down her stories.  Pierre mentioned my blog and (after explaining the concept of a blog) explained that I write about cultural differences between life in France and North America – about things like the rigidity of French classrooms compared with those in North America, or the way the French insist on saying “bonjour” before starting any interaction.  Self-deprecation, he added, was always a plus in making these observations.

 

Jean caught onto the notion straightaway.  “Cultural differences – like we’re surprised that a villa like this has shoes right here in the entryway – right out in the open!” he said.  “I mean, it’s okay for a casual home, but here, in a nice villa…?”

 

Pierre delighted that his own personal gripe had been noted by a third party.  My husband counted the neat line of shoes under the hallway table.  “Fourteen pairs of shoes!” he said.  “Fourteen pairs!  Two belong to me.  The other twelve belong to my wife and six-year-old daughter!”  

 

And that, I explained, hoping to avoid that ongoing line of fire, was the perfect example of what Jean could write about in his own blog about crazy foreign folks who shack up on France’s good soil. 

 

But Jean Aussel was a man of bigger ideas.  What interested him at that moment was that we were connecting with local people and forming these insights.  “I expect you’ve already started making les racines here,” he said expectantly.

 

Les racines – roots – are a big deal in France.  Particularly among folks whose ancestral roots delve far beneath the Côte d’Azur’s sandy and sometimes transitory surface.

 

It was at about this point that I mentioned my dictaphone.  The couple had no fear of recording their voices.  And honestly, it was the only way – despite the painstaking revision – that I could understand all their enthusiastic words.

 

It was about this time, too, that I realized I didn’t know her name.  Jean never offered it, nor did she, and cultural and generational mores somehow prevented Pierre and me from asking.  And especially now, as sweet Alice floated further into her rabbit hole that was at once familiar – generating the spark of a faded snapshot – and then, in a single breath, entirely new, a dwelling that was totally disembodied from the space she knew as a child.

 

We moved onto Bellevue’s main terrace.  Pierre explained that we call it our “loge at the opera of life” because honestly, there’s always some activity that we can spy on from the perch:  boats and cars and motorcycles and planes, sun worshipers and picnickers, sailors and windsurfers, swimmers and divers and fishermen.  And here, something – something among this hive of activity – set off a spark. 

 

“We went fishing for les crevettes…,” Jean’s wife began.

 

Shrimp?  Pierre and I were stunned.  Today there were sea urchins – but hardly shrimp!

 

“Between the rocks – oui, oui, oui,” she said.

 

There was more.  Her parents wanted to buy this house when they moved down from the north to escape the war.  “I lived here from 1939,” she said, hesitatingly. 

 

Jean finished her thought as she searched for words.  “Her father left the north because he had four children,” he said.

 

“Et voilà,” she said.  Exactly right.  “And after, the Italians came to France…”

 

“The Italians,” Jean interjected, “they were allied with the Germans in the war.”

 

“They took the house and we had to leave,” she said.  “That was 1941 or 1942….  All along the sea, all the houses were requisitioned, and we had to leave.  The Italians moved in and the house was mined.”

 

“Mined?!”  Surely I didn’t hear that right.  My own mind raced to the builders and gardeners and pool installers who dug deep into Bellevue’s earth.  It jumped to playdates in which half-a-dozen kids bounded through the gardens.  And, like a good American brain, it rushed straight to the strength of our home insurance policy.  All in a couple seconds.

 

“They put landmines in the garage…,” she said.  Her memory was cut short by our clamour on the terrace, making me wonder, belatedly, what other areas of the house she was about to name.  And then, as if to make sure we got her point, she said, “If we walked over them, they’d blow up.”

 

“There was a period,” Jean explained, “when people living on Cap d’Antibes close to the water were evacuated.  They didn’t have the right to live here.”

 

When we headed upstairs, Jean’s wife became disoriented:  Her bedroom was gone.  Recognition of such a precious fact – the disappearance of one’s own, childhood room – was both slow and, I suppose, heartbreaking in its way.  Rooms were smaller and more enclosed in earlier times.  Where there’d been four bedrooms, today there were only two.  The ceiling above Bellevue’s grand, cylindrical staircase – now rising three full stories – must’ve been a storey lower.  The top part of today’s vaulting void was Jean’s wife’s bedroom. 

 

But a second terrace that existed outside her bedroom was unchanged.  Its views still must rank among the best on the Cap, sweeping from our own town of Antibes all the way – if you crane your neck – to Cap Ferrat, on this side of Monaco. 

 

The delicate woman was delighted by a sudden memory.  “I shelled peas here with my sister!  During the war…we were happy!”

 

On reflection, it’s that last phrase that was so poignant.  Something so simple brought great joy during the darkness of war.

 

She then focused on the sprawling, white house next door, a shockingly modern residence in former days.  She often played there with her good friend, the daughter of Georges Milton, a well-known singer and movie actor.

 

Jean galloped down memory lane, too.  Soon we stood on a small balcony overlooking Bellevue’s garden, where his conversation clung to this notion of rootedness that I can’t seem to escape.  Jean pointed across the road to La Collinette, a white villa with sea-green shutters.  He played there as a child.  The house next door?  It was bought by his grandfather, a well-known horticulturist.  And the house right up there on the hill, peaking out under the parasol pines?  Jean was born there.  Of course he was.

 

When we reconvened in Bellevue’s living room, I hoped that Jean Aussel’s nice glass of whiskey might fuel further stories.  But it’s her stories that I’m focusing on now, and one of my favourites had to do with the dishes she used as a child.  Edouard Muterse had purchased a pretty table service as part of the rental package.

 

“What’s funny is that I lived in this house, and then I married Jean,” she said, now offering her stories more freely.  “He inherited the furnishings that were in this house.  So now, the whole set of dishes came back to me!”

 

Her contributions continued.  She returned to northern France with her parents, but after the war her family bought a holiday home in neighbouring Juan-les-Pins.  (This town, if I may interject some history, was a hot spot during that era.   It was the place that had invented waterskiing and where – if the story is to be believed – Coco Chanel had recently discovered the suntan.)  The couple met each other through one of her sisters and married in 1953.

 

Fueled by the pause, and perhaps by the warmth of the whiskey, Jean began to tell stories about his own family, and to indulge my curiosity, particularly those about Edouard Muterse, the father of Bellevue.  At one point, he played on the small-worldliness of this whole episode.

 

“My wife knew Edouard Muterse before I did,” he said.  “She knew my uncle because her parents rented the house.”  But there was something else.

 

“My uncle was trés genereux,” he said.  His property Le Bosquet was a very large, wooded property with a separate cottage.  He loaned this cottage to les Guides de France, the French Girl Scouts.  Jean’s wife was a young member.

 

She continued the story.  “Every Thursday, all the Guides, we’d play at Le Bosquet.  It’s like this that I knew his uncle….  It was during the war, and the place was full of fig trees.  We were tellement, tellement hungry, and so we stole figs from Edouard Muterse!”  She added, “I don’t know whether he suspected or not.”

 

By the time Jean Aussel and his wife left Bellevue, my dictaphone had recorded nearly two hours of conversation.  That’s a pretty good indication of how long this blog post could be.  So I will leave you, just as she was every Thursday, hungry.

 

French Lessons is on holiday next week in – of all places given its recent, shocking atrocities – Norway.  Bellevue’s tale will continue in the following week with what’s left:  Edouard’s story.

 

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The Answer is Blowin' in the Wind

The hour of the phone call.

 

Having finally met Christian Aussel face-to-face in Le Bosquet’s front garden (see last week’s post), Pierre and I remained none the wiser whether Edouard Muterse really was the father of our beloved Bellevue.  But speaking for ten minutes with Edouard Muterse’s great-grandnephew – largely through the formidable barrier of his motorcycle helmet – made us even more intrigued about the possible ancestry of our French Rivieran home. 

 

I waited out the rest of that sunny afternoon in anticipation of an early evening phone call to Jean Aussel, Christian’s father and Edouard Muterse’s grandnephew.  Les Archives Municipales helped me track down the octogenarian to Le Bosquet.  He was “a charming man who always has a lot of things to say,” they told me.  Alas, he was napping at the time of our visit.

 

Just before 6pm, Pierre and I convened in Bellevue’s library.  It was the room with the best telephone connection – and the spot having the best Mediterranean views to keep six-year-old Laurelle occupied.  That said, jumping between the leather couch and a cushioned ottoman in the center of the room – which was what she was doing – wasn’t exactly the sort of occupation I had in mind. 

 

I tried to explain to our baboon that Mommy and Papa had an important phone call to make.  A really important call to someone who was much older than we were and who might have to listen closely to what we said.  I focused Laurelle’s energies through a strong pair of binoculars aimed out the library window.  From here she could inspect Billionaires’ Row in Port Vauban.  The secretive, Qatari megayacht Katara had just floated in.  The dazzling, white, 408-foot-long subdivision – bigger than Antibes’ Old Town, so it seemed – surely would keep her attention for a few minutes.

 

Pierre perched on the arm of the couch and took the phone.  I sat, pen poised, facing him.  It was an unfortunate state of affairs for my personal research, but Pierre was the one with the language skills – and the Quebecois charm.  Between the two of us, he had a far better chance of engaging Jean Aussel. 

 

One more thing.  We chose against the speakerphone.  I wasn’t thrilled about hearing everything after-the-fact, but throwing an 80-something-year old on speakerphone seemed rude.  And anyway, there was that baboon in the room.

 

Someone answered.  Very unusually for my husband – a man who, assuming he loved the stuff, could sell fois gras to a vegetarian – Pierre faltered on his introduction.  He jumbled his name, Bellevue’s street address and what he wanted into one, sweeping breath. 

 

I decided he was talking to an answerphone – a rarity in France, but still.

 

No, on second take, Pierre spoke to a person.  That person went off in search of Jean Aussel.  I figured it was an assistant, someone who helped the elderly man maneuver around his house.

 

My pen remained poised, but there was nothing to write.  Meanwhile, our calm six-year-old daughter became bored with captivating Katara and started using the binocs to peruse the bay.

 

Jean Aussel came to the phone.  Pierre’s posture straightened.  His language became polished.  The first piece of his introduction was – get this – that he was a Quebecois.  To the French, this word is code for “long lost cousin”.  The term immediately softens every French soul. 

 

Pierre perched on the couch, listening intently.  He was obviously intrigued by Jean’s conversation – amused even.  My pen hovered expectantly, but Pierre only tossed me a few words.  Jean was doing all the talking.

 

Finally – FINALLY – my husband brought me into the context of the conversation.  He launched the question that went to the heart of our search.  The Big Question that determined whether it was even relevant for us to connect with the fascinating family who lived in Le Bosquet – the one who had offered the celebrated Guy de Maupassant residence, the family called Muterse, and now Aussel, whose Antibois roots plunged widely and deeply into the good soil of this ancient city.

 

Dites-moi, Pierre said to Jean.  Tell me, was it Edourard Muterse who built Bellevue? 

 

My husband listened briefly and nodded.  I think his eyes actually twinkled.  He put his palm over the receiver and uttered the words I most wanted to hear:  “Edouard built the house!”

 

I punched my fist into the air and declared a victorious “Yes!”  “EM built home,” I scribbled – as if I’d ever forget that golden nugget.  In that single phrase, my nascent passion to unearth all facts and stories and details Muterse suddenly sprouted legs.  Real, firmly-rooted legs.

 

Pierre covered the telephone receiver again and threw me another, seemingly riveting morsel.  “It’s the same family!”  

 

Whatever that meant.  “Same family?” I jotted on the page.  If he forgot to explain, I’d ask.

 

Laurelle suddenly was finished with Katara, the whole of Billionaires’ Row and the most mesmerizing bay in the French Riviera.  She went back to bouncing between the couch and the ottoman.

 

Pierre repeated another phrase he just heard.  “Mille cinq cents vingt.” 

 

Numbers are the worst thing to understand in French.  I wrote down the words and then translated them into figures:  1,520.  And so?

 

Just as the bouncing baboon was working herself into a frenzy, and I was thanking God we’d decided against a chandelier in that room, Jean excused himself for a moment to check something with his wife. 

 

His wife?  I’d never thought of him having a wife.  Pierre covered the phone and leaned toward me:  “His wife – her family rented the house during the war years!”

 

Which was honestly incredible.  It made no sense whatsoever. 

 

The two men slipped back into conversation, talking quite delightedly with one another.  I began to worry that Pierre was gathering all the best, firsthand information.  All that’d remain for me would be his rehashing of Jean’s stories, an almost-precise remnant of their meandering telephone conversation.  But finally – finally! – Pierre mentioned we’d like to meet up with Jean for an hour or so.

 

The Frenchman seemed open to the idea.  The men were talking about meeting here?  At Bellevue?  Yes, yes, they were – tomorrow?  6pm?  Pierre was offering to collect Jean and his wife, but Jean insisted he not worry.  The elderly Antibois knew his way around this area pretty well.

 

At last my husband rang off.  “Jean – he’s a real storyteller!” he said.  “He’s incredibly lucid.”  There went my vision of the frail 80-something who needed a home nurse.  Then Pierre filled in the detail.

 

Edouard Muterse, when he built Bellevue, gave her another name.  He called her Lou Gargali. 

 

While I’d been aware of this name, I never realised it was Bellevue’s original name.  Exactly when the name changed – and by whom and for what reason – remained a mystery.  But Jean unpacked its meaning.  Lou Gargali was a Provençal term for a very unusual, morning wind. 

 

I thought immediately of the tumultuous winter we’d endured in Antibes a few years ago.  Living within Lou Gargali’s walls was like living inside a teakettle that was constantly approaching its boil.

 

Jean’s 1,520 number corresponded to – get this – the year to which he could trace his family’s land ownership in the area.  (That “one-thousand, five-hundred twenty” was a year never crossed my mind.  Think about it:  Ferdinand Magellan was still alive.)  Jean Aussel’s own, seriously established family was his current project.  He was writing a 500-page book about them.  He had only three pages to go.

 

But the bizarre, small-world and entirely riveting thing about this whole affair was that, as a young girl, Jean Aussel’s wife lived at Lou Gargali.  France is hardly a land of arranged marriages or family trees with no branches, so let me rephrase:  The wife of Edouard Muterse’s grandnephew lived in the house that Edouard Muterse built.  Her family rented Lou Gargali from Edouard during World War II, a grand travesty played out on Antibes’ very grounds.  Jean didn’t know the young girl at this time, but it was through this connection – Edouard Muterse and Lou Gargali – that they met each other.

 

Lou Gargali and her founder were probably responsible – just doing the math here – for a 50- or 60-year marriage.  At a minimum they deserved god-parenting rights.

 

And so it was she, Jean Aussel’s wife, who was the more interested in seeing Lou Gargali again.  She hadn’t been here since the 1950s or so.  Inside Lou Gargali – our Bellevue – lived her childhood memories of the war and, surely, of her parents and any siblings.

 

So tomorrow.  What should we do?  Tour the house and have a drink?  Offer the Aussels dinner?  What does a North American whip up for well-healed, French-to-their-bone-marrow guests without having to sweat over a stove? 

 

A dictaphone!  I need to find a dictaphone.  Pierre believes Jean’s going to give me 90% of what I’m looking for, so I don’t want to miss a single one of his precious, French words.

 

But what am I looking for exactly?  I need to clarify that, too.  Facts.  Characters.  Connections. 

 

In short, I’m seeking stories of the past.  Stories that will make Lou Gargali – our darling Bellevue – come alive.

 

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Villa Muterse I

Villa Muterse II?, my post a couple weeks ago, has generated feedback from several readers – this, after Pierre told me the blog lacked a certain punch.  He was right.  It probably did fall a bit limp.  But if the entry lacked a certain punch, it offered a certain content. 

 

So, readers have been wondering, what happened next?  Did I ever find out who built Bellevue, our beloved seaside villa in the Côte d’Azur that has attracted interest from passersby and celebrities alike?  Was it the brainchild of Edouard Muterse, the man who looked back at me through wire spectacles in the photos from Antibes’ Archives Municipales – the guy who was Président in the 1930s of both the Bureau d’Hygiène Sociale and our neighbouring Port de la Salis, the one whose father gave accommodation and sailing lessons to the famed novelist Guy de Maupassant? 

 

And not just facts, you wanted to know, but did I manage to track down any people with lucid memories and stories to tell?

 

The words of Emilie, the unusually helpful woman at les Archives, have rung clearly in my ears from the moment they arrived there.  Antibes isn’t large, she said.  There are a lot of people here who remember the past. 

 

All data points gathered from les Archives Municipales were directing me, the guided missile, up the hill from Bellevue to a property called Le Bosquet – a place whose former name, when Maupassant stayed there in the winter of 1885-1886, was Villa Muterse.  It was the home where, in his later years, Edouard Muterse lived – whether or not he was the one who actually built Bellevue.  (I must not lose sight of this unfortunate possibility.)  And Le Bosquet was the place where today, the Muterse family line lives on under the name Aussel. 

 

“I don’t know if you’ll have the occasion to meet the father, Jean Aussel,” Emilie wrote to me in an email a few days after my visit to les Archives.  She’d mentioned that the senior Aussel was in his early 80s these days, but as if in encouragement, her email described him as “a charming man and who always has a lot of things to say.”   

 

Le Bosquet also was charming.  But as much as I was drawn to the residence, I was also repelled.  What would happen, I worried, if the current family knew nothing of their past?  Worse, what if they didn’t want to tell it to some snooping American broad? 

 

So I did what all curious people do at the birth of any particular interest:  I googled it. 

 

As it happens, Le Bosquet is partly a chambre d’hôte today.  That’s to say it’s a bed and breakfast – with 4.5 stars, no less – run by Christian and Sylvie Aussel.  I learned that the property’s bones date back to 1750, thanks to an ancestor who was the last Viguier du Roy (king’s magistrate, a position that survived until the French Revolution in 1789). 

 

While the weight of Le Bosquet’s lineage only frightened me further, the online photos at least made the place look comfortable and charming.  It had a flesh-coloured stucco façade, pale green shutters, matching green umbrellas and a rambling-but-tended garden.  Exactly the kind of place you’d crave for some R & R.

 

This factoid about Le Bosquet being a B & B was incredibly fortuitous for someone who didn’t speak the local language perfectly.  Francophone phone conversations are a nightmare for me, contorting basic words into urgent-sounding jibberish – simply by removing the speaker’s face.

 

So one early afternoon, I convinced Pierre to take a bike ride with me up to Le Bosquet.  He has the language skills – and the Quebecois charm.  The French surrender their espressos and morning croissants for their long lost cousins.  And in truth, even if Pierre wasn’t exactly a fan of that earlier blogpost of mine, he admitted to being curious about the story behind it.

 

Shortly we stood at the gate of Le Bosquet.  Actually that makes it sound too easy. 

 

Shortly, after circumnavigating the private and blocked streets that surround Le Bosquet (which, I remind you, was supposedly a charming bed and breakfast), we found ourselves in front of an iron gate having a good dozen call buttons.  Inside the barrier lay a long, straight street lined with olive trees.  But nowhere, inside or outside the gate, was there the slightest announcement of a chambre d’hôte.

 

Fortunately one of the call buttons was marked “Le Bosquet”.  After several rings, a barely audible, male voice answered. 

 

Pierre made his opening bid:  Bonjour, Monsieur!  We purchased Bellevue a few years ago and we’re trying to discover its history, and my wife’s a writer – behind us a dump truck mounted the road in low gear – and anyway, she’s led to believe that an Edouard Muterse built our house.

 

The almost imperceptible voice said we probably want to speak to its father.

 

Pierre continued:  Oui, yes, that’d be great.  We were wondering whether we could take a minute or two now and make an appointment and….  Allo?

 

The call box was silent.  Pierre rang again.  No answer.  But what luck:  The pedestrian gate was open!  We scooted inside. 

 

At the end of the straight, olive tree-lined road, we found it:  Le Bosquet – just like its online picture, but with almost every shutter snapped tight.  The residence looked inviting but unwelcoming.  We sensed people nearby – there was that voice on the call box, and some garden tools were splayed out in the shade – but still, the area felt vacant.

 

Pierre and I called out.  “Allo?  Bonjour?” 

 

No one came to meet us.  We resolved to try again at the main road – but on retracing our steps we discovered we were now locked inside the gated community.  So again, google.  Reception via satellite on a Canadian cell phone proved the superior technology.  Someone would arrive. 

 

When Christian Aussel finally emerged from Le Bosquet’s stately entry, he wore a spherical motorcycle helmet.  It seemed to me a clever way to confine conversations with interlopers.  He had a compact, wiry build; dark, round eyes; and an olive complexion.  I guessed he was 50-something – at least as far as I could gauge within that space helmet.

 

Christian reiterated that we probably wanted to speak with his father, Jean Aussel, who was taking a nap at the moment.  The best time to reach him was between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. 

 

Oui – merci – but Pierre and I could hardly leave it at that.  Here we were, standing beside (though shielded by the astronomical headgear of) a relative of Edouard Muterse, the man I thought and hoped was the father of our Bellevue.  Part of me, indeed, was that meddling history junkie that Christian aimed to avoid.

 

But kindly, Edouard’s great-grandnephew wasn’t too reluctant to offer some of Le Bosquet’s history.  Yes, this was the place where Maupassant spent one winter.  It was only a winter stay, he said, because the Muterse family lived at Le Bosquet during the summers.  In winter they’d decamp to their city home near the train station.

 

Let me put this geography in context.  We’re not talking about a winter home in Aspen and a summer home in St Tropez.  Non.  We’re talking about a winter home in Antibes and a summer home in – you’ve got it – Antibes.  The distance between the two spots is about three kilometers.  Of course airplanes didn’t exist in the 1880s (and for that matter, Aspen was basically a newborn, silver mining camp).  Le Bosquet itself would’ve lain in the wilderness outside Antibes, a city that was still fortified (though not for much longer) by rampart walls and a vaulting access door that snapped shut each night at 8:00pm.  This sort of country property was only comfortably inhabited during the summer months.  

 

So I launch my million Euro question.  Did Edouard Muterse build Bellevue?

 

He may have built Bellevue, Christian said, but when his father died (already having outlived Edouard’s mother), Edouard came to live in Le Bosquet.  Christian had to spell out French tradition for us:  Parents always live in the big house.  When they die, the house belongs to their children.

 

Quick, mental arithmetic spun the arrow away from Edouard’ role as father of Bellevue.  A few years ago, someone told us that his uncle laid Bellevue’s plumbing in 1923.  Information at les Archives Municipales told me that Edouard’s father died in 1928.  The brief, five-year interval between these years hardly supported the idea that Edouard Muterse would’ve created a grand, new home – one that at the time was described as a virtual castle – only to move out a few years later.

 

Edouard himself had no children, Christian said.  We were still focusing on Le Bosquet.  The fact seemed to explain the property’s current situation.  In Edouard’s time the estate was a single, sprawling unit.  Edouard’s niece (who married an Aussel) inherited the place in 1948, the year Edouard died.  Her son Jean, now in his eighties and presently taking a nap, restored the property and today occupies the verrière, a vaulting, glass-roofed portion at the western end of the property.   Christian runs the imposing, central part of the house as a chambre d’hôte, while his brother Denis lives in the eastern section of the building, once a fig séchoir (drying room).  

 

Around this time the motorcycle helmet came off.  Maybe Christian was enjoying our conversation more than he’d expected.  Or, from the sweat pouring down his cheeks, possibly he was just hot.  He was busy working out which house was our Bellevue.  The one with the library and tower? 

 

Yes. 

 

The one on the water.  It was more statement than question. 

 

Yes.

 

I have the drawing for the front door, Christian said.  The guy who made it, Monsieur Mondini(?), is still alive.

 

Pierre was visibly floored by this revelation.  I was a few sentences behind, still taking the word porte (i.e., “door”) to mean our neighbouring port.  Soon, though, I realized the two men were talking about the magnificent, thick slab of walnut at the front of Bellevue that has intrigued us for years.  It groans on its hinges, Adams Family-style, and still took an eight inch-long, iron key until our modernizations. 

 

Pierre underlined the door’s beauty.  In the early days of our renovations, he explained to Christian, Bellevue had no surrounding gate.  A Russian actually stopped by and offered something like EUR 14,000 for our door.  Just the door!

 

Christian laughed.  A Russian?  If the guy offered 14, he said, we should’ve asked double!

 

Of course Pierre and I never sold Bellevue’s door.  Surprising and interwoven as this connection over Bellevue’s porte sounds, Christian now owns Monsieur Mondini’s woodworking shop.  Woodworking is his own trade, he explained.  Bellevue’s plans were simply part of the business he purchased.

 

The stonework surrounding our groaning door contained another, possibly related mystery.  The initials “RC” were engraved into the keystone at the top of the arch.  Philip, our builder, had told us such initials traditionally belonged to a property’s original owner. 

 

But “RC”, no matter how you morphed it, looked nothing like “EM”.  Perhaps Christian held the answer to another of Bellevue’s mysteries?

 

Edouard’s great-grandnephew was now interested that we were interested.  Do we know any local families in Antibes? he wondered.

 

Yes, I said, explaining that because our daughter attended school here for a year, we have the privilege of knowing local families.  We don’t just hang out with expats, I told him.

 

We are lucky to know these people, Christian said.  There aren’t so many of them.

 

In a city of 70,000 year-round residents, this last comment seemed strange to me.  But Pierre understood.  As ever with me and the French language, I was talking cross-purposes.  (Pierre later explained that Christian referred to a different sort of local family:  those with roots in Antibes.  The true Antibois have lived here for generations.  It was all about that deep-dwelling, French passion for le terroir – the land, and the values and mores rooted into it.  The real Antibois represented fewer and fewer of Antibes’ population.  And Christian was obviously one of them.)

 

Pierre and my “two-minute visit” was well and truly exceeded.  But our connection should endure.  Christian will come by to look at our door.  We don’t want him to fix its endearing moan, but it’ll be useful if he could look at the little bug problem.  I won’t mind a glimpse at the original drawings either.  More importantly, Christian gave us the telephone number for his father, Jean.

 

As Pierre and I biked back down the hill toward Bellevue, I punched the air in victory.  We found Le Bosquet!  We talked to a real person who was related to Edouard Muterse!  And we’re on the way to linking up with the fabulously interesting Jean Aussel!

 

And yet.  And yet, I can repeat the closing line from that prior blogpost called Villa Muterse II?:  I have yet to officially link Bellevue’s creation with the Muterse family.  But now, more than ever, I’m keen to do so.

 

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A Delectable Fourth

The French Riviera is renowned for its rambling estates and sumptuous villas.  Take Domaine la Dilecta.  So grand is this 10-bedroom, 10-bathroom, 19,375 square-foot (1,800 square-meter) residence and its 4.5-hectare park, it deserves the designation of Domaine. 

 

Domaine la Dilecta has intrigued me, more any than others, since my family began coming to Cap d’Antibes in 2005.  Part of it is proximity.  There’s something enthralling about the place just up the road, the one you stumble on during an innocent tour of your neighbourhood. 

 

I happened upon Domaine la Dilecta in this way, while biking the winding roads just behind Bellevue, navigating their circuit enclosed by high shrubs and fences on both sides, all the time climbing toward Cap d’Antibes’ working lighthouse.  But at one crossroads, the fences came to an abrupt halt.  Smack in front of me stood a crescent of 12-foot, black-iron spears with golden tips.  Their rods formed an artful fence fitted with golden lettering announcing, with determined majesty, the entrance to Domaine la Dilecta.

 

The estate’s downright grandeur is the other part that has kept me bewitched.  Peering between the black iron posts, the size of this single property on the Cap d’Antibes is truly breathtaking.  I could spy (and by the obviously-placed security camera, I was certainly spied upon) the sprawling residence, an exquisite example of 1920s, boxy architecture painted Mediterranean white, set nobly within a verdant, English lawn (or more precisely, an expansive park) at the end of a long, winding drive.

 

Rumour has it that an Italian family has owned this estate since the 1940s, which I’m guessing means they got it for a decent price just after the war.  Right next door to the Domaine is the Aga Khan’s former residence – now a famous ruin after one Russian oligarch tried to “improve” it (i.e., to grotesquely enlarge it, so the estate agents’ rumours go), when the mairie put the kibosh on unapproved works.  The property has remained vacant ever since, gaping chunks blown out of its beautiful, stone bones, its grounds growing wild for six years and counting.  Neighbours like this only enhance the mystique surrounding life at the top of the Cap.

 

In the past, I’ve parked my bike outside Domaine la Dilecta to photograph her and her imposing entryway.  But all that changed with some vague invitation on the Fourth of July.

 

Our Austrian neighbours here invited this Canadian-American family to a party on Monday night.  The fact that Monday was the 4^th, as in the Fourth of July, was hardly part of the invitation.  The Austrians insisted we must meet their good friends the Ps, who rent out the delectable Domaine la Dilecta for the summer.  The Ps were – as virtually every American would know – scions of a storied, fellow American family. 

 

Naturally, we accepted.  Putting two and two together, I thought about wearing red, white and blue to the event – but Pierre encouraged me into teal and pink, something sleeveless and silky and precisely Côte d’Azur.

 

At 7:50 p.m. sharp, on an oddly drizzly July evening, Pierre, six-year-old Laurelle and I link up with a small convoy of black vehicles emerging from the Austrians’ home.  We wipe sprinkles of rain from our windscreens as the parade weaves upward toward the Domaine.  

 

This time, the first time for me, Dilecta’s black iron gates open.  Our parade sweeps up the long drive to reach the magnificent, white residence.  At the same time, caterers run tables and chairs from a poolside marquee into the main house.  The weather has prompted last-minute changes.

 

The fleet deposits our brigade at Domaine la Dilecta’s doorway, adults and children in about equal number.  Our Austrian neighbour is there, glittering in chunky bijoux, frizzy hair running wild down her back.  The Ps, I learn, charged her with populating their party.

 

“I’ve brought 23 people!” she says proudly.  Her friends are Swiss and Norweigian, British and Austrian and – thanks to our threesome on this US holiday – Canadian and American.  Plenty of sequins populate the entry hall, but there are no red-and-white stripes or blue stars to be found.

 

Laurelle maintains her usual, 45-second routine of shyness, hiding behind my legs.  Then she bounds off full-throttle with a troop of six-to-nine-year-old girls.  They gallop freely through the stately Domaine la Dilecta like it’s Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyworld, each room an open invitation to be explored.  Laurelle darts back into view momentarily wearing a blue, sparkly top hat.  She’s headed to the disco cave, she tells me, and disappears again.

 

Meanwhile, the adults congregate in the Domaine’s salon, an airy room paved in black-and-white-checkered, marble flooring and graced by an oversized marble fireplace.  I weave between the other foreigners trying to determine how they, like us, have ended up in the Domaine tonight. 

 

But I want to be a child!  I want to run through the rooms and halls of Domaine la Dilecta to see her splendor rather than being cooped up in a single, though spacious and justly grand, sitting room with arching windows over an undulating, green lawn.

 

A mother has a right to check up on her six-year-old daughter, right?  Especially one that’s gone off to a “disco cage” (which is – I swear – how I heard it from my sweet, baby child’s tongue)? 

 

Vigilant mommy trots off to discover Domaine la Dilecta’s library, its wood-paneled walls decorated with frescos and intricate carvings.  She finds a dining room with an enormous, crystal chandelier and walls covered by mirrors that are mounted with rows of vibrantly coloured plates.  Vigilant mommy works out that the handle on an antique-mirrored wall in the hallway leads to a hidden bathroom.  She dodges caterers in a utilitarian butler’s pantry and goes in search of the disco cage, a musty building across the back driveway complete with black lights, full bar and leopard-motif carpeting.  (Here, I find my daughter dancing to rock music, quite innocently.)

 

I’m not meant to be playing nanny, I know.  Reluctantly at first, I return to mingle with the sequins – and to work out this enigma of Independence Day on the Cap.  Does anyone here but me (and my long-suffering Canadian husband) realize today’s a Big Holiday?  Earlier today, Yankee greetings flew into me via email from Ohio and Colorado, from England and up the road in Biot.  In London, a 10-foot statue of Ronald Reagan was unveiled outside the US Embassy. 

 

The Fourth of July, I am quite sure, remains a major holiday.  But here, the only evidence I find of red-white-and-blueness are a few little girls running around in blue, sparkly top hats.  I strike up conversation with a Brit.  I ask him, isn’t this the day the Brits like to call “British Thanksgiving”?  But conversation drifts away from any notion about the sort of independence that’s celebrated on the First by Canadians, the Fourteenth by the French and – does anyone realize it? – on the Fourth by the Americans!

 

At the dinner buffet table I catch up with my fellow American host.  It’s a marvelous party, I say to Mr. P.  Tell me:  Monday night is honestly as good a night as any to throw a party, but is this party meant to coincide with the Fourth of July?

 

The evening’s red, white and blue, it turns out, is out in the marquee by the pool house.  Yes, whether anyone else realizes it, this is meant to be an American Independence Day celebration!  And at that moment, it’s as if every other Yank at Domaine la Dilecta emerges from the gorgeous woodwork in one fell swoop.  Pierre and I share a dinner table with the Ps’ American houseguests. 

 

“To the Fourth of July!” we say, chinking our French glasses filled with Austrian wine in the royal splendor owned by the Italians.

 

Suddenly, not far away, fireworks explode outside Domaine la Dilecta’s arching windows.  We drift into the humid, nighttime air – the Americans, Canadians, Austrians, English, Swiss and Norwegians alike – and spread along the graceful terrace.  An expansive pool and fully equipped pool house is situated to one side of the grounds; the black, iron entry gates lie miles off in the other direction.  But our eyes are directed over the rolling greens, above a mask of surrounding trees and into the nighttime sky. 

 

“Just on time!”  Mr P announces with grandiose and comic charm.

 

Truth be told, the fireworks are probably going off at water’s edge for clients of the Grand Hôtel du Cap.  Or maybe, if I have my directions confused, it’s an extravagant Russian celebration emanating from Roman Abramovich’s Château de la Croë.  Or quite possibly, these fireworks are part of some festival d’art pyrotechnique, one of an endless stream of firework shows, usually set to musical scores, that sparkle and pop along the Côte d’Azur during the celebrated summertime.

 

But who cares whether these fireworks are French or Russian or the glittering backdrop to some Wagnerian aria.  For this single moment, we pretend the celebration is just for us, a small band of Americans who, sprinkled among the world, populates Domaine la Dilecta on the Fourth of July.  Rarely do I feel so patriotic as when I celebrate an American holiday on foreign land! 

 

The fireworks end and we head indoors.  The caterers are collecting plates and setting the tables for dessert.  Now – finally – evidence of the evening’s intent comes to light. 

 

On the tables are paper dessert napkins.  They’re red, white and blue – and in the design of the good, ol’ stars and stripes.

 

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