French Lessons

Double Vision

I’m living in two parallel worlds again.  That’s how I know this glorious breath of France is now coming to an end. 

 

It’s time to think about whether Laurelle’s black oxfords fit anymore – for school in Toronto.  Fresh air and sea salt always seem to add a size or two to her feet.  It’s time to return all her French library books and to sign-up for ice skating classes in the autumn. 

 

In an out of the way corner of Lou Gargali – somewhere that won’t overshadow my last precious moments here – I’ve begun to stash some French items I can’t live without in Canada:  my favourite vinaigre balsamique, le blé gourmande (quite simply, durum wheat), and hair conditioner.  (I know, women and their toiletries.)  I’d like to take home one of Jacques Vial’s oozing, wholly unpasteurized rounds of chèvre from Antibes’ Marché Provençal, but I think the Canadian authorities might get a little snippy.  

 

That said, last spring a French friend living in Toronto was thrilled to receive a care parcel from home:  pâté, saucissons (dried sausages) and hard cheeses.  The covert, cross-border food swap is quite remarkable.

 

Not that my last few days in the Côte d’Azur this season have been any less, well, Côte d’Azur.  The place is still offering up some gobsmacking stories.  Property gossip from Angela, our dear agent immobilier, is always a treat:

 

• We now know the rental price tag for Domaine la Dilecta, the sprawling property at the top of Cap d’Antibes where our family had the pleasure of spending the Fourth of July (see July 6, 2011 post).  You, too, can be King and Queen of the Cap in this 10-bed, 10-bath, 19,375-square-foot mansion and its 4.5-hectare park for a mere EUR 300,000 (US$429,000) per month.  That includes lawnmowing and pool maintenance, but no breakfast.

 

• After years of rumours, German heiress Heidi Horten’s property, a rare villa on Cap d’Antibes land that’s pieds dans l’eau (literally “feet in the water”, meaning nothing, not even a road, lies between it and the sea) is officially on the market.  The asking price is EUR 55 million.

 

• Back into the stratosphere, the top floor apartment over La Brasserie, a restaurant between “our” boulangerie and Angela’s real estate office, recently sold for EUR 1.5 million.  EUR 10,000-a-square-metre rate was significant for our seaside village of Antibes (though still a snip in Cannes).  An interesting trend surfaces:  The pad sold to a Frenchman.  He and his country folk are once again investing in Côte property.  After all, the banks aren’t paying anything.

 

Non-property assets also tempt the ritzy, summer clientele.  Pierre stopped into Cannes’ Cartier shop earlier this week.  A Russian mother and daughter were shopping for an engagement ring (which in itself is interesting).  Eeny, meeny, miny, mo.  The daughter couldn’t make up her mind between the ring for EUR 1.2 million and another for EUR 1.4 million. 

 

And the yachts along this French Rivieran shoreline!  For two weeks now, Roman Abramovich’s Eclipse has been anchored in Antibes’ bay, perfectly centered within the little porthole window that peers from my office onto the bay.  Poor Roman, the UK’s Mail Online reports.  Antibes’ authorities tell him there’s no space in Port Vauban for his 538-foot megayacht, the longest private yacht in the world.  The sole berth that could possibly accommodate his extravagance is a far-flung jetty occupied by super-wealthy Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Alsaud’s jewel, a mere 265-feet in length (though nonetheless a storied vessel, having featured in the 1983 James Bond film Never Say Never Again as ‘The Flying Saucer’ owned by villain Maximilian Largo).

 

Yes, we have the occasional spat in the sunny Côte.  What the Mail Online didn’t realize in reporting the rude brush-off by Antibes’ authorities toward the king of Chelsea Football Club was that the Saudi prince actually paid for this jetty to be built.  His multi-decade lease is still running.

 

Closer to reality, Laurelle has lost her third and fourth teeth this summer, so Lou Gargali has enjoyed two visits by la petite souris.  The toothfairy hasn’t obtained landing rights in France, so French children rely on a little mouse for payment.  Except that Laurelle, who gets tenderhearted about any marginally collectable item, couldn’t bear to part with either of her teeth.  We’ve learned that a pleading note – and a small wedge of cheese – will ensure the souris’ money. 

 

I expect tooth number five will present a drama.  Will the toothfairy accept cheese?  We’ve never actually met her.  Somehow my daughter has managed to lose each of her four teeth so far under French jurisdiction.

 

A final note, too, for continuing readers of French Lessons who’ve followed this summer’s investigations:  Pierre and I enjoyed a last-minute invitation to visit the Aussels at none other than le Bosquet, the storied home occupied by Antibes’ last viguier (the local representative of the King of France) back in the mid-1700s; the very bastide that housed Guy de Maupassant in 1886; and the family home of our own home’s founding father, Edouard Muterse.  We stood in the salon where Edouard met his friends.  We glimpsed his office.  We ambled through the library he built and walked upstairs to see the space that housed his family museum. 

 

Pierre and I returned to Lou Gargali that evening feeling as though we’d somehow met this man who’s now long gone.  We held another precious gift in our hands:  The Aussels gave us a plate from Lou Gargali’s original collection, the very service used, quite incredibly, by Madame Aussel during her own childhood, a plate furnished for Lou Gargali by Edouard Muterse himself.   (To understand what on earth I’m talking about, and what has grabbed the fancy of readers this summer, take a look these posts in order:  June 30, July 15, July 22, July 30 and August 11, 2011). 

 

But now it’s time to go.  The July/August issue of Cannes Soleil will soon be pulled from the shelves in the neighbouring city.  Did I mention that Laurelle and I featured in a story on the revitalization of Cannes’ produce markets – picture and quotes and all?  Our fleeting celebrity soon will evaporate.  Summer’s expiring and so is that bit of fun.

 

So will end another favourite French escapade.  The alarm went off the other night just after midnight.  One of the sensors, we later learned, had rusted.  But in the heat of the moment, Pierre and I rushed outside onto Lou Gargali’s balcony to try to glimpse the theives’ escape.  At that very moment, the only thing missing was the clothes on a young couple beneath us, who waded from the shoreline into the sea.  Ah, l’amour….

 

Time for all this Côte d’Azur fun to stop.  School is starting.  Laurelle’s excited to show off the holes in her mouth to her Canadian classmates – and to share new lyrics to the traditional tune of “Happy Birthday”:

 

Joyeux Anniversaire,

Le gâteau tombe par terre

Sur les pieds de ma grand-mère

Qui sentent le camembert!

 

Happy Birthday,

The cake falls on the floor

On the feet of my grandmother

That smell of camembert (cheese).

 

Did I honestly believe at one time that French kids had perfect manners?

 

One thing’s for sure, though.  The field trips back in Ontario will be less interesting than those in the Côte d’Azur.  Last year one of Laurelle’s six-year-old French friends went on a field trip with her class to a winery.   

 

It is sad to say this temporary goodbye.  It’s true that I look forward to living in a unified world again, even if that world is the Great White North.  But we’ll hold France in our hearts, especially in the winter months – cheese, megayachts, skinny dippers, little mice and all. 

 

And I’m buoyed by the knowledge that we’ll return to the Côte d’Azur next summer where – in the continual pursuit to understand what makes this place so utterly mesmerizing to foreigners like us – I’ll be dishing up a whole new series of French Lessons.

 

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The Gelato Index

First, news from last week: 

Voting is pretty much unanimous.  Early indicators came from the crew at Plage Provençal, and you’ve confirmed it:  Our Bellevue is rightly known as Lou Gargali.  Now, if only switching the name was as effortless as the French shrug….

 

Now for something new:

It’s mid-August, and La Rentrée suddenly infiltrates the air.  La Rentrée is the French institution that resurrects itself as September looms.  The beaches and ice cream parlours begin their annual clear out – en masse – as long-time holidaymakers head back to the grind. 

 

Tomorrow (Saturday), French highways are already labeled “red” by Bison Futé.  Put this way, everyone who’ll be stuck in Saturday’s bouchons – and there will be hundreds of kilometers of them – knows ahead of time that the jams will exist.  Meanwhile, Bison Futé says today (Friday) will be a “green” day for half the country.  But of course no one will shorten their holidays. 

 

That Rentrée feeling steals up every year.  On Monday, the 15^th, mid-August exactly, I sat chez le coiffeur for some overdue assistance.  Only two stylists worked; the others idled at the front desk.  As Terrence wielded his scissors over my head, he looked onto the quieter pedestrian street and declared, “It’s the end of summer.” 

 

Just like that, it’s decided.  But it’s not just him.  In the streets of Antibes, the sauf lundi regime had returned in a silent, unanimous onslaught.  Outside the summer peak, Antibes’ shopkeepers run reasonably precise schedules, many of which include the phrase “sauf lundi”.  Except Monday.  This Monday afternoon gates reappeared over shop doors.

 

La Rentrée has got me all reflective.  It’s been a great summer, no doubt, but it’s been, well, different.  Of course, as readers of French Lessons will know, I’ve spent decent hours in les Archives Municipales, la Médiathèque and la Bibliothèque Antiboulenc.  That’s as good a reason as any to call a sea-and-sand Côte d’Azur holiday different.  But there’s more to it.

 

At the beginning of June, when our family returned to this sun-kissed land, we visited Gelateria Pinocchio in Juan-les-Pins.  It’s owned by friends and, as luck would have it, Pinocchio’s gelato is both luscious and lovely.  As Marc stacks the creamy goodness into a cone, he forms the shape of a rose.

 

“If gelato sales are good at Easter,” he told us in June, “then they should be good in summer, too.”  That’s the local economic indicator.  And what luck, Easter was good this year. 

 

But this summer’s gelato sales wouldn’t be strong because of weather.  According to Riviera Radio – if I must admit it, that’s the English-speaking station in Monaco – the average temperature in the Côte d’Azur during the whole of July was five degrees Centigrade less than average.

 

Think about that.  Five degrees Centigrade is nine degrees Fahrenheit.  And we’re not just talking about the odd, cloudy weekend.  We’re talking about the whole of the middle of summer.

 

And there has been rain.  Real rain in the Côte d’Azur!  Last summer we apologized profusely to friends from Leiceistershire who visited Lou Gargali in mid-August, coinciding with the only rain of the season.  (In fact, they didn’t mind the moisture.  Like I said, they were from Leiceistershire.  They brought anoraks.  They called the rain “lovely” and “warm”.)

 

One evening this summer as Pierre travelled, a storm cut out part of Lou Gargali’s power supply.  A loose shutter banged against an exterior wall, echoing through our home’s ribcage at the exact time I led Laurelle up to bed. 

 

“I think the house is haunted, Mommy,” she said.  The years flooded back.  When we signed on the dotted line in 2005, French contract law pointed out that we couldn’t back out of the purchase based on any servitudes occultes – any supernatural forces – that may afflict the place.  Maybe we should’ve considered the phrase more carefully.

 

As clouds have descended on the Côte, sidewalk cafes and restaurants have unsurprisingly felt the barometric pressure.  Even the four, seasonal snack shacks that reign day-and-night over the nearby beach, had their windows snapped tight for a couple days. 

 

Tourist traffic is different, too.  Higher campsite volumes have hit hotel businesses.  Arabs continued to take up residence in Cannes’ chichi accommodations, but Ramadan started in early August – and swoosh, out they went.  All put together, the Nice Matin newspaper said tourist numbers were up 10% in the Côte d’Azur this year – but that people were spending less.  Except, apparently, for the Russians. 

 

The attendant at Juan-les-Pins’ Pain de Sucre, a branch of the chic swimsuit shop, confirmed the year’s trend.  Her Italian clients traditionally come at the start of each season to select three designer swimsuits.  This year, she said, they bought only one new suit – if they came at all.

 

But don’t get me wrong.   It’s still the famed Côte d’Azur and all.  Roman Abramovich’s Eclipse megayacht – the world’s longest at a full 538 feet – is anchored in the bay outside Lou Gargali this week as I write.  Earlier this season we’ve gawked at Luna, “A”, Katara, Lady Moura and a host of other floating subdivisions.

 

Meanwhile, our postbox continued to suck in the usual, French Rivieran offerings, like these:

 

• A brochure from SL Cannes trumpeting “Our Chauffeur – Your Car”.  A chauffer comes to drive your private car, to the airport or anywhere else in Europe.

 

• A calling card for a “Luxury Car Wash”.  Cars need TLC, too.  Someone comes to your house to wash your car, starting at 60 Euros a pop.  (Surely the actual price will be a function of the grime, the make of the car, and the size of your property.)

 

• A handwritten note from a Cannes real estate agent:  “Merci de me contacter le plus rapidement possible.”  Thank you for contacting me as rapidly as possible. 

 

A single mail drop about Lou Gargali hardly resurrects the property heydays of 2007 and 2008.  That’s when the likes of Brad Pitt and Bernie Madoff – not that I mean to compare them – contracted to purchase apartments in Juan-les-Pins’ famed-but-ruined Hôtel Provençal for EUR 30,000 per square metre, so a source told me this summer.  Now the owner of the prominent shell does a small burst of construction every six months or so, just to keep his building permit alive. 

 

Interest is on pause at Lou Gargali, too.  A few years ago, countless people (mainly Russians) stopped by to ask how much – even though the house was hardly for sale.  This summer the enthusiasm was confined to an early evening.  The street gate buzzed.  A teenage boy was kicking his ball on the neighbouring beach and – whoops – it flew over our wall.  Could he claim it?  Pierre let him in – but told his five friends that only one person was necessary to fetch a ball.  They groaned.  He finally relented and ushered the boys in for a gawk.  “Nice place you have here,” one of them said politely, and in English.

 

A pause from the typical Côte d’Azur silly season has suited me just fine this summer.  I’ve hardly minded a drop in the beastly heat and humidity.  And anyway, I’ve spent far more time indoors than most anyone would consider permissible.

 

In the end, the strange summer hasn’t been bad either for Marc, our friend at Gelateria Pinocchio.  Even if holidaymakers weren’t frequenting the area’s restaurants or buying swimsuits with their usual gusto, they’ve been piling into rose-shaped gelato cones. 

 

Terrence at the salon is upbeat, too.  A cooler July means summer is delayed, he said.  September will be terrific in the Côte d’Azur.

 

Unfortunately, we’ll hardly know.  It’ll be the time of our own Rentrée.

 

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Tonton Edouard

When Jean Aussel and his wife first set foot in Bellevue – coming here to tell us the story of our home, while also allowing Jean’s wife the chance to revisit her childhood abode – one of the first things he did was hand me a simple gift.  The photocopied pages were spiral-bound and entitled Les Brises et Les Vents sur Notre Littoral.  The Breezes and Winds along our Coastline. 

 

Hardly a page-turner, I know.  It was an extract from the annals of the learned Société Scientifique et Litteraire in Cannes, dated 1939-1941.  But on closer look, I understood the relevance of the gift.  The author was Edouard Muterse.  The man who built Bellevue.

 

“He sailed a lot,” Jean said, giving the motivation behind the text.  “He had many sailboats in his life.  You could perhaps get up in the morning at a good hour, and you could look at how the wind rises, and the light … so he wrote this,” he said.  “And it explains Lou Gargali – it’s a Provençal name – for the morning wind….” 

 

Lou Gargali:  That’s the name Edouard gave to Bellevue – until some unknown person decided to change it. 

 

As I read the opening lines of Les Brises et Les Vents, Edouard’s character seemed to jump from the page.  A colleague, he wrote, asked him to share his personal observations from his long practice of sailing navigation along this coastline, and “je n’ai pas cru devoir refuser.”  He believed he ought not refuse.  Edouard’s phrases were stately yet conversational, sweet yet erudite.

 

Jean flipped to the back of the booklet.  “Et voilà!” he said.  “The man who constructed your home!”  It was the same black-and-white image Les Archives Municipales had given me a couple weeks earlier.  Edouard was probably in his 30s, with a thick crop of dark hair, a straggly beard and long, twisted moustache.  If he shaved off the forest he might be quite handsome.

 

Now Jean Aussel, Edouard’s grandnephew, and his wife were sitting in our living room.  That the octogenarian was sipping from a chilled glass of whiskey only suggested that his stories might become more prolific. 

 

We already had an inkling that Edouard Muterse was a generous man, largely through stories from Jean’s wife (see 30 July 2011).  He’d kitted out Bellevue (or shall we now call her Lou Gargali?) with lovely china as part of the rental package (and oddly, that very set, through marriage and inheritance, has returned to Jean’s wife own kitchen cabinet).  We also learned that Edouard offered his own property as home base for the local Girl Scouts.

 

Jean Aussel’s opening description of Edouard was as a “vieux garçon.”  An old boy.  That’s a way of saying that Edouard Muterse never married.  He never had kids.

 

“Edouard Muterse was the brother of my grandmother,” Jean said.  “He was a lawyer.  He never married, but he was un homme trés raffiné, trés sympatique, trés agréable” – very elegant, very likeable and very pleasant. 

 

He was born in 1878 at Le Bosquet, the house up the hill from our Lou Gargali, and the very place where Jean lives today.  Edouard studied law in Aix-en-Provence, where he became a lawyer in the Court of Appeals. 

 

“He was un homme trés attachant – a very captivating man,” Jean said.  “You’re an intelligent woman” – he said this presumably because I hounded him with researched questions – “so you would’ve liked this Edouard.  He had quite the sense of humour.  He played cards – he played bridge.  When my mother played cards with him, she’d come home at night and we’d ask her, “What did Uncle Edouard say?”  He always had a joke.”

 

When World War I broke out, Edouard was in his mid-30s.  He served in les Chausseurs Alpins, an elite mountain infantry of the French Army, and was shot.  While recovering in a military hospital in the countryside, the man recuperating beside him was the parish priest of Gonfaron, a little village in Provence.  The curé was, of course, also a vieux garçon.  The two men struck up an enduring friendship. 

 

On occasion, the curé visited Antibes.  He came here – and Jean indicated right here, the rocky beach just below Lou Gargali – where young men and women would swim and sail and basically make merry.  The curé saw these young women in their bathing suits and, as a priest in the 20s might’ve done, he got anxious.  He had to blot out these ideas.  So the curé from Gonfaron found a nearby path with cattails growing on either side.  The cattails formed a decent wall against women in risqué swimsuits.  He perched there, gazing upward toward the Chapelle de la Garoupe, his Bible in hand. 

 

Edouard and his sense of humour hardly let that image go.  Jean gave a bit more background before continuing the story.  “My uncle actually had a lot of money,” he said.  “He had a very easy life, so he bought a nice sailboat and an American car – the first American car before the war – the Hudson (pronounced “HOOD-son”) Terraplane.” 

 

So one time – this was the first half of the 1930s – Edouard and le curé drove the HOOD-son Terraplane for an aperitif in neighbouring Juan-les-Pins, a town that was making headlines for inventing waterskiing and inspiring Coco Chanel’s first suntan.  It was here, too, that the current female fashion statement was les pyjamas. 

 

“They were un scandale, les pyjamas, because they hugged the buttocks,” Jean said, curving his palms toward us in a polishing motion.  So right there, in 1930s Juan-les-Pins, three pretty women wearing les pyjamas passed in front of the curé from Gonfaron with their buttocks bien moulées.  Edouard didn’t miss a beat.  He called out to the waiter, “Garçon!  Garçon!  The cattails!  The cattails!”

 

“Like this, you see the life of Edouard Muterse!” Jean said amid our chuckling.

 

After serving in World War I, Edouard couldn’t bear the horrors of Aix-en-Provence.  He lived close to the square that housed the city’s guillotine; the gruesome device was still in use.  Worse, people kept asking Edouard if they could watch the executions from his home.  It shocked him, so he moved to Marseilles.

 

But Edouard often returned to Antibes, to Le Bosquet, to visit his father who’d become a widower at a very young age.  In this part of the world, family homes traditionally pass through the generations.  Nowhere is that more true than at Le Bosquet, a provençal home that has remained within a single family since it was built in the mid-1700s.  Edouard moved definitively into the storied residence when his father died in 1928.

 

That’s about the time that Jean Aussel put on Lou Gargali’s birth – the late 1920s or even the early 1930s.  It was somewhat later than I’d expected.  Edouard Muterse, he said, built our house with money he’d earned on the sale of land on Cap d’Antibes.  While the Cap today is covered with apartments and villas, back then the peninsula was largely wooded and full of scrub.  Sizeable tracts of this fallow land belonged to a few wealthy families.  

 

But times were changing.  It was the beginning of Le Front Populaire:  Sweeping social reform within France brought the first, paid holidays.  Meanwhile, Antibes’ mayor favoured development.  In 1920, Edouard donated 460 square-meters of coastal land for the development of our neighbouring Port de la Salis.  Between 1925 and the beginning of World War II, he sold great stretches of wooded properties between Lou Gargali and la Garoupe, another Cap d’Antibes shoreline.

 

As Jean spoke, the penny was dropping.  Edouard Muterse never actually lived in Lou Gargali.  He built our home for rental income.  Part of me was glum that the man never had occupied our home.  But at the same time, I was thrilled to occupy a small part of Antibes’ long and storied history, in a house built by one of the city’s most enduring and notable families.

 

Meanwhile, Edouard’s own home up the hill was always open.  ”Because he wasn’t married and he was quite an engaging man, everyone – all the Antiboise – called him ‘Tonton Edouard’,” Jean said, “as if he was their uncle.”  Uncle Edouard received lots of visitors.  He had a trés belle library, Jean said, and he collected succulent plants that he exchanged with “the whole world.” 

 

As if I needed to root Lou Gargali even more deeply into the history of Antibes, Jean described another of Edouard’s possessions housed within the welcoming Le Bosquet:  the so-called Galet de Terpon.  The oblong stone dated back to the 5^th century B.C.  Inscribed upon its surface was the oldest Greek inscription found in the whole of France. 

 

“C’est extraordinarire,” Jean underlined, as if I hadn’t already figured that out.  It was Edouard’s father, Antibes’ historian, who helped bring the discovery to light.  When Edouard died, his family contributed to their French inheritance tax assessment by selling the Galet de Terpon to none other than the Louvre.

 

Which basically brings us to the end of this tale.  Or is it just the beginning? 

 

The preliminary research and this encounter with Jean Aussel only has drawn me further into the Muterse rabbit hole.  The name Muterse jumps off library book pages at me like the beacon of the Garoupe lighthouse, up the hill from Lou Gargali, pierces the nighttime sky.  Antibes’ library holds more books written by Maurice Muterse, Edouard’s father – and even a couple entries by Edouard himself.  There’s an Avenue Muterse up near the train station.  The Galet de Terpon today resides in Antibes’ Musée d’Archeologie.  Of course I’ve paid a visit.  

 

The list continues.  Each discovery is a celebration of connection.  It’s a tribute to lives long past.  Time paves over their stories unless we stop to unearth them.

 

A few days after the Aussel visit, Pierre lunched with a local friend at Le Plage Provençal in Juan-les-Pins.  He mentioned my research of all things Muterse and the fact that Bellevue once was called Lou Gargali, supposedly after a particular morning wind.  Moments later he met the Provençal’s boat master, a deeply tanned, local man of 60-ish.  People here would call him “un vieux loup de mer” – an old sea bass.  An old salt. 

 

(The vieux loup de mer’s father, as it happens, was the previous boat master at the Hotel Provençal.  Rumour has it that he was the one who invented waterskiing.  And so, quite relatedly, this tanned, 60-ish man that Pierre met began waterskiing at age six and instructing at 12.  In his teens he was France’s national champion.)

 

Ben oui, the vieux loup de mer knew about Lou Gargali!  It was a cold wind that arrived in the early hours, he said, when fishermen were pulling their nets out of the water.  It didn’t come up often, but when it did, it scared them.

 

Pierre explained that the man who built our house also loved the water, and that he called the place Lou Gargali.  But someone, sometime changed its name to Bellevue.  General consensus that lunchtime was that Lou Gargali was a better name.  Antibes and Juan-les-Pins already had too many Belle-’s. 

 

So, Pierre asked me that evening as we prepared our meal, now that we’ve stopped to unearth the past:  Should we switch the name back?

 

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