French letter: Bitten by the Côte d’Azur

America is back. But so, if the crowds are to be believed, is France. Having defeated Germany 1-0 in the European Championships on Tuesday, Les Bleus next face Hungary, whose chances of an upset against the reigning world champions are assumed to be slight. 

In Nice, on Tuesday night, the performance – laboured and distinctly pedestrian – mattered less than the result, and the fans poured out of the city’s sports bars in huge numbers. Le Cours Saleya, a pedestrian zone in the heart of the Old Town, erupted in celebration. 

No doubt, the joy and satisfaction would have been equally felt in “normal” times, but it was hard not to read into the spectacle a shared sense that it wasn’t just football that was coming home, but France itself. 

Masks were de rigeur, but disregarded. As far as the public was concerned, Christmas had come early. The official word from France’s dour prime minister Jean Castex was that face-coverings in public remained mandatory until Thursday, but no one in Nice was waiting.

Le coup de soufflet – the final whistle – blown by the Spanish referee in Munich was the signal for the nation back home to cast off its shackles and give the pandemic a run for its money. 

Further down the coast, past Antibes, Cannes was also in celebration mode. With the temperature nudging 30 degrees, the Queen of the Riviera is self-consciously en fete from May until October. On Thursday night, the two-kilometre Boulevard de la Croisette rang with live and recorded music while passing cars, sounding their horns, filled the air with brass. 

It was only when bed beckoned that the trouble began. Mosquitos are a serious menace in Cannes. The local variety, immigrants from the Nile Delta, are fitted with silencers, which seems to me a clear example of bad manners. You don’t hear the distinctive high-pitch weeee that native mozzies emit. Instead, they land on you with their slippers on and feast until dawn. By Friday morning, I counted sixteen bites on my right leg alone, necessitating a visit to the pharmacy for something to relieve the intense discomfort. 

As I lay in bed, twisting and turning, bathed in sweat, I found myself wondering what it must have been like to be a prisoner of the Japanese in Burma, building the bridge over the River Kwai. Apparently, the beatings and the meagre rations weren’t the worst of it. It was the mosquitos that stuck most in the mind of survivors.  

Still … I mustn’t grumble. In Cannes, my wife and I had been lodging for a week with an old friend from England who has lived in Provence for the last eight years. He is hardened not only to night visitors but to the intense sun that burns down with a relentlessness that I, from the sub-arctic wastes of East Belfast, find hard to bear. 

By way of reward for our steadfastness, we planned to spend the weekend in a hotel in Arles, with air-conditioning, stepping out only to view the Roman amphitheatre and the bar in which Van Gogh like to spend his evenings back in the late 1880s. 

One of the odder aspects of life in France at the moment is the almost complete lack of tourists. Everywhere we went, waiters would ask where we were from, desperate that we should be harbingers of better times to come. 

They were disappointed to learn that, though American and Irish, we lived in Brittany and were not true pioneers. In the pre-Covid era, as remote, mentally, as the Jurassic and Mesozoic periods of Earth’s evolution, you would hear English spoken almost as much like French in Cannes, to say nothing (meaningful) of Dutch and German. Not these days. 

As in England, staycations have become the thing, and a monolingualism had descended not experienced since the Occupation or, before that, the time when the seafront in Nice was not yet the Promenade des Anglais. 

But do not be discouraged. The French may loathe and despise us. But they love us really, and they can’t wait to have us back. 

The peculiar joy of our trip has been the fact that everyone around us, other than expats in the ubiquitous Irish bars, have been French. They have all been civil, and all tried to be helpful. 

In short, unlike their Government, they couldn’t have been more pleased to see us. I am looking forward to arriving home in Brittany just to escape the mosquitos and prickly heat, but I won’t forget the welcome given to us in Provence.