French Letter: Ten days in Provence

The variety of France’s landscape never ceases to surprise. 

One minute you’re motoring along country lanes that would not be out of place in Sussex or Devon, the next, you’re on a bridge spanning a gorge a mile wide or crossing a river deeper and faster flowing than the Severn. 

In the Auvergne, surrounding Clermont-Ferrand, the spectacular extinct volcanoes of the Puy-de-Dôme region suggest to me what the Moon or Mars would look like if they had water and oxygen. They are, to coin a phrase, out of this world. 

Looking East, heading to the Mediterranean down the A75 (La Méridienne), it is easy to miss a first view of the Alps because the bridge over the Tarn – Le Viaduc de Millau, designed by Norman Foster – is so high that it frequently soars above the clouds. 

But then, all of a sudden, as if nature has decided to turn the page, you are in Provence, where extra colours join the canvas, the temperature rises and Cypress trees, neat as fountain pens, line the roads. Between Aix-en Provence and Cannes, the motorway curves through a range of rugged hills, the lush lower slopes studded with vineyards and fields of lavender and sunflowers. 

Cannes itself is an experience. Like a sub-tropical Scarborough developed by Russian oligarchs, it lives for pleasure. You either love it or loathe it. I did both. My wife and I stayed with an old friend in the heights overlooking the town, so I cannot comment on the hotels or Airbnb apartments that festoon the centre. 

But if it’s food and drinks you’re after, the choice is almost limitless. Every other property on the corkscrew descent from Le Suquet – the old town overlooking the resort, complete with castle, museum and medieval church – is a bar or restaurant. Along the Croisette, lined with yachts, are more restaurants and more bars, with a view beyond to larger yachts, while over there, just around the bend, is the monstrous Palais des Festivals, looking like a cross between the South Bank Centre and a nuclear power station. 

For some reason, I was surprised to find that real people live in Cannes – the sort of folk who work in factories, go to the market to buy fish and fresh vegetables and take refuge in the air-conditioned boutiques along the Rue Meynadier, from the intense heat that hangs over the town like a shroud from May until October. Everyone we met was helpful and friendly, in part no doubt because, like characters out of Disney, they were at last awakening from their long Covid sleep. 

My friend – who last year paid a chef returning to England €250 for his chic 2006 Golf convertible – even found a garage that, without complaint or bluster, fixed my car’s failing air-conditioner. To celebrate, we treated ourselves to coffee and pains-au-raisins outside a supermarket in the largely immigrant enclave of La Bocca that would give Fortnum & Mason a run for its money. 

Wherever I go in France, I invariably find some neighbourhood or individual property that causes me to exclaim, only half in jest, “we could live here”. Cannes doesn’t do that for me, or not quite. It’s too much of a confection. Like New York, it is designed for just three categories of person: the natives, the rich and the young. Being none of the three, I prefer to look in now and again before escaping back into what these days pass for real life. 

I might, with regret, say much the same of Arles and Nice – both of which I embraced at the first meeting. Arles is so real it could only have been made up, probably by the Romans. Nice is a proper city, with a sense of itself that goes far beyond the Promenade des Anglais. Neither, though, would appeal to me en permanence. 

I couldn’t bear Arles in a typical summer (all those sweating tourists taking selfies in the Café Van Gogh). In Nice, a city on the edge of everything the twenty-first century has to offer, I would feel that I should have a job to justify the urban whingeing in which I would undoubtedly indulge. 

But I can recommend Les Arcs, located deep in the wine country of the Var, which divides into the basse ville ­– where residents go about their business and sit in the shade of an evening over a cold beer or a glass or two of the local white – and the vieux quartier, perched on the adjacent hilltop by way of innumerable steps and cobbled alleys, where nipping out for a carton of milk must take half the day, with breaks to ward off cardiac arrest. It was in one of the bars in the lower town, while excavating a particularly sumptuous dame blanche, that I found myself confiding, “we could live here”. 

My wife, ever sceptical of my passing enthusiasms, says that Vence, set in the foothills of the Alpes-Maritime, is even nicer than Les Arcs. I was writing a previous column on my struggle with mosquitoes when she and our friend visited the town, so you must take her word for it. 

Heading back to Brittany, we broke our journey (for the third time in five years) in the village of La Bastide Murat, some 40 kilometres north of Cahors, just off the A20 motorway – a sun-lit version of the M6 where it rushes past the Lake District. Bastides (fortified towns) are not uncommon in this part of France. But this one, built during the suzerainty of England’s Edward I and originally designated La Bastide Fortunière, was renamed in 1852 to honour a local hero, Napoleon’s celebrated general Joachim Murat. He, in addition to his military triumphs, reigned for five years as the King of Naples. 

The village is what Private Eye would call small and perfectly formed. At its heart, next to the Mairie, looking across to a newly erected statue of Murat that, unwokely, fails to mention his strong support for slavery, sits La Garissade, a hotel-restaurant that I cannot recommend highly enough. 

The menu is first-class, presided over by an ambitious young restaurateur from Lille. The artfully appointed rooms provide the perfect respite from the long hours behind the wheel necessary to get from one end of France to the other. Lest you think that I am starting to sound like a journalist enjoying a freebie (not that I would), let me add that I paid full-whack for our stay – €206 for bed and breakfast, a four-course dinner and drinks on the terrasse. So my encomium is entirely sincere.

Our final day on the road was something of a nightmare. Violent thunderstorms made driving hazardous. For the benefit of older readers, the rain came down like stair-rods; for those under 40, it was as if a bath was constantly being tipped over the windscreen. 

But all bad things come to an end and by 8.30 pm, in the evening of the Longest Day, having made it through the Vendée and across the Loire at Nantes, we finally drew up outside our little house in the Côtes d’Armor, grateful to have made it home in one piece. 

But we’re not done yet. Our next destination of choice, Covid-permitting? Paris. I think we could live there.