August
Empress Eugénie – perfect Romantic icon
La Mer
No race on earth caricatures itself as magnificently as the French on the beach in August. Those who know only the international meat rack of the Riviera have never seen the full, adorable absurdity of a French family enjoying their grandes vacances, complete with candy-striped beach huts, shrimping nets, muscular lifeguards, yelping lap dogs, daft beach games and matelot sweaters for everyone.
The phenomenon reaches perfection on the Atlantic coast, all the way from Brittany to the Côte Basque, where the great ocean rollers crash on the endless silver sands and the whole scene sparkles with magical pale light reflected from the ocean. In the normal way, I would have been right there jumping the surf with them, but this year, with my ankle in plaster, I had to sit the summer out in various beach bars and watch the fun.
The fathers lead the way, striding out for the sand with the same show of authority as they had put on in their offices only the day before. On that first weekend of summer holidays, which the French have designated le grand exit, the breadwinners haven’t yet slowed down. The fathers, strutting determinedly towards the beach, irresistibly recall Jacques Tati in M. Hulot’s Holiday. Even if they’re short, fat and bossy, whereas the great comic actor of the Fifties was tall, gangling and apologetic, you know they are all equally vulnerable to the slapstick accidents of a day at the seaside, and in the fullness of time their dignity will be punctured by the nip of a crab or the unwary step on a slimy bit of seaweed.
After the father come the children, skipping with excitement at the multiple treats ahead: swimming! ice-cream! Papa! Finally, the mothers dawdle at the rear with the designer towels, the coordinated beach mats, the bats and balls, the fishing nets, the suncream and the rest of the family impedimenta. While the children scamper off to the water’s edge, the mothers stare around disdainfully, flicking sand off their T-shirts, fiddling with the straps of their costumes, thinking up a morning’s worth of little services which they can ask their husbands to perform for them.
The French beach is, of course, regulated. The lifeguards assess the sea each morning and stick their flags into the sand to mark out the safe swimming area. Swim only between the flags, please. We cannot be responsible for people swimming outside the flags, and at the first breath of wind we’ll be out there with our whistles, calling in any offenders. What is the point of being a lifeguard if you can’t puff out your chest like a Michelin man and blast antisocial elements out of the water with your whistle?
One scorching Sunday at the height of summer in Biarritz, when the tide was in and the narrow strip of beach not under water was already so crowded you could hardly open a copy of Elle without casting a shadow on the next-door sunbather, all the lifeguards suddenly ran down to the sea and whistled every swimmer ashore. We crowded fearfully onto the sand, wondering what drama was unfolding.
It was, of course, the drama of the French nanny state. A helicopter flew into the bay and hovered over the sea about a hundred metres out. A man in a red wetsuit jumped from the helicopter into the water. A loudspeaker crackled into life, informing the crammed beach that there would now be a life-saving demonstration. Two men in black wetsuits jumped from the helicopter into the water. The helicopter lowered a cradle, and the man in the red wet suit was manoeuvred into it, after which all three men were winched aboard. In the doorway of the helicopter, the men in black mimed a resuscitation drill. Then the helicopter flew away and the lifeguards informed the bathers that they could go back into the water. Instead of being annoyed that their afternoon’s pleasure had been spoiled, the swimmers and the sunbathers nodded to each other with appreciation.
Lifeguarding is a regular summer job for medical students and police cadets. Every beach has its Baywatch station, usually a concrete bunker not unlike the lookout points built in World War II. Outside is a blackboard displaying the weather forecast and the water temperature, and a flagpole on which the official status of the sea that day is signified by the colour of the flag. Green flag – the sea is calm, bathing is permitted. Yellow flag – the sea is a bit rough, bathing may be undertaken with caution. Red flag – the sea is definitely rough and bathing is not advised.
There is some point to this on the coast to the north of Biarritz, where the long straight sweep of golden sand runs for miles where the Landes meets the sea. This may be one of the best surf beaches in the world, but it has lethal rip-tides and when the wind rises suddenly it whips the waves up to a gigantic size. In the same afternoon you can wade out into friendly breakers which are hardly bigger than Shetland ponies and, a couple of hours later, stagger ashore in terror leaving rollers the size of houses thundering at your heels.
There are other reasons why a beach on the Côte Basque might be glad of a lifeguard. One day in an earlier summer my friend Gill and I had been enjoying my favourite beach in Biarritz, called the Plage de Port-Vieux. It’s also the smallest, a little crescent of sand between two spurs of rock, where the waves are always tame and the water usually crystal clear. If you want some excitement, you can swim out around to the little islet called the Rocher de la Vierge or take a mask and watch the fish darting around the caves hollowed out of the red-brown cliffs. When the tide is right, the most daring can dive off the rocks into the turquoise depths. Port-Vieux also has a nice little bar, overlooking the water from a headland.
Tiny as the beach was, we noticed that it had three lifeguards. It’s too small for a proper Baywatch station, so the guards were hard to miss, three muscular young men lolling on their towels with their flippers stuck blade-first into the sand in front of them.
‘Why do they need three of them?’ Gill wondered. I looked around at the other people on the beach. Apart from us, the average age of the swimmers – even the swimmers who were 800 metres out, braving the open sea – was about seventy. Since Port-Vieux slopes a bit too steeply for small children, it’s also the beach which the local people prefer, and the local people in the South-West enjoy the greatest longevity of the whole country. Nutritionists call this the ‘French paradox’ and do not understand how longevity is compatible with a lifetime diet of confit and red wine.
Sometimes, however, the French take their respect for the sea to levels that the British find ridiculous. One day, at a small beach south of Biarritz at the end of the season, the lifeguards had decided to work short hours and posted a notice informing the kind clientele that they would not be on duty until 11 a.m. It was a cool morning, but not breezy and the sea was calm. Up strode a French father, his striped sweater tossed around his shoulders, all ready to supervise the swimming of his two sons of ten or so. Where was the lifeguard? he demanded of the owner of the cafe near the flagpole. She pointed to the notice. No lifeguard until 11 a.m. But the flag wasn’t flying, he protested. They’d put the flag up at eleven, she promised him. The father looked anxiously at the sea. What was one supposed to do about swimming, with no flag flying? The cafe owner shrugged. ‘What do you think?’ he asked her at last. ‘If there was a lifeguard on duty, what colour flag would he run up?’ Clearly, swimming without a flag was an impossibility.
Fortunately for me, there were plenty of beach bars. There’s hardly an inch of the Côte Basque which isn’t overlooked by some appealing establishment offering tapas and cocktails, or, if it’s oriented to the surfing clientele, frites and beer. Our favourites were Txamara, overlooking the tiny port at Guethary, and the Blue Cargo, just south of Biarritz at a one-time village called Ilbarritz. We liked it because it was modern and stylish, with a big canvas canopy, like a sail, shading rough wooden tables.
In the daytime, Blue Cargo was just a nicely chilled beach bar. By night, it was one of the most popular gay bars on the coast. This was not saying much, but since Andrew and Geoff had been more than ready to leave the London gay scene behind, they weren’t disappointed to find that Biarritz had little to offer beyond a whiff of nostalgia. Inland, gay life was rare. Willow introduced
them to a gay friend who lived in the Chalosse, and somebody knew two former airline stewards over near Orthez. That was it.
On the landward side, Ilbarritz is now less of a village than a golf course, which has the pleasant side effect of leaving the foreshore almost unravaged by building and the beach in a natural condition. The curve of the bay is shallow, but enough to break the surf down from majestic rollers as high as a car to waves of more jumpable proportions. The sand when dry is fine and silvery; when wet, it’s firm, greyish and ridged by the sucking tide. Rising here and there are just enough red rocks to lend drama to the eternal horizontal of sea and sky, and keep children amused all day hunting for crabs.
I know I played on beaches like this in England as a child; I know that those beaches are now mobbed all summer, littered with plastic and almost devoid of marine life. Geoff’s parents, who had come over from Somerset to visit him, said the same about the countryside around Maysounabe, with its flowering meadows and woodland. It reminded them of England, twenty years ago.
The It-Girl Who Owed It All To Her Dentist
The seaside holiday was invented, or at least perfected, at Biarritz, in the middle of the nineteenth century. The new-hatched holiday industry swiftly transformed what was once a small whaling port into the most glamorous resort in Europe. The town owes its status, its grand buildings and its decades of prosperity to the Empress Eugénie, a Victorian It-girl who spent the happiest days of her life playing on its golden sands as a child.
‘Empress of France!’ wrote a seriously biased historian. ‘What a dazzling dream for this Spanish woman, with her generous heart and a soul burning with noble and refined feelings, always irreproachable in spite of living in outrageous times!’
Eugénie was born a countess, the daughter of a minor Spanish nobleman, the Count of Montijo. Her family lived in Andalucia, and to save their children from the burning heat of summer there, they sent Eugénie, her siblings and her duenna, north to the green hills and cool breezes of the Côte Basque.
Beautiful, stylish, well connected among Catholic royal houses but scarcely rich, Eugénie was pretty much on the shelf by her mid-twenties, by which time she, and her ambitious mother, had moved to Paris. Eugénie had an American dentist, who introduced her to another of his patients, the Emperor Napoleon III. Just then the Emperor was desperate for a suitably noble and Catholic wife.
When they married in 1853, Napoleon III was nearly forty-five, and, despite being short, tubby and disfigured by a goatee, a confirmed philanderer. The product of Napoleon I’s relentless nepotism, he was the son of the first emperor’s younger brother and his step-daughter Hortense, child of the Empress Josephine from her first marriage. He went into politics, was elected President of the French Republic, then gambled on France’s lingering nostalgia for imperial glory and called a referendum, as a result of which he too was adopted as Emperor.
Napoleon III found himself ruling a prosperous but unstable country, and was in urgent need of a wife and heirs, especially after Queen Victoria scotched his attempt to marry one of her nieces.
Eugénie was not, at first, a popular choice. In London, The Times reported sarcastically: ‘We learn with some amusement that this romantic event in the annals of the French Empire has called forth the strongest opposition, and provoked the utmost irritation. The Imperial family, the Council of Ministers, and even the lower coteries of the palace or its purlieus, all affect to regard this marriage as an amazing humiliation.’ The Thunderer then went on to point out, in Eugénie’s defence, that Napoleon III probably wasn’t even a real Bonaparte, but the son of one of his mother’s lovers.
Eugénie, however, was a star. She was born to be an empress, and if she had lived in modern times her genius for being fabulous in public would have gone over well with Hello! magazine. Not until Jacqueline Kennedy would the world see a consort who expressed the spirit of her age so confidently as a public figure and a patron of all the decorative arts.
With her smooth dark hair, centre-parted under her diamond crown, her large eyes, oval face and pale complexion, Eugénie was a perfect icon for the Romantic era, and she set about imposing her opulent style on the world. Having a tiny waist and pale, sloping shoulders, she looked wonderful in a crinoline and was an ideal clothes horse for the couturier Worth, whom she soon appointed court designer.
She lost no time in dragging her husband down to Biarritz, where he too fell in love with its rugged red cliffs and golden beaches. They built a magnificent palace on the point of the largest bay, which was soon surrounded by the Victorian-Gothic fantasy villas of the nobility and gentry. The humble whalers’ cottages almost disappeared under new terraces and shops. The child who once paddled in the rock pools below the cliffs had grown into a woman whose nostalgia for those innocent pleasures created the modern concept of fun in the sun.
However magnificent their summer residence, the Imperial couple were restless and travelled constantly, perhaps inspired by the romance of the Three Musketeers. The fact that Biarritz was a long way from the actresses of the Comédie-Française, and from her husband’s official mistress in Paris, was an added attraction for Eugénie. She was a fine horsewoman, and as athletic as her husband was fat and lazy. The medicinal hot springs of the Pyrenees soon lured them inland, where they went on mountain excursions guided by local smugglers and revelled in a landscape as dramatic as the dreams of the romantic poets.
As a result, the grand hand of Eugénie can be seen all over the South-West corner of France. The court doctor took charge of the salt springs in Saliès-de-Béarn, and raised a candy-striped Moorish-style spa building above them. The tiny mountain village of Eaux-Bonnes is almost swamped in grand Victorian villas and the formal gardens designed by the imperial landscapes The lovely hamlet of Sare dedicated a chapel to Eugénie, and on the little peak of La Rhune, a sacred mountain to the Basques, a special trail was laid down for her visit in 1859.
Pau was almost completely redeveloped in the Imperial era, when the great sweep of the Boulevard du Pyrénées was thrown over the town’s huddled hills, leading around a line of grand new villas to the foot of the revamped chateau. Up in the Landes, another village blessed with hot springs renamed itself Eugénie-les-Bains and laid out a formal garden, with fountains and waterfalls, to restore the energies of the Imperial couple on their long trek to and from Paris.
The legacy of spacious villas at Eugénie-les-Bains was eventually taken over by one of the great French chefs, Michel Guérard, and his wife, Christine, pioneers of cuisine minceur, who developed the entire village as a shrine to health-conscious gastronomy. All the same, it looks just another little Landais village, and as you approach down a meandering lane between the maize fields it is not until you’re almost at the first house that you notice that instead of the normal sleepy dilapidation, every building is a shop, a restaurant or a fitness centre, painted up to the eaves and wired for credit-card transactions.
When she was a child, a gypsy fortune-teller told Eugénie that ‘an eagle will carry you to the heavens, then drop you’. For all its brilliance, her life was scarred with the trials and tragedies that nowadays seem to add that essential note of poignancy to a diva’s CV. Eugénie met them all head-on with persistent courage.
Napoleon III’s rule lasted less than twenty years. He was deposed towards the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the couple fled to England, where he died shortly afterwards, in 1873. Eugénie’s pregnancies were difficult, and the couple had only one child, a son, called Napoléon Eugene. He went to South Africa as an observer with the British army, and was killed in a battle with the Zulus in 1879.
Eugénie’s palace in Biarritz burned down, and the ruin was demolished by the government of the Third Republic of France in 1881, which also sold off the palace grounds for building land. A new edifice was built, and was gutted by fire in its turn. The present Hôtel du Palais, a low-rise pink building whose resemblance to a slab of cake is only enhanced by its white Gothic stonework, was built on the
site in 1905 and was never anything but a commercial establishment, though it is an elegant spot for cocktails.
Biarritz was all the rage in the Belle Epoque, or the Naughty Nineties as the British called the sunset of the century. The town heaved with English pleasure-seekers, Russian émigrés and Italian aristocracy, and many exotic villas in the fin de siecle and art nouveau style were built on the grounds of the former palace. While the resort she had created continued to be Europe’s most fashionable summer destination, Eugénie lived quietly in Farnborough in Hampshire. At the age of ninety-four, she decided she wanted to see Spain again before she died, and passed away during the trip, in Madrid. She is buried with her husband and son at St Michael’s Abbey in Farnborough.
A Girl’s Best Friend Is Her Best Friend
Finally, Gill came out, just for a week. She gets three weeks holiday a year. When we’ve spoken on the phone over the past nine months, she’s been yelping with stress if she’s in the office, and catatonic with exhaustion if she’s at home. She runs the finance department of a group of health clubs, a glossy business which has grown fast. Her department is where all the bucks stop. She came alone, because her partner, a musician, couldn’t be persuaded to leave London in case he was booked for a session, and her company immediately cheered me.
Dr Suleiman was not pleased with my ankle; the fibula which he set so carefully has moved a millimetre out of alignment, probably because I’ve been kidding myself that I really can garden on one leg. He swapped the plaster for a splint, which makes me a bit more mobile, but no way, he said, can I walk on the injury before the end of August. So Willow and Tony fetched Gill from the airport, Amandine made her bed and Annabel took me shopping.
Deep France Page 24