“Yes, we have no villas today, “ remarked the agent, smiling.
“That’s a very old played-out joke, “ I said, “and I am too hot to laugh. “
Extracting Information
Our clothes were hanging on us like wet towels, but when I had established our identity by a scar on my left hand we were admitted to the hotel. I decided to ask one of the lingering Englishmen if there was perhaps another quiet town near by.
Now, asking something of an American or a Frenchman is a definite thing: the only difference is that you can understand the American’s reply. But getting an answer from an Englishman is about as complicated as borrowing a match from the Secretary of State. The first one I approached dropped his paper, looked at me in horror and bolted precipitately from the room. This disconcerted me for a moment but luckily my eyes fell on a man whom I had seen being wheeled in to dinner.
“Good morning, “ I said. “Could you tell me — “ He jerked spasmodically, but to my relief, he was unable to leave his seat. “I wonder if you know a town where I could get a villa for the summer. “
“Don’t know any at all, “ he said coldly. “And I wouldn’t tell you if I did. “
He didn’t exactly pronounce the last sentence, but I could read the words as they issued from his eyes.
“I suppose you’re a newcomer too, “ I suggested.
“I’ve been here every winter for sixteen years. “
Pretending to detect an invitation in this, I drew up my chair.
“Then you must know some town, “ I assured him.
“Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo. “
“But they’re too expensive. I want a quiet place to do a lot of work. “
“Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo. All quiet in summer. Don’t know any others. Wouldn’t tell you if I did. Good day. “
Upstairs, the nurse was counting the mosquito bites on the baby, all received during the night, and my wife was adding them up in a big book.
“Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo, “ I said.
“I’m glad we’re going to leave this broiling town, “ remarked the nurse.
“I think we’d better try Cannes. “
“I think so too, “ said my wife eagerly. “I hear it’s very gay — I mean, it’s no economy to stay where you can’t work, and I don’t believe we can get a villa here after all. “
“Let’s go on the big boat, “ said the baby suddenly.
“Silence! We’ve come to the Riviera and we’re here to stay. “
The Villa of Our Dreams
So we decided to leave the nurse and baby in Hyeres and run up to Cannes, which is a more fashionable town in a more northerly situation along the shore. Now when you run up to somewhere you have to have an automobile, so we bought the only new one in town next day. It had the power of six horses — the age of the horses was not stated — and it was so small that we loomed out of it like giants; so small that you could run it under the veranda for the night. It had no lock, no speedometer, no gauge, and its cost, including the parcel-post charge, was seven hundred and fifty dollars. We started for Cannes in it, and except for the warm exhaust when other cars drove over us, we found the trip comparatively cool.
All the celebrities of Europe have spent a season in Cannes; even the Man with the Iron Mask whiled away twelve years on an island off its shore. Its gorgeous villas are built of stone so soft that it is sawed instead of hewed. We looked at four of them next morning. They were small, neat and clean; you could have matched them in any suburb of Los Angeles. They rented at sixty-five dollars a month.
“I like them, “ said my wife firmly. “Let’s rent one. They look awfully easy to run. “
“We didn’t come abroad to find a house that was easy to run, “ I objected. “How could I write looking out on a” — I glanced out the window and my eyes met a splendid view of the sea — “where I’d hear every whisper in the house. “
So we moved on to the fourth villa, the wonderful fourth villa the memory of which still causes me to lie awake and hope that some bright day will find me there. It rose in white marble out of a great hill, like a chateau, like a castle of old. The very taxicab that took us there had romance in its front seat.
“Did you notice our driver?” said the agent, leaning toward me. “He used to be a Russian millionaire. “
We peered through the glass at him — a thin dispirited man who ordered the gears about with a lordly air.
“The town is full of them, “ said the agent. “They’re glad to get jobs as chauffeurs, butlers or waiters. The women work as femmes de chambre in the hotels. “
“Why don’t they open tea rooms like Americans do?”
“Many of them aren’t fit for anything. We’re awfully sorry for them, but — “ He leaned forward and tapped on the glass. “Would you mind driving a little faster? We haven’t got all day. “
“Look, “ he said when we reached the chateau on the hill. “There’s the Grand Duke Michael’s villa next door. “
“You mean he’s the butler there?”
“Oh, no; he’s got money. He’s gone north for the summer. “
When we had entered through scrolled brass gates that creaked massively as gates should for a king, and when the blinds had been drawn, we were in a high central hall hung with ancestral portraits of knights in armor and courtiers in satin and brocade. It was like a movie set. Flights of marble stairs rose in solid dignity to form a grand gallery into which light dropped through blue figured glass upon a mosaic floor. It was modern, too, with huge clean beds and a model kitchen and three bathrooms and a solemn, silent study overlooking the sea.
“It belonged to a Russian general, “ said the agent; “killed in Silesia during the war. “
“How much is it?”
“For the summer, one hundred and ten dollars a month. “
“Done!” I said. “Fix up the lease right away. My wife will go to Hyeres immediately to get the — “
“Just a minute, “ she said, frowning. “How many servants will it take to run this house?”
“Why, I should say, “ — the agent glanced at us sharply and hesitated — “about five. “
“I should say about eight. “ She turned to me. “Let’s go to Newport and rent the Vanderbilt house instead. “
“Remember, “ said the agent, “you’ve got the Grand Duke Michael on your left. “
“Will he come to see us?” I inquired.
“He would, of course, “ explained the agent, “only, you see, he’s gone away. “
We held debate upon the mosaic floor. My theory was that I couldn’t work in the little houses and that this would be a real investment because of its romantic inspiration. My wife’s theory was that eight servants eat a lot of food and that it simply wouldn’t do. We apologized to the agent, shook hands respectfully with the millionaire taxi driver and gave him five francs, and in a state of great dejection returned to Hyeres.
“Here’s the hotel bill, “ said my wife as we went despondently in to dinner.
“Thank heaven, its only fifty-five dollars. “
I opened it. To my amazement, tax after tax had been added beneath the bill — government tax, city tax, a ten per cent tax to retip the servants.
I looked gloomily at a nameless piece of meat soaked in a lifeless gravy which reclined on my plate.
“I think it’s goat’s meat, “ said the nurse, following my eyes. She turned to my wife. “Did you ever taste goat’s meat. Mrs. Fitzgerald?”
But Mrs. Fitzgerald had never tasted goat’s meat and Mrs. Fitzgerald had fled.
Hunting His Majesty
As I wandered dismally about the hotel next day, hoping that our house on Long Island hadn’t been rented so that we could go home for the summer, I noticed that the halls were even more deserted than usual. There seemed to be more old copies of the Illustrated London News about, and more empty chairs. At dinner we had the goat again. As I looked around the empty dining room I suddenly realized that the
last Englishman had taken his cane and his conscience and fled to London. The management was keeping open a two-hundred-room hotel for us alone!
Hyeres grew warmer and we rested there in a helpless daze. We knew now why Catherine de’ Medici had chosen it for her favorite resort. A month of it in the summer and she must have returned to Paris with a dozen St. Bartholomew’s sizzling in her head. In vain we took trips to Nice, to Antibes, to St. Maximin — we were worried now; a fourth of our seven thousand had slipped away. Then one morning just five weeks after we had left New York we got off the train at a little town that we had never considered before. It was a red little town built close to the sea, with gay red-roofed houses and an air of repressed carnival about it; carnival that would venture forth into the streets before night. We knew that we would love to live in it and we asked a citizen the whereabouts of the real-estate agency.
“Ah, for that you had far better ask the king. “ he exclaimed.
A principality! A second Monaco! We had not known there were two of them along the French shore.
“And a bank that will cash a letter of credit?”
“For that, too, you must ask the king. “
He pointed the way toward the palace down a long shady street, and my wife hurriedly produced a mirror and began powdering her face.
“But our dusty clothes, “ I said modestly. “Do you think the king will — “
He considered.
“I’m not sure about clothes, “ he answered. “But I think — yes, I think the king will attend to that for you too. “
I hadn’t meant that, but we thanked him and with much inward trepidation proceeded toward the imperial domain. After half an hour, when royal turrets had failed to rise against the sky, I stopped another man.
“Can you tell us the way to the imperial palace?”
“The what?”
“We want to get an interview with his majesty — his majesty the king. “
The word “king” caught his attention. His mouth opened understandingly and he pointed to a sign over our heads:
“W. F. King, “ I read, “Anglo-American Bank, Real-Estate Agency, Railroad Tickets, Insurance, Tours and Excursions, Circulating Library. “
Where Things are So Cheap
The potentate turned out to be a brisk, efficient Englishman of middle age who had gradually acquired the little town to himself over a period of twenty years.
“We are Americans come to Europe to economize, “ I told him. “We’ve combed the Riviera from Nice to Hyeres and haven’t been able to find a villa. Meanwhile our money is leaking gradually away. “
He leaned back and pressed a button and almost immediately a lean, gaunt woman appeared in the door.
“This is Marthe, “ he said, “your cook. “
We could hardly believe our ears.
“Do you mean you have a villa for us?”
“I have already selected one, “ he said. “My agents saw you getting off the train. “
He pressed another button and a second woman stood respectfully beside the first.
“This is Jeanne, your femme de chambre. She does the mending, too, and waits on the table. You pay her thirteen dollars a month and you pay Marthe sixteen dollars. Marthe does the marketing, however, and expects to make a little on the side for herself. “
“But the villa?”
“The lease is being made out now. The price is seventy-nine dollars a month and your check is good with me. We move you in tomorrow. “
Within an hour we had seen our home, a clean cool villa set in a large garden on a hill above town. It was what we had been looking for all along. There was a summerhouse and a sand pile and two bathrooms and roses for breakfast and a gardener who called me milord. When we had paid the rent, only thirty-five hundred dollars, half our original capital, remained. But we felt that at last we could begin to live on practically nothing a year.
In the late afternoon of September 1, 1924, a distinguished-looking young man, accompanied by a young lady might have been seen lounging on a sandy beach in France. Both of them were burned to a deep chocolate brown, so that at first they seemed to be of Egyptian origin; but closer inspection showed that their faces had an Aryan cast and that their voices, when they spoke, had a faintly nasal, North American ring. Near them played a small black child with cotton-white hair who from time to time beat a tin spoon upon a pail and shouted, “Regardez-moi!” in no uncertain voice.
Out of the casino near by drifted weird rococo music — a song dealing with the non-possession of a specific yellow fruit in a certain otherwise well — stocked store. Waiters, both Senegalese and European, rushed around among the bathers with many-colored drinks, pausing now and then to chase away the children of the poor, who were dressing and undressing with neither modesty nor self-consciousness, upon the sand.
“Hasn’t it been a good summer!” said the young man lazily. “We’ve become absolutely French. “
“And the French are such an aesthetic people, “ said the young lady, listening for a moment to the banana music. “They know how to live. Think of all the nice things they have to eat!”
“Delicious things! Heavenly things!” exclaimed the young man, spreading some American deviled ham on some biscuits marked Springfield, Illinois. “But then they’ve studied the food question for two thousand years. “
“And things are so cheap here!” cried the young lady enthusiastically. “Think of perfume! Perfume that would cost fifteen dollars in New York, you can get here for five. “
The young man struck a Swedish match and lit an American cigarette.
“The trouble with most Americans in France, “ he remarked sonorously, “is that they won’t lead a real French life. They hang around the big hotels and exchange opinions fresh from the States. “
“I know, “ she agreed. “That’s exactly what it said in the New York Times this morning. “
The American music ended and the English nurse arose, implying that it was time the child went home to supper. With a sigh, the young man arose, too, and shook himself violently, scattering a great quantity of sand.
“We’ve got to stop on the way and get some Arizon-oil gasoline, “ he said. “That last stuff was awful. “
“The check, suh, “ said a Senegalese waiter with an accent from well below the Mason-Dixon Line. “That’ll be ten francs fo’ two glasses of beer. “
The young man handed him the equivalent of seventy cents in the gold-colored hat checks of France. Beer was perhaps a little higher than in America, but then he had had the privilege of hearing the historic banana song on a real, or almost real, jazz band. And waiting for him at home was a regular French supper-baked beans from the quaint old Norman town of Akron, Ohio, an omelet fragrant with la Chicago bacon and a cup of English tea.
But perhaps you have already recognized in these two cultured Europeans the same barbaric Americans who had left America just five months before; and perhaps you wonder that the change could have come about so quickly. The secret is that they had entered fully into the life of the Old World. Instead of patronizing tourist hotels they had made excursions to quaint little out-of-the-way restaurants, with the real French atmosphere, where supper for two rarely came to more than ten or fifteen dollars. Not for them the glittering capitals — Paris, Brussels, Rome. They were content with short trips to beautiful historic old towns, such as Monte Carlo, where they once left their automobile with a kindly garage man who paid their hotel bill and bought them tickets home.
The High Cost of Economizing
Yes, our summer had been a complete success. And we had lived on practically nothing — that is, on practically nothing except our original seven thousand dollars. It was all gone.
The trouble is that we had come to the Riviera out of season — that is, out of one season, but in the middle of another. For in summer the people who are trying to economize come South, and the shrewd French know that this class is the very easiest game of all, as people who are tr
ying to get something for nothing are very liable to be.
Exactly where the money went we don’t know — we never do. There were the servants, for example. I was very fond of Marthe and Jeanne — and afterwards of their sisters Eugenie and Serpolette, who came in to help — but on my own initiative it would never have occurred to me to insure them all. Yet that was the law. If Jeanne suffocated in her mosquito netting, if Marthe tripped over a bone and broke her thumb, I was responsible. I wouldn’t have minded so much except that the little on the side that Marthe made in doing our marketing amounted, as I figure, to about forty-five per cent.
Our weekly bills at the grocer’s and the butcher’s averaged sixty-five dollars, or higher than they had ever been in an expensive Long Island town. Whatever the meat actually cost, it was almost invariably inedible; while as for the milk, every drop of it had to be boiled, because the cows were tubercular in France. For fresh vegetables we had tomatoes and a little asparagus; that was all — the only garlic that can be put over on us must be administered in sleep. I wondered often how the Riviera middle class — the bank clerk, say, who supports a family on from forty to seventy dollars a month — manages to keep alive.
“It’s even worse in winter, “ a little French girl told us on the beach. “The English and Americans drive the prices up until we can’t buy and we don’t know what to do. My sister had to go to Marseilles and find work, and she’s only fourteen. Next winter I’ll go too.”
No Money and No Regrets
There simply isn’t enough to go around; and the Americans who, because of their own high standard of material comfort, want the best obtainable, naturally have to pay. And in addition, the sharp French tradesmen are always ready to take advantage of a careless American eye.
“I don’t like this bill, “ I said to the food-and-ice deliverer. “I arranged to pay you five francs and not eight francs a day. “
He became unintelligible for a moment to gain time.
“My wife added it up, “ he said.
Those valuable Riviera wives! Always they are adding up their husbands’ accounts, and the dear ladies simply don’t know one figure from another. Such a talent in the wife of a railroad president would be an asset worth many million dollars.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 415