A richer dust

"Properties down here in the late thirties were easy to find and the prices comparatively reasonable. It was a question, really, of elimination and on what part of the coast one wanted to be. It took my mother about six weeks to find her ideal; a house on the end of Point Saint Hospice with enough land around it to assure complete privacy. St Hospice is a small peninsula jutting out from Cap Ferrat and, bending back like a thumb, faces out across Beaulieu Bay to the mainland, and is about as near to being an island as it is possible to be. Angled east-west, the house faces due south and full out to sea on one façade and to the shelter of a large, open bay on the other. The property was known as La Fiorentina, and as its name suggests, was a Florentine pastiche and was built just after the outbreak of the 1914 war by Comtesse Robert de Beauchamp, and is illustrated, incidentally, in Robert Doré's extremely useful L'Art en Provence.

"It was a typical house of the period and remembering it as it used to look it is much to my mother's credit that she saw its possibilities and understood what could be made of it. I was not experienced enough in those days to be consulted seriously and the whole responsibility rested with her. It was a brave choice and, as it turned out, a very fortunate one. Of course its whole raison d'être is the position, its gardens reaching right down to the rocks and the heaving Mediterranean. The end of the point was left wild and grown over with a tangle of stone pines tortured by the wind into wierd Rackham-like shapes, and it was for these trees, I believe, that my mother really bought the place.

"The Comtesse de Beauchamp had sold Fiorentina to Sir Edmund Davis, a man who had made his fortune in South Africa, and it was from him, or rather his widow, that my mother had bought it. The purchase went through a few months before Chamberlain and his Cabinet declared war on the Third Reich, and the family spent the first few months at Fiorentina, dispersing afterwards to their different duties; my mother and sister to London, and myself, an American citizen, to a heavy bomb group based in Nebraska. I was eventually transferred to the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, and from there moved to London, on loan to MI5, England's Intelligence service. Fiorentina stood empty for some time and was subsequently occupied by the Germans when they moved over the demarcation line into unoccupied France. Fearing an allied invasion they started fortifying what they considered the strategic points along the coast, and our peninsula, commanding the entrance to Beaulieu Bay, was one of them. One wonders, however, at their reasoning, for no invading force could possibly have considered landing on a mountainous coastline that dipped precipitously from the height of some thousand feet directly into the sea."

The day we headed to Rome we took the morning to visit Pointe Saint-Hospice, thinking, perhaps, we might get a glimpse of La Fiorentina from the coastal path that wound around the point. Before we set off, we knew the house was not visible from the street and so it proved, for Impasse Fiorentina, at the end of which the villa stands, is a gated street - in effect, all the houses and their grounds, form a gated community. Chilled in the shade, as we were, and impatient to get up the hill, as I was, the Celt went back to fetch the car to schlepp his aching and cranky partner upwards. I, in my excitement at being in a place I had read so much about, climbed a long flight of steep stone steps - a shortcut, so called - the while feeling dulled by the certainty that I was come pretty close to being one those people who in LA take the "houses of the stars" tours.

We met again at the parking place at the gate of the Great War military graveyard above which looms the King of Sardinia's memorial chapel and a twelve-metre-tall bronze Madonna and Child, cyclamen, the bedding plant of the Cote d'Azur, at her feet. She stands there, not so much wedged between the walls of the chapel and those of a park surrounding the ancient tower on which, as an icon for the sailors of that coast, she was originally intended to stand, but rather in that no man's land between faith and kitsch where her shadow stretches back to a world predating Christianity.

It isn't difficult, I think, to find a melancholic romance in old, tottering and lichen-blotched graveyards but, on walking into a place such as this - this corner of a foreign field - one sees not romance, but  a ninety-four-year-old, kept-as-new military graveyard where the inevitabilty of war and the waste of life is heartbreakingly clear - as clear as the light that raked the Madonna and threw her shadow over that rich earth a richer dust concealing.

So, in the end, did we take the sea-path around the headland in the direction of Villa Fiorentina? Given my misgivings as I climbed those steps to the Belgian military graveyard, and when I looked at the surface of the path - gravel it seemed to me, and not the easiest surface for me to walk on - the distance to be walked, the distance I'd already walked, and the fact that we been texted to say that we should be at the airport early than we'd expected to be, we, acutely aware of the irony of it all, did not take the path.



There are a couple of references to Rupert Brooke's The Soldier in the text, and the quotation with which I set the scene is from Roderick Cameron's The Golden Riviera.