{A Pocket Guide to the South of France}

A Reading Miscellany

{A Few Books Set in the South of France}

Perfume from Provence & Sunset House, Lady Winifred Fortescue

You can’t swing a dead cat in a bookshop these days without hitting an “escape to Provence” memoir, but Lady Winifred Fortescue did it in the 1930s, starting with Perfume from Provence and continuing with its sequel Sunset House.

Jean de Florette & Manon des Sources, Maurice Pagnol

Also his autobiographies My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle. And his films, specifically the Marseille Trilogy. Who could be more Provençal than Marcel Pagnol?

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

The Chateau d’If, where Edmond Dantès spends fourteen years in prison, is right off the coast of Marseille.

Perfume, Patrick Suskind

Set partly in Grasse, Perfume is the story of Grenouille, a man whose exceptional sense of smell leads him to murder.

The Avignon Quintet, Lawrence Durrell

You know, if you have time for a quintet.

Madame, Will You Talk, Mary Stewart

I can’t help mentioning this mid-century caper set in Avignon because I’ve just started to read it. I’ll let you know how it is.

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, Vincent van Gogh

It’s hard for me to think of Provence without thinking of Vincent van Gogh. There are a million fictional accounts of his time in the south of France, but his letters - which are mostly written to his brother Theo - not only act as autobiography, they are also a reminder that he was as much a philosopher as a painter.

{Did you know?}

That no one even thought of going to the French Riviera during the summer until the 1920s? In 1923, a wealthy American couple, Gerald and Sara Murphy, started renovating a villa - which they would call Villa America - near Antibes. They invited their artist and writer friends, played on the beach during the day and threw lavish parties at night.

That same year, Coco Chanel was photographed disembarking from a yacht nearby, sporting a deep tan after spending all day in the sun. Suddenly - after centuries of darkened skin being associated with manual labor - everyone who was fashionable wanted a tan. The age of sunbathing was ushered in, and there was no better place to do it than the French Riviera.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was among the visitors to the Murphy’s villa, and he modeled Nick and Nicole Diver in his Riviera novel Tender is the Night on the couple.

You can read more about the Murphys in Calvin Tomkins’ short book Living Well is the Best Revenge - which started out as an article for the New Yorker and in which Sara Murphy claims to bear no resemblance whatsoever to Nicole Diver - and in Amanda Vaill’s Everybody Was So Young.

{One Random Fact}

The great and influential American food and cookbook writers James Beard, Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, Evan Jones (and his cookbook editor wife Judith Jones), and Richard Olney all happened to be on holiday in Provence in late 1970. Julia and Paul Child owned a small cottage - La Pitchoune - on her co-author Simone Beck’s estate near Grasse, and Richard Olney lived in the Provençal village Sollies-Toucas. The 300-pound James Beard had come to Grasse to visit a famous weight-loss expert nearby, and spent much of his holiday on a strict diet. M.F.K. Fisher spent the year with her sister and children, traveling between Aix-en-Provence, Marseilles and Arles. She kept a journal, and her great-nephew Luke Barr wrote about the memorable year in his book Provence, 1970. For her part, Fisher wrote about the year in her memoir Two Towns in France, and also in her collection of essays As They Were.

(Did you know you can rent La Pitchoune on AirBnB? It will cost you, though.)

{One Piece of Artwork Not to Miss if You Visit}

I am going to cheat a little bit and tell you the one place that I wish that I had had a chance to visit, but didn’t. I do think it’s probably the one piece of artwork that you shouldn’t miss if you visit (and will be first on my list if I get a chance to return), and that’s Henri Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence.

Matisse was in his 70s and living in nearby Nice, when he had surgery for cancer in 1941. One of the young nurses who helped him during his recovery entered the Dominican convent in Vence soon afterward. After the war, the convent decided to build a new chapel nearby, and the nurse, Sister Jacques-Marie, asked Matisse if he would help. Matisse, who had recently relocated to Vence, agreed, and designed everything from stained glassed windows to furniture to priest’s clothing. He considered the resulting chapel his masterpiece - the culmination of his life’s work. She wrote a book about the chapel and her friendship with Matisse called, appropriately, Henri Matisse: The Vence Chapel.

Of course, I am just scratching the surface…and this list reflects my favorites and my particular interests. What am I missing - I would love to know! What are your favorite spots in the south of France? Your favorite books or movies?

If you are a full-fledged Francophile, and can’t get enough of all things French, I’ve temporarily removed the archive paywall behind my other letters from France:

A Letter from Paris

A Letter from Provence

A Letter from the Loire Valley

A Letter from Normandy

A Letter from the Cote d'Azur

A Letter from Avignon

A Letter from Nîmes

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