De Trop'
'• By PETER FORSTER
ALimn I had forgotten how attractive the .■St. Tropez area is, the loveliest part, for my money, of that whole golden coast. It was over ten years since I last stayed there. and gaudy Publicity seemed to have established that the little fishing town at the end of the peninsula, which Cocteau and Colette once favoured because it was quiet as well as charming, had become Left- Bank-by-the-Sea, a newly modish international Playground most notable now for high prices, the blare of clubs, klaxons and starlet scandals.
But in early May at least it is not yet de Trop'. There are a few advance cohorts of the jeunesse bronzee, the semi-intellectual blousons noirs; and a few of the usual international sportsmen with (heir little toy women gather under Sdnequier's awning at cocktail hour. But for the time being, the numerical balance in the town is still in favour of the residents; clubs are still shut, and night-time noise comes from the fishing boats starting up one-stroke engines which put-put-put out to sea like egg-beaters.
Also in early summer it is possible to enjoy the lushness of the countryside in that southern UP of the Var, which to me is as near paradise as anywhere I know. Again, you may have to Undergo ordeal by the Rock Pool English Of Gassin and Ramatuelle ('Is your name Livingstone-Leotard?' a supercilious girl asked Ole. 'Because if so, somebody has left you some dross sticks and a box of cigarettes from I.ortnum's!'). But Gassin in particular remains a unique vantage-point, perched like a little red Cowl on a hilltop off the road to Toulon, just before the nondescript village of La Croix-
Valmer, where the Emperor Constantine is sup- Posed to have seen his vision of a cross in the sky.
Across the valley from Gassin stand the mas-
sive ranks of the Chaine des Maures; to the right Is a fifty-mile view to Hyeres; on the other side eight or nine separate headlands are distinguish- able, far past the Estdrel, so like a spiky-spined dinosaur crouching down to drink; and on a clear early morning, there is a blur on the far sea-horizon that is Corsica. more than three hundred miles away.
In some respects Provence today is like Scot- land; the retreat from the land is on. because natural beauty does not make hard farming less hard. Shepherds are difficult to come by. and the annual dispatch of sheep to the cool of the mountains, and their autumn return described by Daudet in 'La Rentrie du Troupeau,' is now done by lorries. Many, incidentally, mistake the Riviera littoral for Provence, forgetting that for the three men of genius who have done most to immortalise it—Daudet, van Gogh, Pagnol- Provence is mainly the northern, inland area around Avignon.
Yet in some ways rural communities are all one. In the small town of Cogolin, near St.
Tropez, there was a Sunday-night fair at which farm labourers from Suffolk or Gloucestershire would have recognised their own kind, and felt at home. Children on the merry-go-round, today
preferring to ride in space-ships rather than an Disney animals; candy-floss for sale, and a warn- ing above the shooting-gallery that anyone win- ning a prize three times would be banned for the rest of the day. Ruminative elders and wallflower daughters seated at a distance, and the same small man trying time and again to set up a record on the try-your-strength machine. A few bold couples danced to the imported band, watched by the gang of local boyos, arrogant, aloof. envious. The fair was, said a local restaurateur retired from Paris, the town's one big annual excite- ment: yet from now until September hundreds of thousands will be finding excitement in a world only a few miles away, though a million miles away in another sense.
For what an absurd racket holiday-making has become! The one activity which, by its very nature, should surely not be highly organised, has been turned into a pressure-group major industry—and before its PROs start reaching for their pens, let me agree that coach tours are doubtless a very gdod thing for people who want to go on coach tours. What always strikes me most is the inefficiency of the industry: indeed, it is bound to be inefficient and unsatisfactory, because comfort and taste cannot be categorised accurately, any more than asterisks can exactly establish standards. I used both the Michelin and the Kliber-Colombes Gastronomic guides, and found neither particularly reliable. As for the AA Foreign Touring Guide, the wine-and-food boys have so got at it that it even offers a Glos- sary of Food Terms. Technical terms, which one might have thought to be more the AA's pro- vince, are not included :, in a moment of difficulty I needed to know the French for shock absorbers, and it was really very little use to discover that ,earpeaux fords means 'a young carp. stuffed.' But then the world of phrase-books remains a mystery, the ultimate repository of out-of-date English — though admittedly modernity has broken into an Italian-English work shown me by a fellow-traveller which included the request: 'I wish to descend by parachute.' It also offered the quite haunting sentiment: 'I pity you.'
So in a corner like the Var, the local and the tourist worlds co-exist—and are at their worst when they touch and try to coalesce. I remember when locals in Gassin laughed because an Ameri- can novelist had bought for £500 two houses which could have been had for £50 apiece: now they would probably fetch nearer £5,000. Land prices are mad. and I was asked £3,000 for a one-room villa without water or electricity twelve miles inland from St. Tropez. Profiteers are having a field day, though one pleasing irony is that part of the St. Tropez peninsula (which has stayed unspoiled simply because there is no through road round its coast) has been declared a national park, and cannot be built on.
Even so, the lure to live down. there remains strong. especially to writers. Those bright popular paintings whose colours appear to have been filled in by numbers, and the rose-twined reminiscences of Lady Fortescue have created a distorting par- tial image, but they cannot destroy the true and valid attractions of a part of the world which, for an Englishman, is accessible, can be lived in part- time, and in part understood, without the neces- sity to turn professional expatriate. Robert Muller has some cutting remarks in his new novel about journalists who dream of that place in the South of France, but it is no bad dream to nourish, of a southern post to which a rope may be attached as corrective to the swirling currents of Fleet Street. (Mr. Muller himself goes down there to write his novels.) And it can be a practical dream—Derek Monscy has just found some- where, and I still think next time I shall find that bargain everyone else has missed.
Meantime, revenons a nos moutons on page 755.
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