Sunday, Cap d'Antibes

Our last day, we stayed on Cap D'Antibes where Monet came to paint from January to May in 1888, after visiting Cezanne in nearby L'Estaque. This was the view from the balcony of our little hotel.


Originally this town served as a winter resort frequented by fashionable Europeans like the Duke and Duchess of Winsor. But in the 1920's, Cole Porter rented a house here and invited his college classmate Gerald Murphy to visit. The Murphys liked the area so much that they first convinced a local hotel owner to stay open during the summer so they could visit with friends and then bought a house which they lived in until the Depression, inviting many of their avant guard Paris friends including the Fitzgeralds, the Hemingways, Picasso, Man Ray, and Gertrude Stein. Fitzgerald both worked on Gatsby while renting a house here and based his novel Tender Is the Night on the Murphys and his experiences here. The little beach which became the setting of the most famous picnics of the 1920's is still public. But like many French beaches now, it is dominated by chairs and umbrellas for rent.

The town's key season is now the summer, and it was largely empty when I cycled through in the early eighties and again in the late nineties, both trips in March, which I think is actually one of the best times to visit. There's little documentation of the revolution in taste that changed the town from a winter to a summer resort or any commemoration of the many artists and writers who visited. The Murphy's home, like most of the estates, lies hidden behind tall hedges and gates. A local real estate agency recently tried to market a house as the one Fitzgerald rented while writing The Great Gatsby, but the listing was false according to local historians, his real home one house down. For Americans, it's a shame that there's so little documentation of Fitzgerald's time here. I think that Gatsby owes more to the liberated world of the Murphys, to the artists and writers he met in their company, and to the way in which his marriage unraveled here than it does to the time Fitzgerald spent in Great Neck and New York.

This is what the beach looked like in the 1920's with Picasso lounging on the left and Gerald and Sara Murphy on the right.

The original cover to
Fitzgerald's novel, set in the south of France and showing a stylized view of Antibes.

The Fitzgeralds on the beach at Cap D'Antibes

                       

 In the afternoon, we walked the beautiful stone shore path that runs along the shore from the Plage de la Garoupe around the point. While it does not have sandy beaches, it does have beautiful grottos and places to sit and watch the sea.