Folly and philosophy on the Côte d’Azur
To hear of it, you’d think I am crazy: a geographicalhodgepodge flowing with wines and tapenades dotted withpost-impressionist horizons and museums, bordered by a paragon of acrystalline sea and illumined by perennial sunshine.
Phantasmagorically speaking, I’ve been here before. Ittook me a while to realize that the seeming familiarity of theCôte d’Azur results from its pretty exact likeness togeneral ideals of heaven.
Beneath that unfailing sun the still-green nether regions of theAlps squeeze together tightly before plunging from virgin forest toMediterranean depths. Atop their peaks perch eremitic villages anda sprinkling of villas.
The Villa et Jardins Ephrussi de Rothschild glows among these inperfect pink equanimity a few miles from Nice, indifferent, likeits former owner, to its own decadent remarkability. But then, theinsane often are.
Beatrice Ephrussi, Baroness of Rothschild, was the daughter of abanker. It took about seven years after her marriage to anotherbanker for a small portion of her fortune to materialize into aneclectically ostentatious Italian-style villa.
She poured her fervent energies into the creation of a feminineparadise—compensation for her chronic infertility. Withmaternal exactitude and thoroughness, she constructed a bubble ofextravagance unparalleled in its day.
Her delusions did not augur well for her servants, all of whomwere required to dress daily in sailor garb. They laboured tomaintain some dozen salons, galleries, offices, bedrooms andboudoirs, a menagerie of exotic animals, a formidable artcollection and six themed gardens. Undoubtedly a few of them grewtired of the decor. Each centimeter of the walls, floors andfurniture is plastered with roses of a nauseatingly antiquatedshade of pink.
The disconcerting homogeneity becomes all the more unsettlingupon examination of exhibited items: a silk Oriental wardrobe witha thatched boudoir roof to match; aged gargoyles redolent of grimcathedrals; a miniature “Temple de l’Amour”dominating the gardens; the tea service used for Marie Antoinettedress-alike parties; the algae fountain far above the effortlessbeauty of the Mediterranean; the forlorn collection of unusedchild-sized furniture.
And creepily enough, all throughout the flowered pink perfectionhang gigantic mirrors.
Everywhere. A mere concession to extreme vanity, perhaps butstill—turning from some mauve relic I caught a glimpse ofmyself in one gilded glass.
The fleurs du mal of the pink prison behind me gleamed in thebevelled edges. I realized, that maybe this villa had shut out morethan it had revelled in.
I was relieved to escape this monument to eccentricity (note: italmost goes without saying that had the baroness been born to alesser family or married into a lesser fortune, her eccentricitywould have probably been labeled something like certifiableinsanity.)
Then I was transported to the higher realm of the village Eze.This vertically constructed town first settled by the Celts hasfunctioned for the past few centuries as an artistic oasis.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s path to the Mediterranean shoreveers off sharply, appropriately, from the steep graveled villageentry into wooded quiet, wending its way patiently through thickbrush.
A clearing not far from the village yields unspeakablemutability: the heave and fall of mountains, the garrulous wind indry olive leaves, the skipping glint of sun on waves, the shiftingdeepness of the blue beneath.
Allegedly, the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra was writtenin Eze, and given this 1,400-foot altitude and panoramic view, theconcept of the Ubermensch suddenly seems downright feasible.
If France at large exemplifies a heap of philosophical,political, artistic, geographical and social contradictions, thenits southernmost regions are indeed the Frenchiest of the French.Though le mot juste to describe the experience may elude thetraveler between the Provincial sun and the azure coast, itdoesn’t really matter.
But what is one to do, you may ask, when everything’scoming up roses, but God is dead? The answer: worry not.
Philosophy and folly marry nicely—case in point: studyabroad programs. So make like the French, embrace the dichotomy,take off your top and dive on in.
