Paris

As a bonus to our stay in Cannes, let’s make a trip to the Iles de Lérins and get lost in medieval ages, when monks settled down to turn against the outraging wealth in the world. To get to these islands we have first to walk to the Gare Maritime next to the Palais des festivals and find a boat. At least one an hour leaves to Sainte-Marguerite or Saint-Honorat. The whole trip lasts half an hour.
About the history of these islands we must find out that here are very few remnants to testify about that history. It is useless to describe in the finest details all the murderous and inhuman facts that took place here perpetrated by the Saracens and also the Catholic Spaniards of Charles V, operations where monks were burned at the stake or stabbed to death. It resulted in the building of an immense tower at the south side of the island Saint-Honorat, in fact a fortified cloister. In the 16th century a visitor counted 90 rooms of which 36 cells for the monks and five for the servants. Four chapels, two wells and hundred windows.
When Prosper Mérimée visits the island during his inventory travels and arrives in St.Honorat in 1834 he is fascinated by the maze of stairs and corridors that connected in a bizarre way. Mérimée reminds us the horror novels of Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) and her “dream castles” “made especially to play at hide “. And from the terrace of the cloister tower Mérimée discovered “one of the most beautiful panoramas in the world, meaning the massif des Maures, the Esterel with Cannes and Grasse in the mountains.”
Take the earliest boat possible out of Cannes to have at least 2 a 3 hours to visit and stroll in Saint-Honorat. In principle the boat will land at the north side of the island where a restaurant surges out of the palm trees on the road leading directly to the tower. The monks ask for “Silence and thank you” on shabby boards all around the abbey but it is a difficult task. I remember an old Cistercian monk on the boat, squeezed between a busload screaming Italian teenagers, his eyes closed and praying intensively with his rosary to surround himself with the silence the Cistercians chose to live.
When all our boat companions spread out under the trees after our arrival, we were for a brief moment alone with the eternal, wonderful rushing of breakers against the stone shores and –in the spring—the song of the nightingale or the intoxicating odour of the white “Pittosporum tobira”, a tropical shrub all over the place.
I couldn’t escape the impression that the few remaining Cistercian monks who have entrenched themselves against the invading tourists, abandoned the fight to keep St. Honorat clean and authentic. Despite you find a garbage can every 100 meters and that shows us something about the behaviour of the visitors, I must say that the monks themselves didn’t do such a good job in maintaining the beauty of nature around their abbey: under the palms and other trees the shrub is neglected and slovenly, around the cloister empty gas bottles, shredded boats and rotten wood staples spread around like a bad farmer who mistreats his farm. The pollen on the lavender fields is dead and the earth overgrown with grass. Like a Dutch lady said to me, looking at all this: “The Cistercians looked probably too deep in their own liquor glass…”
But I’m talking, talking, and we didn’t hear yet a word about how and what to visit on this island. Let’s keep it for my next article.

Bibliography

“L’Art Cistercien en France” by le Père Anselme Dimier (Zodiaque, Yonne, 1982), « Notes d’un voyage dans le misi de la France », by Prosper Mérimée (Ed.Adam Biro, Paris 1989), "Guide de la Provence mysterieuse" by Jean-Paul Clebert (Ed.Sand, 1986), Mary Blume, "Cote d'Azur. Inventing the French Riviera" (Thames and Hudson, London 1982)

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