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Cote d'Azur

Menton, a haven for last
century's aristocracy

Menton, visiting town (1)

We approach Menton along an endless boulevard, realizing that this is the last city before the Italian border: it’s the end of France and you feel almost as you would be at the end of the world. Italy begins after the chic area of Garavan. The first Italian city is Ventimiglia. 

Melancholy is the primary feeling you get here in Menton. It’s a cocoon of the past. Just as Hyeres, Cannes and Nice it was the favourite haven of refuge for the wealthy and mostly sick (tuberculosis) British. In those days maybe 5,000 stayed over winter. They had their own church, club, newspaper and library. And because it was unknown at that tie that the odour of lemon trees didn’t cure tuberculosis, they didn’t die in Ispahan but in Menton and were buried at the local graveyard. Amongst them was the historian John Richard Green. He worked in Menton on his book “Conquest of England” when tuberculosis took him off this planet. You can read on his tombstone:”He died learning”.  The British example was soon followed by the Russian and mid-European nobility. 

Katherine Mansfield

 This escape from tuberculosis lasted until the latetwenties. One of the most pathetic cases was that of KATHERINE MANSFIELD, who hoped in 1918 in Bandol that she got better and finally died in 1923 near Fontainebleau. She came in 1920 to Menton and stayed in one of the many “hotel-sanatoriums”. She received a strange and not very elegant mail from D.H.Lawrence (Lady Chatterley’s Lover), who would die himself in 1930 in a sanatorium in Vence: “ I loath of the way you cook in your phthisis”. Not very elegant indeed. Now there is a Katherine Mansfield street in the Garavan quarter and a plaque is set on the wall of the villa Isola Bella where she lived.
Despite the recent efforts of the Menton municipality to revive the area, its stays, despite its pedestrian shopping streets and new created festivals, a border town, a dormant city with sweet memories and nostalgic charm. 
But, but: an incredible climate who gives you the opportunity to lunch outside on a terrace in December, with mountains falling into the sea. The yearly average temperature is 16.3 Celsius and there are 300 days a sun per year! The consequence is that there is such a luxurious vegetation of palm-trees, oleanders, citrus, orange and almond trees. Here and there you can even see dates and figs ripen.

Bibliography: 

Tobias Smollet, "Travels through France and Italy", (Oxford University Press, Oxford, New-York in the series World Classics), John Pemble, "the Mediterranean Passion, Victorians and Edwardians in the South", (Oxford University Press 1988), Mary Blume, "Cote d'Azur. Inventing the French Riviera" (Thames and Hudson, London 1982)

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Menton, visiting town (2),
wedding hall, Carnoles
palace and Cocteau