A Côte above the rest

Those were the Fifties before mass tourism. I believe that the French Riviera has never been equalled since.

The Film Festival at Cannes was quite a modest affair where an unknown nymphet, Mlle Bardot, was ferried out to the U.S. navy carrier moored in the bay, and soared into the world's consciousness in an explosion of sailors and flashbulbs.

Picasso, though rarely visible, lived and worked in Cannes in a large villa called La Californie and you could buy his newest plate from his studio in Vallauris above the town.

At night the palm-fringed Croisette glimmered with pleasure and money. The four great hotels and the summer casino lay like lighted ships at anchor around the dark blue bay, spattered with white yachts like a Dufy painting.

Along the winding Corniche roads the very rich and the onceroyal still lingered in huge villas clouded with mimosa and bougainvillea.

But the Windsors, who had conducted-their pre-war courtship here, had abandoned their house in Antibes now that riffraff like me could manage to visit and pollute the atmosphere.

Somerset Maugham was still holding court in his villa on Cap Ferrat as certainly the richest, if not the best, English novelist of his time. Delicious scenery, discreet luxury restaurants (usually called Eden) and a sparkling sea clean enough to bathe in lured one on like lotus land.

Monte Carlo was about to host the wedding and coronation of Grace Kelly, then thought of as the chaste Princess of Hollywood. Monaco's Battle Of The Flowers was like a lavish local fete, accompanied by an out- of-tune military band.

The Casino expected evening dress, which excluded me. But there was nothing to exclude one from the Hotel de Paris, where Winston Churchill still took his holidays.

In the harbour basin lay the Onassis yacht, Christina, its massive deck covered, if you please, in Persian rugs. Money shone so brightly that you needed dark glasses.

In his delightful and informative evocation of the Cote D'Azur at various epochs, Jim Ring says its significance has always been as a safety valve, an elegant place for top people to behave naturally (or misbehave naturally).

The Victorians began going there for their health. They soon discovered the relief of informality.

'I go to the Riviera as I would a club,' said Bertie, Prince of Wales, without mentioning that it was host to the most promiscuous society in Europe (he met Mrs Keppel there).

Queen Victoria, while disapproving of Bertie's holidays, nevertheless became addicted to Riviera sunshine. Winter after winter she descended by special train which stopped for an hour each morning for her to dress. It served quantitiesof Irish stew - the native food not being reliable in France.

Victorian men of letters followed her lead. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote A Child's Garden Of Verses at Hyeres; Edward Lear composed The Owl And The Pussycat in Cannes.

Henry James went to this coast to write The Ambassadors as did Edith Wharton for The Age Of Innocence. The only people who never went were the French - except as maids or maitres d'. All that changed after World War I, bringing to the south Chanel, Cocteau and Colette.

Expat Americans began the fashion for taking summer holidays there - among them, of course, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

'The hot sweet South of France,' as Fitzgerald called it, ruined his marriage - Zelda fell for a Frenchman - and resulted in his most tortured novel, Tender Is The Night. D. H. Lawrence went to Bandol to die, having previously written most of Lady Chatterley's Lover there.

The literary connection continued with Maugham, who wrote Cakes And Ale and The Razor's Edge at the Villa Mauresque, and Graham Greene, who spent his last years at Antibes. The Azure Coast seems to have done literary inspiration no harm.

Apart from St Tropez, where Mick Jagger married Bianca, the French Riviera lost caste in the late 20th century. Nine million tourists still visited (that's its trouble).

But even its loving chronicler admits that parts of it are 'little more than a strip of polluted sea, bordered by a few yards of burning flesh, a railway and an autoroute'.

He still believes that, despite the steady degradation, 'its appeal seems timeless'.

What appeal? He thinks it lies in the promise of human happiness. It was there once. For myself, I haven't dared go back to see if it is still.