Josep Pla - Life Embitters

The countryside around Marseille is so nondescript. Those elephantine-backed mountains, covered in scrub and gorse, are repulsive and dull. They constitute an enormous blot on the delightful, diverse landscape of Provence. But a moment comes, traveling towards Toulon, when Provence resurfaces. This valley of vineyards and olive groves belongs to Cassis. Cassis today is universally renowned. It is a small town of fishermen and country folk with no special features — like so many in France! It has a small delightful port where one or two yachts are always moored. It has a wonderful little restaurant where one eats in a civilized fashion. There is a stretch of level ground, protected from the wind, shaded by plane trees that the sun reaches in the winter, where boxing matches are staged. What a wonderful way to spend the early evening! And the surrounding country crisscrossed by rural paths and dry streambeds, red roofs under foliage, and wonderfully well-kept gardens. Cézanne country.

Bandol and Sanary are towns very similar to Cassis: small sleepy ports in front of a valley. They are small valleys enclosed by hills that trace gentle, graceful lines across the sky. Vines are the main crop, agave grows along the borders, branches of old fig trees sway sensually in the air, olive trees flash myriad silvery smiles, carob trees dot the land, the waves’ whitecaps glint, shimmer, and dazzle beyond the sleepy pines, lulled by their deep music. It is a heavy, sumptuous, mature landscape with a dense leaven, despite the light touch brought by human hands. Coming from the north, where everything seems vaporized and liquid, it is a landscape with a terrestrial presence. What most strikes you is the ease with which the different forms of life express themselves in the presence of such an ancient, such a young sea. A pine branch, the incline of a hill, the flight of a thrush or starling, the trunk of a fig tree possess a keen desire to find almost impertinent, concrete expression. Their plasticity, life’s urge to become form, their passion to exist, is like a ingenuous form of exhibitionism, showing off in ways that can be wise and profound yet surly, adolescent, and unnerving. Provence’s astonishing landscape hungers, yearns for plasticity! Our landscape is more delicate, more Gothic, and more flirtatious; it never attains this distilled, exuberant ripeness.

Hyères is a most elegant town with a large number of huge eucalyptus trees that are hundreds of years old. Such amazing trees! Nevertheless, its entangled plant life, like a good part of the city’s architecture from the heyday of the bourgeoisie, is rather out-of-fashion.

The best policy in Hyères is to abandon the direct Marseille-Nice route — that goes inland, via Draguignan — and go to L’Esterel at the leisurely pace allowed by the local rail line.

L’Esterel, also known as the Coast of the Moors, is wild, mountainous terrain, crossed by very few roads, with a solitary coast of middling high, reddish cliffs that cradles the charming small town of Saint-Tropez in one of its curves. It is a country of cork oaks with the pale grayness these trees bring. The resemblance to our Les Gavarres range is striking. It is a remote, sparsely populated area, like Les Gavarres, crisscrossed by deep ravines with a wintry, very twilight existence. In the summer, it is a land of cicadas that sing furiously in the heat of the dry, bitter cork-oak groves.

L’Esterel isn’t the Côte d’Azur. The coast has left Provence, it is lighter, airier country, and that’s why its name is so well chosen. The Coast of the Moors is reddish rather than blue, and its granite cliffs aren’t gray or its basalt deep brown: these cliffs are a warm, fiery deep ocher. There is another difference: on the Côte d’Azur, the mountains provide a backdrop; in L’Esterel the mountains plunge precipitously down to the sea, occupy the frontline. The villages must hide in small coves.

The usual means of transport is the narrow gauge railway, a provincial operation that winds through valleys and mountains gasping like a dolphin and whistling to give you goose bumps. It has a vague, agreeable timetable. One of the most noteworthy and curious features of the line are the splendid, large hats worn by the station masters. The journey from Hyères to Saint-Tropez is inordinately long. You watch the trains make all manner of maneuvers and as the time spent there accumulates, your affection for those white hats increases.

It is a wonderful railway: the best of feelings — of sociability — are nurtured in its small carriages with upholstery that is now beginning to look threadbare; conversations spring up, friends are made, and you learn strange things about the places you are passing through. This rather shabby means of transport carries a kind of traveler that has completely vanished from the big railway network. Apart from the fact that if there is some sort of disaster, it is never on such a grand scale! Whenever I go to Saint-Tropez, I never fail to visit the friends this railway has so generously given me. We uncork a good bottle of local wine and are genuinely happy to meet up again. I don’t think a form of travel exists in Europe today that can offer such boons.

The line doesn’t always follow the coast. Sometimes it has a stroke of genius and impetuously takes the shortest route across the peninsula. It follows an almost straight line from Hyères to Le Lavandou, and when it reaches Cavalaire bids farewell to the sea and heads inland, leaving the Saint-Tropez peninsula grievously incommunicado. Almost the entire journey is through deserted territory, with very few villages, to the extent that you sometimes think you aren’t in France. The coast is as empty as the hinterland, if not more so: you feel you have moved to an isolated corner of the Mediterranean. Well, in my view, the most intense expanses of sea are the most empty, the most deserted.

The first time I went to Saint-Tropez I did think it was a faraway place. A walled town with ancient dark stone that took on a coppery hue at dusk. Mounted in an old mansion with huge rooms, my hotel looked over the mirror of the small port. An anachronistic hotel: a table d’hôte with petulant, fussy commercial travelers as in Stendhal’s times. From the balcony I could see a small ketch anchored by the breakwater and the flickering reddish glow of its harbor light, I imagined it was Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami . In the pearly light of dawn, the town’s old houses and blackened walls were reflected in the pale pink, celluloid waters. Two or three small coastal packets, with light, airy rigging, bobbed like toys. On the other side of the gulf, beyond the glistening green pine groves, the white walls of Saint-Maxime floated and shimmered above a white sea.

Life was quiet and tranquil, with no nasty surprises. The port was reasonably active. The harbor master caulked boats and boiled a pot of tar that perfumed the air. A labyrinth of bare narrow streets hustled and bustled within the walls and it seemed Italian from our latitudes, rather than French. On these hot, sticky streets you sometimes caught a glimpse of a girl with a complexion the color of potato purée and dark, dilated eyes. The quay was overlooked by the statue of Admiral Suffren, the famous mariner from Provence (a local), from the era of Louis XV. It is a remarkable bronze work, with a veneer of verdigris, grandiose, emphatic but empty, as if styled by a swanky hairdresser. Statues seem to create zones of silence. That statue, which was so demonstrative, deepened the silence in Saint-Tropez. A sparrow sometimes perched on its stentorian hat and left a derisory dropping. The small church bell chimed. The train whistled shrilly. The crickets’ frenzied cries from the cork-oak groves to the south drifted faintly on the summer air. Everything was silent and remote: oblivion.