A few hours after I arrive at Hôtel Belles Rives in the south of France this summer, I’m seated at dinner when I see a flash of green light ricochet across the glittering water. It’s almost too perfect.
I’ve come here to visit the places that inspired the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald as he traveled across France with his wife and daughter in the 1920s. I’ve ended up in a scene from his most famous novel. In The Great Gatsby, the light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock shines green, entrancing Gatsby. I’m staring at a pinprick of a lighthouse in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea while a glass of vermentino sweats on the table in front of me, but still. I’m entranced.
“Almost too perfect” is close to how Fitzgerald must have found this place. Long ago, he rented the house that became this hotel, then called Villa St. Louis. In a letter he sent to the writer Ernest Hemingway, he explained that being back in such a beautiful house had made him happier than he’d been in ages. Now, traces of him are all over the quite beautiful hotel that was later built here, which opened not long after the Fitzgeralds left in 1927. Just off reception, there’s a bar bears his name, and black-and-white portraits of him and Zelda blown up near the Art Deco elevator. Then, there’s the Prix Fitzgerald: an annual prize celebrating a writer who explores the same themes that captivated Fitzgerald in his own work. The event, held while I’m in town and this time honoring the esteemable writer Richard Ford, draws a crowd of well-dressed locals and Fitzgerald enthusiasts, who snack on bite-sized empanadas and arancini while the prosecco flows.
The hotel is perched just above the sea in Juan-les-Pins, the charming little sister town to Antibes. It boasts around 40 rooms and five stars, and I promise no one on the premises has ever heard of Alo Yoga. Older women wear linen sets to breakfast. Younger women traipse down to the beach in gauzy sarongs and piles of gold necklaces. Men wear loafers on the sand. The cocktails are pleasingly fussy and delicious. The croissants are warm. I never want to leave. No wonder the wealth-obsessed Fitzgerald didn’t either. The south of France is a status tracker’s paradise. Yachts gleam on the sparkling water. One guest at Belles Rives is wearing diamond studs so big, I can see them from a third-floor terrace, like a pair of icebergs on a lounge chair.
Marianne Estène-Chauvin, the current owner of Belles Rives, tells me that her grandparents fell in love with the villa where the hotel now sits while the Fitzgeralds were still living there. The two had crossed paths at a bus stop—a chance encounter that changed their lives. Her grandfather Boma had come to France from what was then Russia, fleeing pogroms and persecution, and had planned to work in the area just long enough to afford a ticket to New York. Her grandmother Simone invited him to spend the night at her house, as the next bus out of town didn’t leave until morning. He never did make it to Marseille—or to New York.
After F. Scott and Zelda moved on, her grandparents tracked down the owner of the villa that had enchanted them and entered into an unusual agreement. The couple would be allowed to rent and renovate the villa. After a period of waiting, the two would be eligible to purchase it. In 1941, when the villa should have passed into Estène-Chauvin’s grandparents’ hands, the war came to France. Estène-Chauvin’s grandfather—Jewish and not a French national—was forced into hiding. It took decades to restore the villa to its agreed-upon owners. Estène-Chauvin didn’t learn how complex those negotiations had been until she got involved with the family property as an adult. Her son now works in the business, too.
“Belles Rives is a place for beautiful memories, not sad memories,” she insists. She is proud of her grandparents’ doggedness, but even more of the fact that their effort—their trials, their frustrations—doesn’t show at the hotel. The villa is a celebration of only the happiest, sunniest days. Darkness—including the Fitzgeralds’ own—is something for the real world, not the French Riviera.
The Fitzgeralds came to the south of France to write, but the couple didn’t spend all their time shut up in a villa. So despite the fact that I too am on deadline, I venture forth in their honor. One of the sites most associated with them is the iconic Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc. The Fitzgeralds visited several times on previous sojourns through the area. In Tender Is the Night, it’s immortalized as the Hotel des Étrangers. It has a fictional feel even IRL, as if gardens this perfect and vistas this glamorous must have sprung from someone’s imagination. Rates start in the four figures, but a meal is cheaper. You can visit for lunch and experience the environs at their sparkliest. I prefer the humble spread dished up at the minuscule, cash-only Bistrot du Coin in Antibes. On select afternoons, tables groan under the weight of boiled vegetables, fish, and aioli so luscious I saw someone at the next table eat it with a spoon. Bold, given the number of garlic cloves whipped into it. Fitzgerald described “breathing dreams like air” in his writing, but I did not want to exhale in a social setting until I had a toothbrush in hand a few hours later. Perfect, delectable, fragrant repast.
Back at Belles Rives, one of the best meals in town can be had a stone’s throw from Bar Fitzgerald at the hotel’s La Passagère restaurant. Michelin-starred French cuisine with a breathtaking view of the Mediterranean. At one point during the dinner I eat there, a waiter points to an island in the distance (past the green light). It’s Saint-Honorat, where almost two dozen monks live in the Cistercian Congregation of the Immaculate Conception and produce ultra-limited wine with a spiritual flavor. The waiter has a bottle open and pours me a glass. Not a religious experience, but I would call it transcendent.
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The next morning, I visit the masterworks of Pablo Picasso, who traveled in the same circles the Fitzgeralds did. The Picasso Museum in Antibes doesn’t have as extensive a collection as the Picasso Museum in Barcelona does, but seeing his Joie De Vivre in person is worth the price of admission alone. Later, I wander through Old Antibes where vendors in the Marché Provençal sell cheese, olive oil, fruit, vegetables, and all manner of straw products to tourists and locals alike. Fitzgerald would not have known what to do with the iced matcha latte for sale a few doors down a winding, cobblestone-paved sidewalk, but a gaggle of teenage girls make quick work of their drinks before loading up on French soap. Over dinner at Jeanne in Antibes, I am so engrossed in conversation that I lose track of my belongings and leave a hat I did quite like on a chair in the corner. As the characters in Fitzgerald’s novels have no choice but to learn, there is perhaps such a thing as too much “joie de vivre” after all. The hat is not returned to me.
Antibes has its fair share of diversions, but other destinations beckon. A zippy 30-minute car ride from Belles Rives, the town of Saint Paul de Vence is so picturesque it feels like a pavilion in Epcot. Friends and I descend on La Colombe d’Or—the art-filled hotel where Fitzgerald behaved like such a brazen flirt with the dancer Isadora Duncan that Zelda threw herself down a flight of stairs in protest. The restaurant—now topped with rooms and suites—has works from Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and Miró on the walls and spread across the grounds. Its late founder Paul Roux collected them from the artists themselves—all friends and frequent diners. Danièle Roux, who runs La Colombe d’Or with her husband (and Paul’s grandson) François, regales us with tales of their misadventures next to a giant Calder installation near the hotel pool. She likes to direct visitors to the Fondation Maeght where more masterworks are on view. A 15-minute walk from “the Colombe,” as insiders call it, I get so lost in its outdoor Miró sculpture garden that I have to be shooed out at closing time. (It’s a 10-minute cab ride from there to the Matisse Chapel. Don’t miss it.)
Before I leave, I get a glimpse of the good life on the water. A boat picks me up from the port, and its captain shows me the mansions on the croisette in Cannes. The water is clear and cool under the hot summer sun. Scratch the almost. This is just perfect.