Cassis revisited

When you think of the glamorous coastal resorts of the South of France, the first names to spring to mind are the really famous ones like Nice and Cannes, St Tropez and Juan-les-Pins. Then you discover Cassis, along the coast to the east of Marseille. This, you feel, as you wander down to the harbour in the warm evening, is what St Tropez must have been like fifty years ago.

Once a fishing village, Cassis is now a fashionably charming mooring for yachts and centre for sea trips. I wrote about it several times when I first started this blog - it has, after all, a relevance to The Lantern - and then haven't returned because I haven't returned in real life either for the past couple of years.

So instead of rewriting earlier posts, I'm just going to leave the links here, starting with what I wrote about the French artist Olivier Boissinot's stinging blue and turquoise painting (above) of the nearby Calanques.

Link: The Calanques: jazzy blue

Here's an early post about Cassis's literary connections. The Bloomsbury set came to the town in the 1920s, as did D H Lawrence to the equally enchanting resort of Sanary-sur-Mer further along the coast. Then there was Edith Wharton at Hyeres, where she wrote several novels, including The Age of Innocence.

Link: Red rocks at Cassis

And finally here's a very short post, mainly to illustrate the other-worldly red rocks in the wilder parts of this rocky Mediterranean coastline, as described by Eve in the opening chapter of my book.

Link: The rocks glow red



The Calanques: jazzy blue



A short boat ride from Marseille or Cassis are the magical calanques, deep cliff inlets like small fjords. For all the photographs and artworks that abound, it’s not easy to find images that do justice to their pure beauty, austere in places and yet lush in others.

But Olivier Boissinot’s exuberant paintings of the calanques pulsate with the vivid blues and oranges of a day so hot everything seems reduced to primary colour, and the heat and light sharpen every line. The eye is drawn deep into the myriad blues, in contrast to the baked rusty soil, until you can almost feel the beat of summer just by letting the picture work.

Born in Aix-en-Provence, Boissinot makes his work all about colour, the vibrant relationship of each shade to the one adjacent. The result is celebratory: of place and mood.

Here (below) is his masterly evocation of the high Calanque d’En-Vau. It seems the characteristic black outlines of his trees and rocks capture the dizzying effect of the height above the sea and the unrelenting sun.





   The calanque was below us, such a long way down. I shivered, involuntarily. On one vertical drop human climbers scrambled like lizards, searching out holds in the scarred rock faces of the cliffs. Turquoise water shifted far below, sprinkled with silver flakes.   

                                                                                             From The Lantern

To discover more of Olivier Boissinot’s work, which includes his travels in Morocco and the jazz clubs of New Orleans, click here for his website.

Red rocks at Cassis



Anyone for an infusion of sunshine while all is rain and gloom? Here is Cassis on a summer’s evening: pastel stucco buildings along the waterfront; boats lined up in the marina. Dominating the eastern side of the bay, a medieval chateau-fort sprawls across the towering rock of Cap Canaille, which surrounds the town like a huge protective arm. As the sun sets over the sweetly curving harbor, the castle catches flame from the west, and burns blood-gold for up to an hour each evening.

                                                                                      

This classic old fishing village on the Provençal coast has a rather different feel from the internationally fashionable resorts like St Tropez further to the east. It’s much more relaxed and less crowded, though you’ll need to get up at dawn to park in August. The atmosphere is arty-bohemian, though leavened by the sailing crowds and families. This has always been a resort where the French themselves come on holiday.

It’s also a place for anyone who enjoys a good book trail, because among the foreign visitors down the years, there are plenty of stellar literary associations.

Virginia Woolf travelled here to be with her sister Vanessa Bell, Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell and her lover Duncan Grant in 1925, and wrote after spending her days wandering on flower-edged footpaths through the woods and tiny beaches amid red rocks: ‘No-one shall say of me that I have not known perfect happiness.” For the next few years it became a veritable Bloomsbury-sur-Mer.

It’s a wild, rocky coastline here, a far cry from the white marble and manicured lawns of the palaces near Nice, where we picture F Scott Fitzgerald and Somerset Maugham. This is closer both geographically and in spirit, to tough, earthy Marseille.

In the 1920s a desperately-ill D H Lawrence came to try to calm his tuberculosis at Bandol, yet another stop among so many increasingly frantic attempts to find a climate kind to his failing health. Katherine Mansfield came for the same reason. Aldous Huxley lived at Sanary-sur-Mer, another small seaside town – very pretty but not over-glitzed even now. Sanary would become the chosen place of exile for a group of German writers fleeing Hitler’s fatherland during the Second World War, most notably Thomas Mann.

A little further round the coast is Hyères, once home to Robert Louis Stevenson, and where Edith Wharton had a house for many years and wrote several novels, including The Age of Innocence. She also wrote the lovely lyrical poem In Provence, which begins:

Roofed in with creaking pines we lie
And see the waters burn and whiten,
The wild seas race the racing sky,
The tossing landscape gloom and lighten.

With emerald streak and silver blotch
The white wind paints the purple sea.