It is June... I am sitting on the terrace of the Hotel de La Ponche in Saint-Tropez at six o'clock in the evening, on the brink of summer, but under a gray sky, lead gray, without the slightest streak of pink.

I have both feet on a chair to keep them out of a puddle. On my knees is a book, and I have been trying vainly to read the same page for the last hour. Before my eyes people walk past in the ridiculous outfits of rainy summers, half shorts and half windbreaker, their faces set in the pout of children who have been unjustly punished; on the table to my right an ice cube melts in a lukewarm lemonade, lukewarm like the rain that has started to fall again, that rolls down my hair and cheek and in the end forces me to get up and run away from it. Just as I got up in Paris a week ago, got out of bed one fine morning, or rather one morning like all the rest, when the rain started and stopped and started again, when the expression on the faces of people walking past was anxious, disappointed, and frightened, when the city was worn out and the sky somewhere else, when I ran away, in short—as I have a habit of doing—to the sea, to Saint-Tropez. Only, for the first time in my life the clouds did not thin out at Lyons, scatter at Valence, or vanish in Les Maures. For the first time in my life the sky I saw over the bay when I got here was the same as the sky over the capital; the iron-brown glints I saw on the Mediterranean were the same as those on the Seine. It had rained the whole way down and it was still raining; there had been no spring; there would be no summer; and fear, grief, and depression had driven with me a thousand kilometers in pursuit of a sun that had disappeared. And yet this is June, June 1984: nearly twenty years still separate us from that famous year 2000, which, according to many a Cassandra, we shall never reach, having fallen victim to our technical brilliance and our spiritual ignorance. It is perfectly possible that, moving from error to error and madness to madness, some omnipotent elected dignitary or some distraught subaltern will raze this earth that is so beautiful and char it to cinders; and that we shall all die at a stroke, idiotically incinerated, without anyone—then or later—knowing why, or how, or even by whom!

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Nevertheless, I am going to tell you the tragicomedy of what have been, are now, and will undoubtedly continue to be my sentimental relations with the tranquil village of Saint-Tropez, in the Var, and I am going to tell it to you in a certain number of acts or tableaux, but exactly how many I can't say at the start, memory having its whims and waywardnesses no less than imagination. I do not guarantee complete objectivity or complete veracity in what follows; all I can guarantee is my sincerity. And that in itself is not so bad, when its subject is a town, or rather village, which inspires in those who love it, even now and whatever their age, megalomanias of memory and paranoias concerning the past that are always remarkable for their mad gaiety or their mad melancholy—for their sensitivity, at any rate. Saint-Tropez is a town that touches off reveries, dementias, mild or otherwise, that are not touched off in the same way, so unanimously and instantaneously, by any other place on earth. Here, then, is my personal comedy.

Act I

The action takes place in 1954 or 1955. The 1 scene is a small port on a pale-blue morning. It is spring. A convertible, an old dust-coated Jaguar XK140, has just parked at the water's edge. Behind the wheel, a windblown young man (my brother), and beside him a windblown girl (me). The two heroes' eyes are red, blinking in the glare. They have driven down National Highway 7, a long ribbon full of twists and turns and bumps and potholes, which used to go right through the middle of built-up areas, slow down in villages, and pause outside cafes, and whose users were in the habit of doing what they liked on it. They stopped wherever they wanted, talked to waiters (who were not yet nickel-plated and co-inoperated), and even pulled over onto the grass, just like that, underneath a tree, not in a "rest area." Sometimes, coming together on these caved-in two-way roads, drivers actually bumped into each other's front ends. The sole advantage of such hazardous thoroughfares was the absence of tolls.

"So now the sun, the piercing and corrupt sun of glory, beats down on SaintTropez, which has become, overnight, the capital of illicit pleasures"

Having by some miracle emerged alive from this anachronism of a highway—inconceivable today—the two young people get out of their car and head for the one and only real-estate agency in town. Just as, a little while later, they will drink to their arrival in the town's only bar, which is named L'Escale and owned by old Mme. Mado—a dark provincial cafe smelling of wood, insecticide, and lemonade— and just as, in the afternoon, they will exchange their Parisian outfits for unbleached canvas trousers and rope espadrilles in the only shop in the place, which is called Vachon and run by a pleasant woman and her family (one of the town's five families, as you might say one of France's two hundred families). In this opening act, in a sequence of quick scenes, the two characters look at eight or ten houses, all equally empty and beautiful, all stuck equally askew on rocks which are themselves gingerly balanced on the only stable element in the village: the blue water, the flat blue water that edges it. They choose the biggest villa, the one closest to La Ponche (meaning "fishermen's port" in the local dialect), and they move into it. Alone at first, they are soon joined by pallid friends, victims of the city, heroic friends who turn up one after the other, having also faced and survived the perils and adventures of National Highway 7. These strays from Paris step into the bar and rest their weary eyes (weary with that supreme lassitude one feels at twenty), gazing now to the left at the old women of the neighborhood knitting away in concert (that is, knitting away in the concert of their voices and their delicious accent), now to the right, into the distance, at the green-andblue coast of Sainte-Maxime and the white splotches of its houses, and now at the fishermen's boats and their faded sails—on their way out to hunt the bay fish, "those gilthead bream / Of the blue waves, fish of gold, singing fish" that Rimbaud talks about, or on their way back in again at dawn, on a colorless sea, but in either case moving to the throbbing, disenchanted beat of their two-stroke motors. This will be the only summer and the only tableau in my Tropezian comedy in which all you can see on the left are tranquil knitters and all you can see on the right are sailors minding their own business. This will be the only summer in which you see people working. And, therefore, in which peace and quiet reign over the town.

Act II 

We move into Act II, by contrast, what we shall see is the implacable agitation of vacations, holidays, and far niente, crashing down on both the right and left of the house; on the left, frenzied and disheveled groups of urban naiads scurrying from boutique to boutique in search of swimsuits, and on the right, outboards, accompanied by the furious shouts of young men tearing around in wild disorder, impelled by the puny ambition of stretching out full length on the sand a quarter of a mile away. Here is Saint-Tropez's first virtue and its first defect: It reverses roles and strips words of their original definitions. But more of that later... All I mean to say now is that there was only one year that seemed normal, to my friends and me, in the house on La Ponche: the year when Saint-Tropez belonged to us (of course), the year when we were the only people to use and abuse its sea, sand, solitude, and loveliness, as we were also the only ones to use and abuse the wide-eyed good humor and patience of its inhabitants, the only ones to honk our horns in its back alleys at dawn, the only ones to horse around in front of its two gendarmes, who laughed at us, and in whose mouths the local word fada—"not all there''—did not yet seem a crass and vulgar imitation of Marcel Pagnol (which it did the second year, before it was stricken from the vocabulary).

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The pace accelerates in the second act, or in the second tableau. My memory is already mixing things up... Vadim came to shoot And God Created Woman in the port, or else he finished shooting it. Brigitte Bardot bought La Madrague and developed a crush on Jean-Louis Trintignant. Alexandre Astruc decided to make a brilliant film with my assistance. Michel Magne wrote symphonies for horn and bassoon on the old out-of-tune organ in our big house, and on the Place de La Ponche, M. and Mme. Barbier added a few outside tables to supplement the wooden bar and eight barstools which made up the Bar des Pecheurs (now the Hotel de La Ponche, but still presided over by the shade of Albert and by his innocent wife). All these creative and, it must be admitted, disorderly young people gathered at the end of the summer in the house on La Ponche. The director, Vadim, came to rest his camera, and his heart, which had been tired by the shooting; the actor Christian Marquand came to rest his long frame, along with his laughter and his schoolboy agitation. Soon Vadim's film was being shown in ten movie theaters, and it "slew" them, as they say, in Paris to begin with...before the next year came around and it slew iis.

Act III 

So now the sun of glory (in addition to the other one, the one on high, the round and compliant star Sol), the piercing and corrupt sun of glory, beats down on Saint-Tropez, which has become, overnight, the capital of "illicit pleasures." For not until 1960 will the word pleasure cease to be automatically coupled with the word illicit, and the latter replaced, ipso facto, by the word compulsory. The humanoids of France, hitherto ignorant of amorality, debauchery, and the most elementary laws of sexuality—whether in the cramped quarters of a swimsuit or in the expansiveness of their views—and in some cases ignorant of the fact that the two words do not always have to be coupled, come pouring down to Saint-Tropez, like pilgrims to Mecca or Canossa, to the "Party," with a capital p, in the wake of the filmmakers, musicians, actors, directors, and writers, who now seem like pretty tame black sheep.

The smiles of the original bipeds—us—are beginning to fade beneath their tans. Now they too have to stand in line at Vachon and sulk at Choses or Micmac, the two rival shops which have dared to spread their wares out along the harbor. At Tahiti they too have to pay more than the cost price for lobsters, which Felix, the happy owner, no longer catches himself. Saint-Tropez still belongs to them, of course, and the shopkeepers and landlords who have now become the exploiters of the town's charms still retain their status as parasites, "our parasites," who are more or less loyal to us and more or less expensive, to be sure, but in any event still grateful for the manna we, like young magi, have brought to them. But we are no longer alone on the beaches. The golden days, sleepless nights, peals of laughter in the shadows, chases down narrow alleyways, the unsubstantial loves and inconsequential imprudences are no longer ours alone. And the wild debauchery attributed to us we see being practiced by others, but in their case, of course, gracelessly and without innocence.

What very quickly ensues is the wild debauchery of money, conspicuous and implacable. True, the local success stories are still appealing, as they are merited by something more than greed or cunning or opportunism; when F61ix, Roger, and Francois, for example, who are the same age as we are and haven't got a penny, open L'Esquinade and make for it as glittering a name in the local nightlife as Tabarin or Tabou, their triumph is still fraught with hazards and thrills because all three of them are slightly crazy, broke, and utterly delightful.

Yes, but... After only two years, money is there: no matter how it tries to disguise itself, strip itself to the waist, go racing with the wind in the sails of sporting sloops or under the tops of throbbing Ferraris, no matter how hard it tries to play the rou6, the athlete, the artist, and even the ecologist, it is still recognizable. It is in the very heart of the town, lurking under the placid statue of Admiral de Suffren de Saint-Tropez, the town's patron, and it has its eye on everything, it has its finger everywhere. The gendarmes have already stopped saying fada; people have already stopped buying their fish at dawn straight from the holds of the fishing boats; they have already—unless they are from Texas—stopped pestering sailors foolish enough to sit down in the port by asking them what the weather will be like tomorrow. Some of us, sitting around at night, are already talking of Normandy... 

Act IV, Tableaux 1, 2, 3, and 4 

Things went downhill fast that winter.. one winter or two, who knows?... A few purebred Tropezians, now persons of account because they kept accounts, and a few foreigners, now honorable because they honored the said accounts, destroyed what little easygoing unaccountability still clung to the town. The tame bipeds having been led, by the caprices of their love life, career, or moods, to miss out on one or two of these paradisiacal summers (the memory of which remains pure even today), nobody knows who, when, how it happened... Or, rather, yes; one can guess. One can guess from the tone of certain young locals whose fortunes are no longer so shaky, whose voices no longer express the minutest shade of gratitude (not that I believe any of us bipeds was expecting that) or even of complicity—in which some bipeds had foolishly believed and by the absence of which they were profoundly and secretly dismayed. "What have my friends become?" asked the poet Rutebeuf. "Rich" is the reply. Meanwhile, the bipeds are dismayed over the fifty boutiques, the twenty hotelkeepers, the forty bars, the ten nightclubs, the twelve real-estate agencies, and the five antiques dealers that have taken the places of Mme. Mado, the Agence du Port, Vachon, Lei Mouscardins on my right, and the Auberge des Maures on my left (two restaurants I did not mention at the beginning of this tragicomedy, since Colette used to eat lunch in them fifty years ago—just as I did not mention the church and the town hall)...

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In short, today one no longer goes, in Saint-Tropez, from pleasure to pleasure, tryst to tryst, from one bit of beach to another bit of beach, or one bedroom to another; one goes from dinner at X's to dinner at Y's, from club No. 1 to club No. 2; by night one goes from one clique to another and by day from one purchase to another. One no longer lives like a happy hunter or a consenting prey; one moves from clan to clan and story to story. And as in a Greek tragedy, but one written by a Broadway Euripides taking his inspiration from Feydeau, "love" does not exist unless it is discussed, a beach does not exist unless its mats have to be rented, and desire does not exist unless you can make a profit on it. SaintTropez, in this period, is becoming a prelude to Reno: couples go to Saint-Tropez to separate—that is, to do openly and in a manner injurious to the husband or wife what they were doing secretly in Paris before. Betrayals and breakups are displayed with greater enthusiasm than happy marriages. What rules the night is no longer laughter, or pleasure, or curiosity, but a sort of perpetual—and usually artificial—exhibition of gaiety, pleasure, curiosity; an exhibition that gradually comes to dissimulate a society in reality as bourgeois, regimented, gossiping, and provincial as that of any town where the heroes have all their rights but no more duties. Or, in any event, no more notion of how to behave: they throw their Coca-Cola bottles on the beach, their 100-franc notes at the waiters' feet, and their highball glasses over the balcony rail, all of which projectiles represent their throwing of propriety to the winds. Americans, Germans, Italians, and others believe that by flinging down their dollars, marks, and lire on the blue Mediterranean baize they are purchasing charm; meanwhile the fish in the sea die off from overdoses of motor fuel, the beaches are filthy by the first equinox, and you can't take a barefoot stroll in the sand at night without a box of Band-Aids. The picture is a bleak one, certainly, but that is how it is seen by those bipeds among whom I number myself, and who, like me, have deserted the pink-and-yellow town that used to belong to them—the bipeds who are now. maligning (as I am at this moment) their beloved Saint-Tropez, or are pulling out of their memories, like rabbits out of a hat, the sparkling and nostalgic souvenirs of a youth, "theirs," which they regard as different and visibly of a higher order than the one that came after it. The conflict between generations of tourists that rages nowadays in this Babel of a village assumes comical forms. As when into one of those epic tales we have heard a thousand times there slips the recollection of some old beau who was the target of our childhood cruelty, more than one of the supercilious forty-year-old bipeds of today can be observed to adjust his English cravat in the throat of the duck shirt he bought at exorbitant cost from Saks in New York while he smooths out the torso, wrinkles, and tics which his memory was attributing, the moment before, to somebody else. And the expression on the faces of women of forty or fifty, as they eye "those bare-bosomed cuties.. .no class.. .don't know how to enjoy themselves...poor things...take no pleasure in anything..." and wonder, with their vast experience, whether these young women actually feel anything when making love, can also, in its motherly concern, be pretty rich.

My story might end here: Act IV, Tableau 5, 1999. The same bipeds, blanched and pear-shaped, ironically contemplate their offspring of forty-five as the latter malign their grandchildren of twenty, and mockingly assure them that, "oh yes, yes indeedy, the young people of today do know how to enjoy themselves and are not at all frigid" (this out of pure geriatric malice, of course).

But that would be a false and a lamentably sordid ending to what was, what is, what will be Saint-Tropez. Time passes, memory is immutable, thank God. Just as, twenty centuries ago, some Roman male of forty who had arrived at Ostia on his chariot stood lamenting on the shore, or, a century earlier, some Greek female deceived by her husband, so do we also lament, by the shores of this blue water, the fact that we are not immortal and youth does not endure. Did that Roman male or Greek female imagine that, once their breathing no longer phrased the beating of their hearts and their eyes were no longer fixed upon it, this sea could go on lapping the warm sand into which their bare feet were sinking, and this sun could continue to turn and lengthen the shadows of trees or houses along the ground? Or did that sea, sun, smell of pine, salt, and iodine cause instead to rise in them a sort of sweet and strange pleasure at the very thought that these things would all live after them?

Today, the forty-year-olds who arrive by Aston Martin or bus or trailer to swarm around that blue water with the frenzy of diggers for gold in the Klondike, and these tourists from every country, all suffer from the same marvelous complaint: admiration. SaintTropez is beautiful, stunningly beautiful. Its beauty is indestructible— especially for us, the bipeds of National Highway 7, its ex-proprietors—in spring, autumn, or winter, during those periods of truce when we return to bear witness to it, every time with astonishment and a delight almost free of rancor.

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First, there are the winds, the three or four winds that batten upon the peninsula, sweep it, scour it, and then breathe over it an air so light, dizzy, and gay that within two days one feels oneself transformed, on one's feet again. There is the yellow and peaceful sun, the affable sun that shines there so often when it's raining in Cannes and Monte Carlo. There is the russet coast with its complicated tucks and darts and all of a sudden its sleek beaches, the coast that resembles some of Racine's tragedies, where you stumble and mark time during the dialogue, where you have to hang on tight until you can stretch out on the smooth surface of a tirade. There is the "wild sea that shatters its goblets at the brim,'' as Cocteau says, and is foamier and fresher and more changeable than anywhere else. There is the countryside, the real country hidden behind Saint-Tropez, which is green, unlike the peeled, stony land, the poor overheated land in the rest of Les Maures. For just behind the beach at Saint-Tropez there are fields, and green and persistent grass, woods, cork oaks, hills that look like the ones in Ile-de-France, water, trees, a smell of dead wood in the autumn and of mushrooms. There still are paths one can take out of Pampelonne and not know where they lead.

And whether one sees it from the sea or from above, from the citadel where no one ever goes, Saint-Tropez always shows its narrow, pointed houses, sometimes leaning but all lovable, the yellow, red, and blue or gray houses devoured by sun and wind, with the roofs made of a thousand petals of tile in a pink that is worn and sweet to the eye, crowding around a steeple whose clock is off time and rings random quarterhours to which nobody pays any mind. There is washing hung out here and there, of course, as in Italy, and there are a few overly well groomed terraces, and a few uselessly decorative plants. But the walls of the houses are of stone, piled thick and solid, and all the modem coatings—applied on top of the old ones at vast expense—cannot disguise them. The houses all bask in the sun by day, like cats or big dogs. They have a trusting air—even if their openings are pinched—and round bellies as well. And by night all the houses amuse themselves watching you go by. They have a door that swings, opens to draw you in, and a window that is always lit to tell you where you are. The narrow streets intersect and elbow each other aside, and connect again on a square where one twisted tree strikes an arrogant pose. The streets resound with the shouts of marauders or revelers and, for us, with our shouts of twenty years ago. One can walk for hours in Saint-Tropez, by night and day; from the Place des Lices to the port; from one bar to another, or, later, from one bakery roused at dawn to another; from a white sea to a sea going gradually blue under the little cemetery... the little cemetery where everybody wants to be put one day so that he can see the boats go by and feel the sun warming his loosened bones.

Act V

Summer 1984. The end. The curtain has fallen on a Tropezian tragicomedy. I slept three-quarters of an hour and dreamed for twenty-five years. I awoke in a room that was dark at first and immediately shut my eyes again, instinctively listening for a sound I no longer heard and almost missed. I finally realized that it had stopped raining and that the blond pointed thing striping the wall across from me was a ray of that famous star the sun. I got out of bed and opened the shutters, and the sea and sky flung in my face the same blue, the same pink, the same happiness. And the same sun lasers pierced through it all with one dart, drew heavy black lines around the pastels, and outlined interminably, voluptuously, the peaks of the roofs, the curve of the beach, the stalks of masts. It is 1984, and I do not know if we shall get to the year 2000 without some obstinate, unseeing aircraft, its crew deaf to all counterorders (or some missile, witless and monstrous as the merciless dinosaurs of the earth's infancy), heading toward us with our glaring, ashen death between its ribs.

Not that that is so important: the sun is here, in the palm of my hand, and automatically I hold my palm out to it, but without closing the fingers. One must not try to grasp the sun or life, any more than one must try to cling to time or love. I go downstairs to find people who are laughing, people who are forgetting, people who are about to set out for somewhere else, anywhere, except that it will be a somewhere that looks like here, or tries to, but can never quite bring it off.

Translated from the French by Nancy Amphoux