French Riviera’s Writers: A Creative Haven Between Sea and Sun

The French Riviera has always offered tailor-made refuges to its distinguished guests, whether they were architects, painters, sculptors, or writers. Jean Cocteau transformed Villa Santo Sospir in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat into a true masterpiece, decorating each surface with his mythological drawings.

Saint-Tropez, Writers’ Paradise

In the 1950s, Françoise Sagan made a dramatic entrance behind the wheel of her Jaguar. The author of “Bonjour Tristesse” transformed her Tropezian daily life into a whirlwind of parties, swimming, and writing in the sun. In the mornings, she could often be found at Sénéquier’s terrace, notebook at hand, observing the dance of traditional fishing boats in the harbor while scribbling the first lines of her next novel.

A few decades earlier, Colette had already succumbed to the village’s charm. At La Treille Muscate, her house nestled in the heights, she created an extraordinary garden where the scents of jasmine, roses, and citrus mingled. It was there, in this personal paradise, that she wrote some of her most beautiful pages, lulled by the song of cicadas and the rustle of vines. She even grew her own tomatoes, of which she was particularly proud, calling them “little suns in my garden.”

As for Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, they made the Hôtel de la Ponche their summer headquarters. The couple established an unchanging ritual: morning writing sessions on their sea-view balcony, long existentialist discussions with their feet in the water at Ponche beach, and lively evenings at the hotel bar where intellectuals and artists mingled. Legend has it that it was on these pebbles that Beauvoir sketched the first drafts of “The Second Sex,” between refreshing swims.

From Cap to Cap, a Literary Constellation

Much more than mere holiday destinations: the succession of ports and towns forms a crucible where literary creation is nourished by the Mediterranean’s gentle way of life.

In Saint-Raphaël, Somerset Maugham made Villa Mauresque his refuge for decades, while Albert Camus found inspiration for his Mediterranean works in Antibes. At Cap d’Antibes, the Fitzgeralds transformed Villa Saint Louis, now the Hotel Belle Rive, into the epicenter of Roaring Twenties social and artistic life. One might encounter Picasso or Hemingway there.