Wouldn't it be Nice?
Look at old illustrations of Nice, the French Riviera’s most popular city, and it will strike you that the figures enjoying a stroll by its Bay of Angels are not wearing summer clothes but are wrapped up in elegant capes and overcoats. The reason lies in Nice’s history as a winter destination for the English aristocracy. When health-threatening damp and fog descended on 19th-century country estates and city mansions, it was time to pack your leather trunks - or in Queen Victoria’s case send a train ahead crammed with furniture, horses, carriage and 100-strong entourage including Highland pipers - and head for the French Riviera. At first, a restorative month by the Mediterranean was the thing, then people began to stay for the whole season. Dubbed les hivernants (‘the winterers’), they were joined by others from Germany, Austrian and Russia. The Tsarinas came for their wellbeing and Czar Nicholas II paid for a beautiful Russian Orthodox Church to be built in 1903.
In 2021, Nice won UNESCO status specifically for its identity as the Riviera’s winter resort city. And with an average of nine hours of sunshine even in the coolest months, it’s a tradition well worth continuing. Appealingly, Nice has maintained its glamorous air while becoming very affordable. Travel is easy by plane - you land at Côte d’Azur Airport, aircraft wheels skimming Mediterranean surf. Then simply follow the Promenade des Anglais, Nice’s 7km landmark which was built by early 19th-century English residents, towards the Vieux Ville’s rose and ochre-painted houses crammed around cobbled lanes and squares. Or you can follow Queen Victoria’s example, and arrive by train. Taking Eurostar to Lille then making an easy switch means the London to Nice journey takes less than 12 hours.
Enchanting Cimiez
The hillside district of Cimiez tells the story of the Belle Époque era (roughly 1880-1914), Nice’s most fashionable years. (It’s easily reached by bus or Uber.) This had been a tranquil area, a separate town really, with Roman ruins and a Franciscan monastery set among olive groves, all with heart-lifting views of sea and mountains. But as Nice’s popularity soared, it was developed to provide gorgeous hotels and private residences for les hivernants, making it the district in which to spend the season. An occasional casino and tea rooms also appeared. The Hôtel Excelsior, Regina Palace was built with a west wing specifically to accommodate Queen Victoria and her staff, its roof decorated with a crown. Other beauties are Hôtel Hermitage, the Winter Palace and the Grand Palace (Queen Victoria’s choice on early holidays), all reflecting the prosperity and optimism of the era with creamy Italianate and Neo-classical designs, ornamental iron balconies and wedding-cake plasterwork. They’re all desirable apartment blocks now.
It’s an artists’ area too. Henri Matisse, one of many artists drawn to Nice’s rose-tinted winter light, moved into an apartment at the Hôtel Excelsior, Regina Palace in his final years. The Matisse Museum dedicated to his work is a Cimiez highlight; along with painter Raoul Dufy, Henri Matisse is buried in the graveyard attached to the Cimiez Monastery. For full immersion in Riviera artists, take in the Marc Chagall Museum as you descend to centre ville.
Cimiez was, and still is, a residential district, so to find the shops that catered to the Belle Époque crowd, head to Vieux Ville’s streets and markets. Maison Auder, opposite the Italianate opera house, is the don’t-miss for orangette chocolates, grilled almonds and fruit pastes just as Queen Victoria enjoyed them. They still display her insignia, as does the stationer Papeterie Rontani. The Cours Selaya markets, scented by lavender soap and seafood, are as bewitching now as they were 120 years ago, when the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting bought boxes and boxes of flowers to send back to England.
Illustrations: A Cimiez, caricature of Queen Victoria, Vanity Fair, 17 June 1897; the flower market then and now, Eugène Trutat, Wikimedia Commons and licence CC BY 2.5, Wikimedia Commons
Holidaying with Queen Victoria
“The whole scene, with the mountains rising behind, & the deepest blue sea in the foreground, is really ideal & brilliant beyond belief. I have not time, nor will I attempt to describe it, for no one could believe it, who has not seen it.” This was Queen Victoria’s ecstatic diary entry, written after arriving on the French Riviera for the first time. Over 17 years of winter breaks, she remained effusive about it. And the Riviera loved her too, greeting her Royal train each year with bouquet-wielding bigwigs, military bands and cheering crowds.
The Queen brought smart, wealthy society with her. By her final visit, in 1899 when she was 79 years old, the Riviera was utterly chic. Marie Mallett, one of the ladies-in-waiting who accompanied her, wrote home: “The weather is glorious, perfect, everyone in white dresses and flowery hats, I feel like a little black mole and a dowdy one too, for this place is smarter than Paris”. By then, the Royal party was staying regularly at Nice’s Hôtel Excelsior, where a modern electric lift - noted approvingly by the Queen in her diary - carried them to their quarters in the private west wing.
Rather than exploring French culture, Queen Victoria, established court life as she did in Balmoral and Windsor. Novelty came from a warmer climate - she always noted in her diary the mornings that were balmy enough to take breakfast on the balcony - and daily carriage rides. With her ladies-in-waiting, she visited local parks, where she read to the scent of orange blossom and early roses, or trundled along the Promenade des Anglais towards coastal resorts like Villefranche sur Mer. She delighted in whatever sights they come across, whether a regatta, olive pickers, a religious procession through Roman ruins or a hilltop view of the Alps. In her hand was always a blue purse of francs to give to those who approached the carriage and she took pleasure in being “bombarded” with flowers by local children.
The Queen’s extended family flocked around her. The Prince of Wales was an attentive, exuberant son, who, with his wife Princess Alexandra, always met his mother on the station platform. In 1897 he hosted her on his yacht, which he was entering into races along the coast. In 1899 he was chatting about his fashionable new hobby, golf. There’s an unhappier glimpse of Riviera life in one of Marie’s letters, which describes being tempted by a pair of cut-price diamond earrings at a Russian pawn broker who has separated “miserable wretches” from their jewellery en route to the casinos of Monte Carlo.
The Riviera’s permanent residents, often larger-than-life characters, also courted the Queen’s company. The Comtesse de la Grange, a flamboyant, cigar-smoking ex-actress who ran a small zoo, gifted her an ostrich egg that she had signed in ink. “Just as if she had laid it herself,” remarked the Queen later, according to Marie, although she pronounced the omelette her chef made with it to be delicious.
Actress Sarah Bernhard visited the Queen by invitation to perform an extract from her latest play, tears rolling down her own face as she did so. And Neopolitan singers, a Hungarian gypsy band, and Italian opera added colour to often staid evenings dining at home among courtiers and ladies-in-waiting..
Holidaying in Nice suited the Queen’s health. She was all smiles during visits and her energy levels often higher than that of her younger companions. Sadly the Boer War prevented her visiting in 1900, and she died the following year after a short illness. “Oh, if only I were at Nice, I should recover,” she is said to have remarked wistfully near the end.
Life with Queen Victoria, Marie Mallet’s Letters from Court 1887-1901 edited by Victor Mallet is out of print but used copies are available online.
Photos: A statue of Queen Victoria sits in the grounds of the old Hôtel Excelsior, now an apartment block, mwanasimba from La Réunion, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Jazz Age
In the 1920s (left), holiday patterns in the Riviera began to change. The Jazz Age saw the arrival of hedonistic, creative Americans notably F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who sparked the establishment of a summer season (previously hotels had closed in April) that was set not in Cimiez but around the beach and the Vieux Ville. Swimming, regattas and open-air concerts became part of a hedonistic holiday that gradually evolved into the contemporary cosmopolitan Riviera experience. And the winter season became a memory.
Pockets of fabulousness from the Belle Epoque can still be found all over Nice. Le Negresco Hotel, first opened in 1913 is a Promenade des Anglais landmark. Designed by the architect of Paris’ Moulin Rouge with a dome by Gustave Eiffel, it struggled initially because of the outbreak of World War I, but is now magnificently restored. Cocktails on the terrace or a meal - whether dinner in two Michelin-starred Le Chantecler or great-value set lunch surrounded by wooden carousel horses in La Rotonde - are essential. If their rooms are too pricey, other evocative choices are Hotel Villa Victoria, Villa Rivoli, Le Grimaldi and Villa Otero. And a walk along the Promenade des Anglais always includes a tour of Villa Massena, a museum set into a seaside mansion that both embodies and narrates the story of the Riviera’s Belle Époque years.
Winter in Nice in the 1925, above. Below: Hotel Negresco by Miniwark, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
