We arrived in a cloud. Not a metaphor — an actual one.
You climb the last ten minutes out of Grasse on a road that folds back on itself, and somewhere above the last houses autumn closes over the windscreen and the world goes white. A bright white, the kind that means the sun is just there, one layer up, declining to come down. Somewhere in it, a waterfall was going at full volume. Wonderful, we thought; we would come back one day and take a couple of pictures.
We did come back. We drove the road from bottom to top and back again perhaps ten times. The waterfall had vanished. The doubts about our own sanity had not. Only months later, driving the same road by chance in heavy rain, I saw it again — in its old place, at full volume.
It is a useful thing to learn about a place: what it shows a stranger, and what it keeps back.
We had not meant to live here. After a summer in Antibes, the first wet days made it plain that the villa we had rented regarded us as tourists and had no intention of keeping us warm. We sniffled, looked at listings, and found one in a village we could not have located on a map. So, on a drizzling October morning, we drove up to look.
The agent was called Olivier. I have since come to suspect that nearly every estate agent on this coast is called Olivier — some quiet professional filter. He showed us the rooms, then the terrace, which he presented as the jewel. He enthusiastically gestured at the fog, as thick as cotton wool, with no way of knowing whether the advertised pool was even behind it, and arranged his face into an expression that, to his mind, could leave no doubt about the loveliness of the view.
“In winter,” he insisted, “you can see Corsica from here.”
We looked politely at the white nothing and signed.
The move went much the same way: fog, fine rain. To hell with the view, we thought, and fell asleep to the whisper of rain on the roof and the rustle of droplets through the trees — and then to nothing at all. No sound whatsoever. After a lifetime in the city, silence like this is enough to make you wonder if you’ve wandered into a horror movie.
The following morning, a blood-curdling cry from the terrace tore me out of bed.
“Andrew! Quickly! Come here!”
I ran. Elena was pointing towards the horizon with the serene satisfaction of a woman who had clearly discovered something life-changing.
“Look. Corsica! And it’s so close!”
From time to time she subjects me to practical demonstrations of what a pre-stroke episode might feel like. To keep me on my toes, I can only assume. Corsica turned out to be the Îles de Lérins, sitting in the water a stone’s throw off Cannes. But the rest of it was true, and more than Olivier had promised: Antibes to the left, the Esterel away to the right, the Lac de Saint-Cassien folded into it, the whole coast freshly rinsed and the sun coming up over all of it.
He had not been lying about Corsica either. On clear winter mornings, Cap Corse really does stand up on the horizon. But that comes later in the story, and it should.
So began the slow business of finding out what the village was. It started, as these things do, with the rubbish. Carrying a bag out, we learned that the small house directly opposite, on the Promenade Saint-Jean, had belonged to the Comtesse de Saint-Exupéry — Marie, the mother of Antoine. She came up here in 1938, painted, sat on the village council for more than thirty years, and died in the house, Les Fioretti, at ninety-seven. The village school is named after her. Not after her son — not after the man whose name is on a thousand schools and airports and prizes — but after the mother. A village handed the most famous aviator-author in France and chose instead to honour the woman who raised him.
We walked the other way and found, a little further on — technically just over the line into Spéracèdes, though nobody here appears to care — a house called La Messuguière. For half a century it took in most of the literary weather of the age. André Gide was practically a fixture, and the others came to see him: Malraux and his wife Clara, Roger Martin du Gard, Camus, Sartre.
The village repeats a story I have not managed to disprove: that on a single afternoon you could have found three Nobel laureates in literature — Gide, Camus and Martin du Gard — at one café table on the square.
Not a plaque between them.
Then a neighbour, leaning on her gate, mentioned that our house had been Jules Moch’s. I had to look him up, and the looking-up did not stop quickly. A naval engineer who became, more or less without interruption between 1938 and 1958, a minister of France: Public Works, the Interior, National Defence. He refused, in 1940, to vote Pétain full powers and was arrested for it. After the war he spent a decade as France’s man for disarmament at the United Nations. As Interior minister, he broke the great strikes of 1947 and 1948, by methods France still argues about. He learned to fly so he could make his ministerial travels easier and, in his seventies, was still campaigning for a bridge across the Channel. He lost that one to the tunnel.
He died here, in 1985 — in this exact house, the neighbour was certain, and I have chosen to believe a woman leaning on a gate over the land registry. A man who broke a national strike, disarmed the world by committee and tried to draw a bridge across the sea came here at the end to be quiet.
The village let him.
“Well,” we said to each other, on the terrace, over a lunch we no longer remember and a quantity of information we do. “And that is the first day, before lunch…”
The tour of the actual village had to be postponed. When we finally went down the following evening, we got as far as the square and no further.
The Place des Puits — officially the Place Charles Chauve since 1931, after the engineer who brought the water, but nobody calls it that — is so thoroughly, unrepentantly Provençal that the legs simply stop. A great chestnut. Umbrella pines. A small fountain with fish and a scatter of coins. Café tables under strung lights.
We sat. A glass of rosé, then a second, then the inevitable shall-we-just-eat-here, and that was the evening. Goodnight again.
A word about eating. Cabris has, for fifteen hundred people, seven restaurants. All but one stay open through the winter. To keep seven kitchens lit in a small village in January, people have to come up the hill on purpose. To eat.
I leave you to draw the conclusion I drew.
The walk through the village proper happened eventually, and Cabris turned out to be the sort of place that resists being walked through. There is nothing to rush between. No rank of sights to be photographed in sequence.
The village is the monument, entire.
Like any village, it has its chapels and one proper church. The church carries a story that is, I think, the truest thing about the place.
Its tower used to be much taller. Lightning kept finding it. In 1848 a strike set fire to the wooden altar and did real damage, and the village’s answer was not to build higher but to take the tower down by half.
Up here, the Almighty has an uncanny knack for finding simple and highly effective ways of reminding His flock of the virtue of modesty.
They appear to have taken the note generally. When the lane needed widening — the rue Frédéric Mistral, which runs up to the view — they reached the corner of the chapel of Saint-Sébastien and reasoned, sensibly, that God is everywhere in any case and would not miss a chapel corner. So they cut it. The keystone over the door is dated 1761, which is the year they did it.
No outrage. No sacrilege. Nobody offended. The chapel is a little smaller, the road a little wider, and everybody carries on.
Further up is the épicerie. It sells what you need so as not to find yourself at breakfast without bread, or, worse, without wine. There is nothing remarkable in it, which is precisely the point.
I go in and buy something even when I need nothing, because a shop like that does not have an easy time staying alive in a village, and I would like it to be there. This is, I have decided, most of what it means to belong somewhere: to spend small money on purpose, to keep a thing in existence.
Higher still is the Place de l’Horloge, the clock. When things got harder — downshifting is not, whatever they tell you, an unmixed pleasure — we moved to a house in the centre, directly under it. The tower is the old town hall, built in 1835. The doctor who eventually gave the whole district its water was born in that house.
The first night under the clock was the dictionary definition of a nightmare. You do not merely hear it strike. You hear the mechanism gather itself to strike, because you are that close.
“Pay it no attention,” said Jean, our new neighbour. “The clock is the heart of the village. It keeps the time of the place, and you only notice it if it stops.”
We agreed, out loud, and privately wondered how on earth we might disable the clock and wriggle out of the punishment. By the second night, neither of us heard it at all.
More than that: when lightning later stopped the clock, the whole village, ourselves included, went about mourning and counting the days until it was mended. Although this may also have been because the same strike took out everything plugged into a socket for streets around, and there was suddenly very little else to do indoors.
All the lanes, in the end, deliver you to the same place: the Place du Panorama, also the Place Mirabeau, on the western edge where the feudal castle stood from the tenth century until the Revolution pulled it down.
The view from here is the one Olivier was selling in the fog. On a winter morning, it is everything he claimed. Corsica and all.
I told you I would come back to Corsica. There it is.
The square is named, as it happens, not for the great Mirabeau, the orator of the Revolution, but for his sister, Louise, who married into the place and became, just before everything came down, the last Marquise de Cabris. Naming the square for the sibling nobody expects is, I gather, the local idea of fun.
There is a great deal more to be said about that castle, and about what one of the marquises before her did to her own family on this exact terrace, where everyone now stands to admire the light. But that is its own story.
Here is the history in brief, because it explains the modesty. The Romans worked the valley below. The village keeps a single Roman stone, a funerary cippe cut with the letters D.M. — to the spirits of the dead — tucked inside the small octagonal chapel of Saint-Jean.
Then came the monks. The brothers of Lérins worked their way up the Siagne in late antiquity and farmed these slopes to feed their island monasteries. Then, in the middle of the fourteenth century, the plague came through and did not leave a soul. For a hundred and fifty years there was no Cabris at all — an empty hill with a ruined name.
It begins again on a precise date: 1 March 1496, when the lord, Balthazar de Grasse, signed an act of habitation and brought fifty-two families up to repopulate the place, from Olmée in Italy and from Menton and Sainte-Agnès on the border. The people who live here are called Cabriens, and a fair number descend from those fifty-two.
A village that died completely and had to be invited back into existence, family by family, is perhaps not going to be a village that boasts. It knows exactly how much luck is involved in there being anyone here at all.
That, I think, is the secret of Cabris. You can have housed Nobel laureates and a minister of France. You can have the best view on the coast. You can have Corsica appearing on the horizon on winter mornings. And still see no particular reason to mention it.
You keep the shop open. You let the man who drew a bridge across the sea sit quietly on his terrace. You cut the corner off the chapel when the road needs widening. You learn to sleep through the clock. And when a stranger arrives in the fog, you let the fog do the talking.
Even the fog here is an unusually clean white, like a blank page waiting for tomorrow. Which is, I accept, an absurd amount of poetry to wring out of poor visibility.