There is a statue on the Allées de la Liberté that I have watched everybody fail to notice. Most never get the chance, because they reach the old town the way civilised people do: by taxi, set down at the foot of Le Suquet a few metres from the booked table, the whole approach reduced to a fare and a slammed door. Which is a triumph of logistics over sense. The booking, the fare, the crawl through the Croisette traffic, all of it arranged to avoid the single most agreeable walk on the coast. I would admire the dedication if it were not such a thorough way to miss the point.
Because the point is the prelude — the slow, anticipatory approach to your own dinner — and in their hurry to be at the table they throw the best of it away. Come from the Palais end, from the tables outside the Café Roma, past the Splendid, and take the Allées slowly. The terraces run together into one long, warm hum — a hive — with the chime of glasses somewhere inside it, a peal of laughter, and under all of it the dry knock of boules from the old men still at their pétanque in the dusk. The smells change every few steps: the sea and the old port on one side, one kitchen after another on the other. Beautifully dressed people, unhurried, a little drunk, content with their lives — the whole thing melting into the single jolly, sweet-smelling sound you get only in a southern resort town. It is five hundred metres, past the mairie and up into the old town. Or a table along the way, if five hundred metres defeats you.
And somewhere in the middle of it, in white marble, stands a man you can stop and read properly. He wears a long coat and presides over all of it without being looked at once. He has the heavy, disappointed face of someone who expected to be remembered for something else. Henry Brougham, Baron Brougham and Vaux: depending on how you feel about Cannes, either its founding father or the man to blame.
Any statue does the opposite of the thing it is for. It is raised to make us remember a man, and ends by making him impossible to believe in. The marble is so plainly not a person that the person quietly vanishes behind it. He becomes a fact, a name on a plinth, the reason the square is called what it is called. What you lose is the only true thing about him: that he was once as alive as you are on the walk past him. A body that tired and ached. A daughter he loved and feared for. Mornings he woke into dread and mornings he didn’t. To get him back, you have to take him down off the plinth and put him where he began. Not on the Allées. On a road.
He never meant to come to Cannes. That is the first thing to say, and it changes everything after it. In December 1834 he was going to Genoa, taking a consumptive daughter towards the warmer air of Italy, the way the English of that century took their dying south — hopefully, expensively, and usually too late. But understand what going to Genoa meant in 1834, because the words slide past us now and leave no mark. It meant the Channel under sail, and then the entire length of France: from the Pas-de-Calais through Paris and on towards the Alps, on roads that were not paved but laid with broken stone, rutted and frozen hard in December. The journey was measured not in hours but in days and changes of horses: by one reckoning, fifteen days and more than a hundred fresh teams from Paris alone. The carriage that would one day carry his name — the light, sprung, comfortable one — did not yet exist. He would design it four years later, in part because he knew precisely what the old heavy coaches did to a body over a fortnight. So he sat in one of those, in the cold, week after week, while beside him Éléonore-Louise — who had what they then called phthisis and we call tuberculosis — coughed her way south. That is the man the marble forgets. Hold him there, on that road, before the luck arrives.
Because the luck, when it came, was bad luck wearing the face of good. The plan was only to cross a river: the Var. It is the one you still cross, at least twice, getting from the airport down to Cannes and back again. In 1834 it was also the border between France and the Kingdom of Sardinia, the line past which lay Nice and the road into Italy. He reached it and could not cross. A cholera epidemic had closed the frontier behind a cordon sanitaire, and a former Lord Chancellor of Great Britain counted for very little against a quarantine. Turned back, with a sick child and a halted journey, he retreated to the nearest place with a bed: a fishing village he had never heard of and had certainly never intended to see.
The bed was at the auberge of a Madame Pinchinat, and it is here that the accident begins, quietly, to become a life. While he waited for a closed border to open, he walked. He found the bay, the pines, the red rock of the Esterel falling into a sea he had no vocabulary for, and somewhere on those first mornings the strange thing happened that happens to almost no one. He decided he wanted to stay. He would put it plainly later: here is rest, true happiness, life. In the small inn his daughter coughed and dozed while the innkeeper’s wife spooned warm broth, and the fatigue of the road went out of her face. And Brougham — orator, reformer, the loudest man in the House of Lords — decided not to leave. He would, in the end, never really leave. He died in Cannes thirty-four years later and is buried up the hill at the Grand Jas, which is getting ahead of the story but is, I think, the whole point of it.
Because the accident was not finished with him. Having decided to stay, he first tried to buy not in Cannes at all but in Antibes — the Château Salé, a house that had once sheltered Napoleon, which appealed to exactly the part of a man that a statue is later made of. The Antibois refused. The idea of selling Bonaparte’s old roof to an Englishman struck them as a provocation. They said no. That no is the reason Cannes is Cannes.
Rebuffed, Brougham bought instead a long sweep of hillside above the shore, in the quarter called the Croix des Gardes — orange and olive and pine running down to the water — and built on it a great Italianate villa he named Éléonore-Louise, for the daughter he had come south to save. So the town that became the most photographed mile of coastline in Europe got its founder by default, on the rebound from a neighbour’s wounded pride. An accident on top of an accident. Had the men of Antibes been a little less proud, the whole of what was coming might have settled twelve kilometres up the coast instead. I would be writing about somewhere else.
What he did next was the only deliberate part of the whole affair, and even it was mostly enthusiasm. He gave lavish receptions; he received the English aristocracy on that terrace with its long views of sea and mountain; and for thirty years, whenever he went up to London to take his seat in the Lords, he never stopped telling his countrymen about the village he had stumbled into. He became, as the local historians put it, its best ambassador. The English came and built their own villas; the Russians heard and followed; Brougham leaned on his friend Louis-Philippe, King of the French, to pay for a proper harbour, and got it. Out of a closed border and a bowl of fish soup came, in time, the Croisette, the white Belle Époque palaces, the blue trains disgorging the crowned and the rich, and eventually a film festival and the whole glittering apparatus that streams past his unregarded statue on its way to dinner. An entire industry of glamour, founded on a microbe.
And here is the part the statue does not tell you. He had come to save Éléonore-Louise. She died anyway, in 1839, while the villa that bears her name was still new. The cure failed; the city was born. In that same year he sat above the bay at La Foux and made a drawing of Cannes — a careful amateur’s view of the harbour and the old town on its hill — and beneath it wrote the date, 14 September 1839. A man drawing the place that had taken his daughter and, in the same stroke, handed him an unasked-for second life. In a letter to a friend he confessed that in this enchanted air it was a delight, for one who loved to dream, to forget for a few moments the heaviness and miseries of life. He had a great deal to forget.
What strikes me, walking past him, is the gap between what a man intends and what survives him. Brougham wanted to be remembered for the large things, and the large things were real. He fought to abolish slavery, defended a wronged queen against George IV at the cost of a royal reward he refused, and gave twenty years of his life to a penal code intended to make English law more nearly just. The code collapsed in 1853, beaten by the magistrates and a rival chancellor. Twenty years, for nothing.
And yet his name is attached to none of it. It is on a four-wheeled carriage that London coachmakers built for him in 1838, which became for a while the smart way to cross a city. And it is on this town. A microbe and a river did more for his immortality than two decades of law reform. He would, I suspect, have found that unbearable and funny in roughly equal measure.
The old Provençal telling of all this is gentler, and in its way more honest about its own machinery. It credits the fée Estérel, the fairy who lives in the caves of the red massif and gave the mountain her name, supposing that at the birth of Cannes she waved her wand and promised the place all the happiness in the world. We are too modern for fairies. We have, instead, a cholera bacillus and a shut customs post on the Var. It is the same story told twice, perhaps the only story there really is about places, and about people: that a whole fate can turn on the one thing nobody planned.
The river he could not cross made a city. The daughter he could not save kept him in it. He lies up at the Grand Jas now, under a plain stone cross. There is a line he might have chosen for himself: on est du pays où on laisse ses os. You belong to the country where you leave your bones. He left his here by accident, and so he is ours.
I think about that more than is probably healthy, on the walk past the square: how much of this coast, of this publication, of the particular Tuesday I happen to be having — how much of any of it is simply the river we happened not to cross.