A century and a half later, at a time when the Riviera had ceased to be an “outdoor hospital” and had become a playground for the rich, another high-stakes robbery took place in a hotel restaurant in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Its owner was known to accept paintings in exchange for payment — “My kind of hotel,” Picasso joked. In 1960, thieves broke in and stole 21 canvases, including a Braque, a Léger, a Mirò and a Modigliani. (The Picasso doesn’t fit in the car.)
Each episode of the Miles relay could inspire its own book — or play, symphony, film or painting. Many already have. An international Who’s Who of tastes, talents, whims and ambitions ushered in the Riviera’s golden age. They are not only on vacation; they mined this “thin line of Shangri-La” to create the culture that would define the following centuries.
In doing so, they defined new heights of wealth. The influential Lord Brougham “discovered” Cannes in 1834, when a cholera epidemic interrupted his progress in Italy. Because of the Arcadian environment, he built a villa. Other foreign aristocrats followed suit, and 20 years later, Prosper Mérimée complained that “the English were established here as in a conquered land. They built 50 villas or chateaus each more unique than the last.
As the belle epoque drew to a close, rich villas and grand hotels also proliferated east of Cannes, from Nice and Beaulieu to La Turbie and Cap Martin. When Queen Victoria arrived in Menton disguised as the “Countess of Balmoral” (her French bodyguard admitted that she “didn’t deceive a soul”), the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia was already established there and the two royal influencers has magnified the allure of the Côte d’Azur. Queen Victoria’s libertine son “Bertie,” the future King Edward VII, preceded them, indulging in tennis, yachting, golf and baccarat in Cannes, and courting courtesans in Monte Carlo.
After World War I, the American invaders built their own palaces. The millionaire artist Henry Clews created the fairytale “Château de la Napoule,” west of Cannes; railway magnate Frank Jay Gould built half a dozen villas and hotels, including, in Nice, the Art Deco landmark the Palais de la Méditerranée. In Antibes, the lower-key Murphys attracted artists and writers to their Villa Americana. (In 1925, when Edith Wharton invited their guest F. Scott Fitzgerald for tea at her villa in Hyères, he arrived drunk and shouted, “You know nothing about life.”)
