French Riviera

The French Riviera appears as a landscape of remembered happiness and projected renewal. For F. Scott Fitzgerald, it promises an escape from the failures and pressures of Paris: a place where he, Zelda Fitzgerald, and their daughter might recover a shared life, work steadily, and live by a modest routine. When the Hemingways reach Juan-les-Pins, the setting seems to fulfill that promise, but the welcome party makes clear that a beautiful place cannot itself provide the solitude a writer needs.

Landscape and Memory

F. Scott Fitzgerald recalls the Riviera as it was when he and Zelda Fitzgerald first found it, before it had been built up for summer visitors. His remembered scene is defined by stretches of blue sea, sandy beaches, pine woods, and the Esterel mountains reaching out into the water. The landscape matters not merely as scenery: in his telling, it belongs to an earlier period when Zelda was happy and their life together seemed more manageable.

That memory becomes a counterpoint to Paris, where Fitzgerald repeatedly tries and fails to work. He blames the city, despite its reputation as an exceptionally well-organized place for writers, and imagines that another setting might make a good life with Zelda possible again. The Riviera therefore carries the weight of a hoped-for change in circumstances, not simply a change of address.

A Projected Family Refuge

Fitzgerald invites Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson to come to the Riviera the following summer. He proposes finding an inexpensive place where both couples can work hard each day, swim, and lie on the beach. The routine he describes is deliberately restrained: one apéritif before lunch and another before dinner. Zelda, he says, loves swimming and is a beautiful diver; he expects that the Riviera will make her happy and that she will want him to work. He plans for himself, Zelda, and their daughter to go there that summer.

The plan is a vision of family life organized around health and discipline. Its particulars—the affordable lodging, daily work, swimming, and measured drinking—answer the disorder that Fitzgerald associates with Paris and with his own difficulty sustaining work. Yet these are Fitzgerald’s expectations for a future season, not evidence that the place will resolve the problems he hopes to leave behind.

The Invitation Renewed

By the time Hemingway is finishing the rewriting of his novel in the Vorarlberg, Fitzgerald and his wife and child have left Paris for a watering place in the lower Pyrenees. Zelda has been ill with an intestinal complaint then diagnosed as colitis, while Fitzgerald is not drinking and has begun working. He again asks the Hemingways to join them, this time at Juan-les-Pins in June, and renews the earlier promise of inexpensive accommodation, swimming, good health, and a disciplined routine.

The invitation is accompanied by signs that Fitzgerald believes the plan can succeed. Zelda is well again, he says, and his novel is going wonderfully; money is coming in from a successful dramatization of The Great Gatsby, with a film sale also anticipated. He presents the family as free of immediate worries and the Riviera summer as a fresh chance to live and work differently. The confidence of this picture stands against the repeated need to begin again somewhere else.

Arrival and the Limits of the Ideal

Hemingway arrives at Juan-les-Pins from Madrid by train, traveling third class and hungry after running out of money on the way. The villa is pleasant, Fitzgerald has a fine house nearby, and Hadley has the villa running well. At the small welcoming party at the Casino, attended by the MacLeishes, the Murphys, the Fitzgeralds, and the Hemingway household, the gathering is gay and the setting seems ideally suited to writing.

But the evening already departs from the carefully measured routine Fitzgerald had promised. The party begins with champagne, and the single apéritif before lunch is followed by several more. Hemingway sees that the place offers nearly everything a writer needs except being alone. That qualification gives the Riviera’s promise its central tension: it can supply beauty, companionship, and an inviting domestic setting, but those advantages do not guarantee the solitude required for work.