Nice

Nice was a seaside refuge during Harry Truman’s leave in France in late 1918, set between the Mediterranean and the foothills of the Alps. He called it “ideal”: after the intensity of Paris, its sea views, sunshine, and excursions gave his account a new ease. Yet the place’s deepest significance was personal. In a letter to Bess Wallace, he suggested that she was what the beautiful setting still needed to become heaven.

Setting and First Impressions

Truman stayed in a hotel overlooking the sea, which he called “a dandy place.” The view from his window—with the Mediterranean, hills, a promontory topped by a lighthouse, and small sailing ships—prompted him to think of Von Weber’s “Polacca Brillante,” which he had been told was composed there. His letter lingered on the sea’s color: “There is no blue like the Mediterranean blue,” he wrote to Bess Wallace. The description makes Nice more than a stop on leave: it is a landscape he tries to preserve in words for someone absent.

The city also brought him unfamiliar pleasures. Truman saw his first palm trees, walked in the sunshine, and ate well. After describing Paris as “as wild as any place I saw,” his praise of Nice as “ideal” marks a clear contrast in mood, if not a rejection of Paris: the Riviera offered a quieter, more restorative stretch of the journey.

Excursions from the City

In the first days of December, Truman drove to Monte Carlo, where he was startled to see a real-life princess drinking beer. He and Major Gates then hired a car and drove to the Italian border, returning to Nice along the Grande Corniche. Truman remembered the route as “the most beautiful drive I ever had.” The excursions widened the setting beyond the hotel view: Nice served as the base for journeys along the coast and toward the border, with the return drive becoming one of the most memorable experiences of his leave.

Love and Departure

The beauty of Nice did not displace Truman’s longing for Bess Wallace. His letter turns from the sea and its colors to the thought that she was all that was needed to make the place heaven. That emotional absence remained with him when he returned to Paris as his leave neared its end. At the opera, the sensuous music of Massenet’s Thaïs stirred him deeply after his days on the Riviera. Nice thus occupies a brief but distinct place in the account: a landscape of pleasure whose fullest meaning, for Truman, depended on the person he loved.