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La belle époque

Simon Heffer

Wednesday, 17th September 2008

Simon Heffer on Biarritz

We were drawn to Biarritz for a series of odd reasons. We like France, but for some reason we had never been to that part. We like the French seaside, but the Riviera with its wall-to-wall oligarchs and high summer heat was too oppressive. And I once wrote a book on King Edward VII, who used to think highly of the place, and at last curiosity overcame me.

We went in by road from Spain. It is just 11 miles from the border, and first we stopped at St-Jean-de-Luz to see where Ravel was born. The birthplace turns out to be in the contiguous suburb of Ciboure and is now a tourist office. St-Jean-de-Luz is rather beautiful, and from the quayside in Ciboure you can see it rippling in the afternoon sunshine over the bridge that joins the two communes. What seems to be the occasional palazzo lends it an almost Venetian aspect.

But on to the main business. Biarritz seemed at once sprawling and compact, running as it does along cliffs but pressed in close to the coast. It is still just small enough to be easily comprehensible, and can be dealt with comfortably on foot. At times as we walked around, and I saw the smart little boutiques, the carefully maintained villas and the art deco casino, I was reminded of my beloved Dinard, 500 miles to the north in Brittany. But then you see the Hotel du Palais and recall that you are somewhere altogether grander and of a different order of pretension. The Palais does what it says: it was the seaside retreat of Napoleon III and his empress — one approaches it from the avenue de l’Imperatrice — and is an awesome 1850s palace. The locals burned it down in a fit of post-imperial pique in 1870, but the municipality of Biarritz bought it, restored it, and turned it into one of the most eye-wateringly expensive hotels in the world. It was to places like this that royalty flocked from the 1880s until the Great War — Queen Victoria, the Tsarina, the Queen of Sweden and, of course, France’s favourite Englishman, Edward VII himself. From the Palais it is a short step down to the Grande Plage and some charming promenading along the extensive coastline: from which one looks back at a predominantly belle époque town, its public and private buildings redolent of an age of wealth and vulgar good taste.

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