The Terrain of The Hidden Lovers

It was Maupassant's habit in the spring and summer months to make frequent short voyages along the French mediterranean coast on his yacht Bel Ami; often the Bel Ami would anchor offshore and Maupassant would be rowed ashore in the yacht's dinghy by his First Mate, Raymond. He would enjoy exploring the pretty coastal villages or walking in the wooded hills, rendezvousing with the dinghy in the evening to spend the night back on board the Bel Ami.

The Bel Ami

At this time, the French Riviera as such had not been invented, the Cote d'Azur was little more than a gleam in the eyes of the property developers who had begun to descend upon this exquisite landscape of secluded bays, enchanting villages such as St Raphael and small fishing communities like St Tropez. It was on one such excursion in the early 1880s, while walking up into the heavily wooden hills of the Massif des Maures, a little way in from the coast between Hyeres and St Tropez, that Maupassant sought out the secluded farmstead of an elderly couple he had heard about from an acquaintance, a certain "Count X"; on a subsequent voyage he returned to the farm and learnt the conclusion to the story which is recounted in The Hidden Lovers. 

The port of Saint-Tropez (Le Port de Saint-Tropez) by Maximilien Luce, 1893.

In his sailing journal Sur l'eau Maupassant attests to his particular love for this region - "Of all the coast of the South of France, it is the place I love best. I love it as though I had been born there, as though I had grown up there, because it is wild and colourful, and not yet poisoned by the Parisians, the English, the Americans, the men of the world and the rastaquoueres" - and he describes sailing south from St Raphael to St Tropez.

"I had very quickly crossed the bay, at the end of which the Argens pours out, and once I was in the lee of the coast the breeze dropped almost completely; It is there that this wild, sombre and magnificent region begins, still called the land of the Moors. It is a long range of mountains and only the coastline has any development for more than a hundred kilometres. St Tropez, at the entrance to the lovely bay once called Grimaud Bay, is the capital of this little Saracen kingdom, in which almost all the villages, built at the top of peaks to keep them safe from attacks, are still full of Moorish houses, with their archways, their narrow windows and their interior court-yards where tall palm trees grow, and now they are over the rooftops . . . 

"I could see, far in front of me, the towers and the buoys that mark the breakers on the two shores at the mouth of St Tropez Bay . . . Now we are arriving at the entrance to the bay, which goes on into the distance between the two banks of mountains and forests as far as the village of Grimaud, built on the top of a hill right at the end. The ancient chateau of the Grimaldis, a tall ruin which dominates the village, was appearing in the distance through the mist like something out of a fairy story . . .

Paul Signac Maisons du Port Saint Tropez (1892)

"Opposite, St Tropez appeared, protected by an old fort . . . It is one of those charming daughters of the sea, one of those good, modest little towns, pushed into the water like a sea-shell, fed on fish and sea air and producing sailors . . . You can smell fishing and burning tar, salting brine and the hulls of boats. You can see sardine scales shining like pearls on the pave of the streets, and all along the walls of the port the limping, crippled population of old sailors warming themselves in the sun on stone benches. From time to time they tell of past voyages . . . Their hands and their faces are wrinkled, darkened, dried, tanned by the wind, the work, the spray . . . There you are in a marine world, in a good, salty and gallant little town, which once fought against Saracens, against the Duke of Anjou, against the barbarian pirates, against the Constable of Bourbon, and Charles V, and the Duke of Savoy.. ."

But, along the coast itself, this is a world which, in Maupassant's day, is changing fast.

"A new road follows the sea, going from St Raphael to St Tropez. All along this magnificent avenue, opened up through the forest on to an incomparable coastline, they are trying to create resorts for winter visitors. The first one planned is St Aygulf. This one has something unusual about it. In the middle of pine woods which come down to the sea, wide paths open up in every direction. There is not a single house, nothing but the plan of the streets running through the trees. There are squares, crossroads, boulevards. Their names are even inscribed on metal plaques: Boulevard Ruysdael, Boulevard Rubens, Boulevard Van Dyck, Boulevard Claude Lorrain. One asks why all these artists? Ah! Why? It is because the development company said, like God himself before he lit up the sun, 'Let there be an artistic resort!'

"The development company! The rest of the world does not realize all that these words mean in terms of hopes, dangers, of money won and lost on the Mediterranean! The development company! That enigmatic, inevitable, significant, deceptive term!

"However, the company appears to be achieving its hopes in this spot for it already has buyers, and good ones, among artistic people. Here and there you read, 'Plot bought by Monsieur Carolus-Duran; Monsieur Clairin's plot; Mademoiselle Croizette's plot, etc' . . . The boulevards are marked, the water is brought, they make a start on the gas . . ."

This is the world of Scott and Zelda, of Dick and Nicole Diver, in the making; and it presages our world - of the heavily urbanised Cannes and Nice, of oligarchs' monstrous "super yachts" anchored offshore and the dystopian visions of J.G. Ballard's Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

But many years before all of this the couple at the centre of The Hidden Lovers came to this region in search of seclusion - indeed the husband's life, for he is a deserter from the army, depended upon it. They have spent their lives in hiding, though it would appear that this state has been more of an aid to their devotion to one another than a restriction. The coast itself would never have suited their purposes; but inland, only a short distance from the sea, the Massif des Maures must have seemed ideal. This is where, decades later, Maupassant came upon them: "If you go on foot right into the unknown valleys of this strange mountain mass, you discover an incredibly wild country, with no roads, no paths, even with no tracks, no hamlets, no houses. From time to time, after seven or eight hours of walking, you catch sight of a hut, often abandoned, and sometimes lived in by a poor family of charcoal burners. The Maures mountains apparently have a quite exceptional geological system, an incomparable flora, the most varied in Europe it is said, and immense forests of pine, cork oaks and chestnut trees".

And this world, even now, seems to have changed remarkably little since the lovers' time. 

In his memoir Vanished Years, our contemporary the writer and actor Rupert Everett recounts a memorable drive south from the French Riviera to Turin: "We took the road from St Maxime towards the autoroute at Le Luc. This is one of the great roads, gliding like a snake through a magical range of hills called Les Maures. They are low and round, a child's drawing, covered with forest, umbrella pines and scrub oaks, full of wild boar and the ruins of long-abandoned villages. I wanted to show [my companions] one I had recently discovered, called Val d'Enfer. The Valley of Hell. It was for sale. 

"We clanked three miles down an abandoned track until it became overgrown and then we walked. The forest cooked in the heat, smelling of cork and earth. Cicadas croaked an endless deafening vigil. The path curved around the ridge of a barely perceptible valley and ducked into it. Hidden under a roof of pines was a narrow gulley, and five or six dilapidated houses nestled either side of a path that wound through it. It was an astonishing sight, hidden under the trees, like jumping inside an aquarium where a ruined castle bubbled at the bottom. The dappled light swayed with the branches above. It was cool and dark and away from everything. 

"Not so long ago these forests were scattered with little hamlets. Cut off from the outside world, inhabited by wild, inbred humans, half animal, with unfathomable guttural accents. They surfaced from time to time in the market places of La Garde-Freinet or Draguignan, but they lived and died in the wild, collecting mysteries and legends around them."

Charles Camoin An Old Farm in St Tropez, 1937

This is where we, and our Traveller, find our two principle lovers leading their hidden life together on their "prosperous holding, with vines, fields and a farmhouse, humble but habitable". 

Simon Pettifar