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How Writers From Fitzgerald to Sagan Saw the Côte d’Azur

These books not only captured but also helped shape the mythos of the French Riviera.

The French Riviera is largely an artistic invention, a place of stolen kisses, moonlit dances, gamblers in tuxes and jewel thieves in shadows. Millions of tourists gather every year trying to capture a sense of glamour that was created, in large part, by writers. The name Côte d'Azur (the Azure Coast) was coined by a novelist, Stephen Liégeard, in 1887. Since then, generations of scribes have used the coast as both subject and sanctuary: somewhere to set novels, to write them and, in many cases, to disappear from public view in the company of lovers and far from the taxman.

Dante wrote about the landscape 700 years ago in his Divine Comedy, but the French Riviera as we know it today is a 19th- and 20th-century creation. Although many of the Riviera's defining writers were French, Françoise Sagan above all, it was foreign authors who transformed the coast into an international fantasy. Fitzgerald gave it its Jazz Age glamour, Hemingway its romance and Agatha Christie its thieves and murderers aboard luxury trains.

Yet when we think about the French Riviera, we often think about its artists: Picasso, Matisse, Renoir. We remember cinema: Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, Brigitte Bardot in just about everything. But we also think of the feelings, the moods and atmosphere, which have all been conceived and perpetuated in literature. A teenage girl unhappy in love lying on a beach, long shadows cast by setting suns, espionage and seduction on sleeper carriages and in casinos, both diamonds and kisses stolen by smirking cads in tuxedos. Tourists may flock to the south of France, but so do writers and, as a result, millions of readers, in their imaginations. Here are just a few of the key books that helped define that magical coast in language.

The novels that defined the French Riviera

'Bonjour Tristesse' by Françoise Sagan

'Tender Is the Night' by F. Scott Fitzgerald

'Akin' by Emma Donoghue

'The Mystery of the Blue Train' by Agatha Christie

'The Garden of Eden' by Ernest Hemingway

'Little Women' by Louisa May Alcott

'Bonjour Tristesse' by Françoise Sagan

Sagan was only........

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