There is a passage in A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859, where Charles Darnay is described as looking into the mirror at his reflection while the character is in inner turmoil. It is the kind of set up for scenes we have seen many times in films, but this was the first time this kind of cinematic potential for self-reflection was explored in literature. This is 40 years before Freud would publish The Interpretation of Dreams, and introduce the idea of the self to the general public. It was no wonder, when by the end of the 19th century, the age of industrialization had made commonplace the presence of clocks, train schedules, shift work that would take over modern life, and man was aware of time as an authority that rules over their lives. To think of the Hôtel Du Cap Eden-Roc, it was almost as if the original founder realized this sacrifice to the modern age and rejected it, engineering a kind of surrealist utopia that resisted the passing of time. Hippolyte de Villemessant, who had also founded the French right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, built the hotel’s original site in 1870, intending the place to be an escape from writer’s block. Today in the 21st century, it has remained a retreat for film stars and the unofficial home of the Cannes film festival, with the legend on the hotel garden plaque that reads: Ce qui sera, c'est ce qui fut. "What will be, is what was."
In ‘Hôtel Du Cap Eden-Roc, Cap D'Antibes (Assouline)’, author Francois Simon establishes the bygone era of ‘what was’ by effectively taking us back to a time when the ‘vacation’ was a new concept, and the very nature of traveling was that journeys took so long, you really ought to stay a while. Yet through more than a century of history, you would be surprised how much of the hotel site has remained loyal to its origins. The original building, which started with the rose-coloured Napoleon III château in the early 1900s, has now been painted a cool white, surrounded by a 22 acre park of pine trees and tropical gardens. It now houses 117 suites, 33 cabanas and 2 private villas, but the only landmark changes made in the 20th century seem to have been the addition of two fountains, and the installation of the Eden Roc Pavillion built in 1914. This is no accident, as we find that legacy of the hotel is well-kept through meticulous effort by its keepers (and it will have many keepers in its lifetime). In the 45 million euro restoration which began in 2007 and completed in 2011, the objective of co-owner Maja von Malaisé Oetker was that only regulars of the Hotel Du Cap should notice the changes being made. Such is the spirit of the hotel, there is more evidence of its mark on each set of successive inheritors to the hotel and not the other way around.
In 1899, Madame and Antoine Sella first bought the property with aims to revive its status. The first guests of Antoine Sella’s Hôtel Du Cap had been two English women who only paid 12 francs per day. The rest of their party had not arrived and Sella had prepared for 40 guests, requesting 5 horses and a bus to accommodate them. From a business perspective, it seemed to be destined for failure. But fail it do not, as the fashionable classes of aristocrats came to appreciate its discreet location and old world charm, famously eschewing all the trappings of modern furnishing and plumbing. It was resistant to fashion: it became a summer destination only after a young American couple rented the hotel for the season, when before that it had been one of the few properties in the region open all winter and closed during the warmer months. It was in 1903, when Antoine Sella was showing Lord Onslow around the property, that Onslow remarked the place could benefit from central heating, private baths and lifts. Sella politely conceded that improvements could be made, and stated financial instability as the true culprit behind some of the hotel’s more rustic charms. Onslow brought out his cheque book and at that moment, wrote down a generous sum and he left in a town car stating he would return to sort out the mortgage at a later date. It would not be the first time wealthy patrons would be seduced into assisting the legacy of the great hotel. When Antoine’s son André Sella finally sold the place in 1970, it was then purchased by Rudolf August and Maja Oetker. They had made the sale without a single visit, merely spotting the mansion from afar on their own travels and taking a shine to it. They had acquired the property for their Oetker collection, which at that time already included Brenner’s Park in Baden-Baden, the Bristol in Paris, the Chateau Saint-Martin in Venice and the Park Hotel in Vietnam. But it was clear that the Oetkers had a certain reverence for its status going in. the Hôtel Du Cap-Eden-Roc (HDCER) would never become relegated to a trophy boutique luxury hotel.
This book serves as an archive of guests past and present, and captures beautifully, the quality of a place equally constructed from memories and from dreams. There is a quote from the hotel’s General Manager, the late André Sella, which is so simple and astute as an observation of human behavior. Recalling the caliber of their guests, Stávros Spýros Niárchos; Monsieur Hennessey (of the cognacs); Eddie Constantine; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; the Maharaja of Patiala, Sella remarked: "When on vacation, the rich like to pay Maharajah prices to live like boy scouts." This compulsion towards child-like abandon comes through in the tales of the Hollywood A-list who cross the Promenade de la Croisette during the Cannes Festival, seemingly on their worst behavior once they have beat a hasty retreat from papparazzi, publicity and the shackles of contemporary celebrity culture into the four walls of the HDCER. But there are more tempered examples of a desire to escape: Monica Belluci receiving special permission to sleep in the cabanas facing the sea; Tom Hanks’ heart-breakingly succinct praise in their famed guestbook- ‘Peace and Coffee’! No matter the cultural weight of the past guests who sojourned in their suites, from George Bernard Shaw, Marc Chagall to Pablo Picasso, they are all leveled by in their existential quest to detach from their public persona, so much so that they spirit themselves away to the furthest resort of the tip of the Ivory Coast.
In this sense, you get the feeling the spirit of the hotel is built on eternal nostalgia for another time or place. It is haunted by the romance of the original founder, if we accept D.H. Lawrence’s definition of romantic as ‘being homesick for somewhere else’. If cities such as London, Paris, New York are the most filmed, then we recognize their aesthetic as modern: tapping feet, roving eyes, clocks. Places like French Riviera will always be the most written about, like Rome, they are almost mythical, never pinned down to a fixed image and seem more true to our imagination. We may never see the Cap D’Antibes for ourselves, but we already understand that it represents a dream of a paradise, even if it is not our own.
By Hadeel Eltayeb
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