French Sketches: Cap Ferrat and Somerset Maugham

By Paul A. Myers

In 1928, world famous British author W. Somerset Maugham moved into a sumptuous villa on twelve gardened acres on Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera. Maugham’s marriage to his wife Syrie was behind him; his secretary and companion Gregory Haxton was with him. Syrie, disappointed at coming in number two, had threatened to name Gregory in the divorce action. All was settled peaceably by the solicitors in London. Maugham lived at his beloved Villa Mauresque until his death in 1965 except for the war years. This long essay highlights a fascinating life lived on the Riviera.

During his years on the Riviera, Maugham was famous for hosting glittering dinner parties of the rich and famous at his luxurious villa. Originally, Maugham rose to fame as a playwright in London’s Westend theater district in the years before World War I. During the First World War he served in the British Secret Service, experience which led to write a famous set of spy stories in the 1920s. Also during the war he met Haxton while serving with an ambulance unit in France in 1914 while in 1916 he married Syria Wellcome, the divorced wife of an American pharmaceutical magnate. He tried to juggle the two romances for ten years! During this time Maugham turned out novels and short stories in prodigious numbers, the basis of both his fame and wealth.

Early on, Maugham saw the war clouds gather over Europe in the 1930s. He wrote a play criticizing the stupidity of the world’s failure to turn back what he foresaw as a dreadful war that would take the lives of tens of millions of people. He went to London and spoke with his older brother, a leading member of the Neville Chamberlain’s British cabinet. Britain was caught in the grip of the illusion of appeasement; his brother was stonily cold to Maugham’s appeal.

The war came, France collapsed, and Maugham escaped to England in a harrowing journey on an old collier with five hundred other British expatriates living on the Riviera.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul A. Myers
• Release date: Aug 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465915092

Paul A. Myers

Paul A. Myers is the author of the contemporary satirical novel "Greek Bonds and French Ladies," and the history-based novels "A Farewell in Paris," "Paris 1935: Destiny's Crossroads," "Paris 1934: Victory in Retreat" and "Vienna 1934: Betrayal at the Ballplatz." He also publishes short travel culture essays under the series name "French Sketches." Previously, he wrote the maritime history "North to California: The Spanish Voyages of Discovery 1533-1603." He is a self-employed CPA and lives in Claremont CA with his wife Minche, where both are active in fine arts groups. Myers served as co-president of the Scripps College Fine Arts Foundation 2008-2012. Paul and his wife are amateur francophiles and visit France regularly.

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French Sketches

Cap Ferrat and Somerset Maugham

Paul A. Myers

French Sketches—a series of travel essays providing interesting cultural portraits of France

Smashwords Edition

ISBN: 978-1-4659-1509-2

Published by Paul A. Myers Books

Copyright © Paul A. Myers 2011

All rights reserved.

Please respect the copyright. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment. Do not reproduce or otherwise distribute the book.

More ebooks and historical novels by Paul A. Myers at myersbooks.com.

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Author

Paul A. Myers lives in Claremont, California with his wife Minche. He is the author of the history-based novels Paris 1935: Destiny’s Crossroads, Paris 1934: Victory in Retreat, and Vienna 1934: Betrayal at the Ballplatz and the maritime history North to California: The Spanish Voyages of Discovery 1533-1603.

Figure 1 Paul A. Myers in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris.

Chapter 1: Sybarites in Paradise

Between the two world wars, Cap Ferrat was the upscale end of the Riviera, a place of large gardened estates spotted on sloping hillsides where the smell of old money wafted through the cypress and pine trees. The cap sits in the Mediterranean like a small island about five miles east of Nice, its sole link to the mainland a narrow peninsula extending out from Beaulieu-sur-Mer. The French call it a presqu’ile – almost an island, like a magical place in a light opera.¹

English novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) came to the Cap in 1928 and bought the Villa Mauresque for £16,000 at a time when the pound was worth $4.86. That was a lot of money just about anywhere in the world in 1928. In those years the villa was situated on twelve hillside acres shaded by cypress and eucalyptus trees below the sunny Mediterranean sky.² At the time of his death forty years later the villa was worth over £600,000. The pound, and Britain, had depreciated over the decades but the villa was still worth around $1.5 million.

Maugham’s villa had previously belonged to a priest attending the spiritual needs of Belgium’s King Leopold, who had been the real estate developer, so to speak, of well- mansioned Cap Ferrat. The houses of the king’s three mistresses were nearby, the size of each house corresponding to the rank of the mistress.

The king had been the great despoiler of the Congo in the years before the First World War as darkly described in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. What later became the Belgian Congo had started as the king’s privately owned colony where cruel enslavement of