Famous Residents in Saint-Tropez — 10 of Our Favourites

But that is probably where the two royals parted company, for King Leopold is considered by history as a cruel and repulsive man with a penchant for young girls, and fingernails so long that he refused to even shake hands. His prudish English cousin would not have been amused, although she did meet with him on occasion during her sojourns in the South.

For many people, the glittering darkness behind the glamour is one of the most intriguing things about the French Riviera- a history of hedonism and ill-gotten gains in grand villas under the Mediterranean sun. If you like your Riviera celebrity history dark and brutal, then King Leopold of Belgium is a splendid place to start.

King Leopold is most famous for his reign of terror in the Free State of Congo, which he started as a private venture under the pretext of improving the lives of the native people. In reality he exploited the country for vast fortunes of ivory and rubber, using local slave labour. Murderous patrols of the mercenary Force Publique were sent to cut the hands and genitals off villagers when they failed to meet their crop targets. Estimates of those Congolese that died under his ‘reign’ number between 3 and 15 million, through torture, overwork, starvation and disease.

Like so many since, Leopold took the spoils and invested in property on the French Riviera. Over several years from 1899, he bought up much of the stunning Cap Ferrat, constructing and redesigning immense villas and palaces. He moored his yacht Clementine off the shores, where oligarch and tycoons now anchor their vast superyachts in the summertime. Initially the local farmers who owned the land were astonished that anyone would pay for this rocky land along the cliffs- useless for crops and mainly left to the roaming shepherds and their flocks. No doubt they felt pleased at the windfall, but the locals were not happy for long- a journalist soon wrote in the Nice paper that ‘at this rate the whole of Cap Ferrat will soon belong to King Leopold and there will be nothing more to do except put up a sign at the entrance saying “Belgian colony – Keep Out”’.

Leopold was married to Queen Marie-Henriette in a reportedly loveless marriage. After fathering four children they lived very separate lives and he entertained himself with many other females. It is alleged that English virgins as young as 10 were his flavour at the time, although at 65 years old he swapped them for a 16 year old prostitute by the name of Blanche Delacroix. Because he was still married, he secreted her away in one of his villas on the Cap Ferrat, safe from prying eyes. It is said that he would walk each night with a lantern from his palace along the path to her villa, his long beard wrapped up in a rubber envelope to stop the night-time dew sinking in and making his young lover’s skin uncomfortable when they embraced.

Much to the consternation of the Belgian people, he gave Blanche Delacroix, a commoner of ill-repute, the title of Baroness de Vaughan. Despite her new royalty, she was not allowed to leave the Villa Radiana, and stayed in her glorious cage with her view upon the sparkling sea. Leopold was controlling like that: despite his own moral weaknesses, he jailed one of his daughters for having an affair, refused a widowed daughter to marry again and broke up the impending marriage of a third.

It seems that he loved his young prostitute-turned-Baroness, for they stayed together until his death 10 years later, marrying in a secret ceremony just 4 days before he died. The two children she had were almost certainly his, and as one of the richest men in Europe he left them a vast fortune upon his death. Unfortunately for her, the marriage ceremony was declared null and void and Leopold’s immense wealth passed to his legitimate children and to the Belgian state.

King Leopold’s legacy in the Congo may not bear thinking about, but his legacy on Cap Ferrat is one of beautiful villas and gardens. The palace Villa Leopolda has since been rebuilt but the stunning Villa Les Cedres with its exotic gardens remains. As for Villa Radiana, from the sea it looks much the same as when Baroness Blanche once stood each night and waited for her Leopold- murderer, thief, lover and king- to come calling.

You can’t help but wonder what she must have thought of it all.

The novel itself may have been set in America, but the post-war themes of immense wealth and corrupted glamour- of tragedy and beauty, boredom and thwarted love- were common to the social scene of the Cote d’Azur of the time, and no doubt Fitzgerald drew some inspiration for his masterpiece from the high society he mingled with on the Riviera. 

Fitzgerald arrived on the Cote d’Azur with his mentally troubled wife Zelda in 1925, at the time when the South of France was just beginning to draw a well-heeled summer crowd. In fact, the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc on Cap d’Antibes, now one of the world’s great celebrity hotels, kept a wing of the hotel open for the Fitzgeralds past April when the rest of the hotel was shuttered up, with the more traditional guests departing for the cooler climes before the hot days of summer arrived. The Murphys, friends of the Fitzgeralds, are in fact credited with the birth of the Cap d’Antibes as a summer social destination, and cleared the beach at La Garoupe of seaweed and rocks in order to make it a little playground for the wealthy. It worked; artists and the well heeled flocked to the South of France to summer on Cap d’Antibes, including Picasso, Hemingway, Rudolph Valentino and Harpo Marx. 

It was a time of wild parties and hedonism, the grim memories of the war years buried in fountains of champagne and hot sleepless nights of dancing and sex and intrigues under the pines. Fitzgerald’s writing perfectly captures the dark seductions and temptations of the flesh that so characterise the French Riviera, as well as the almost mystic light and beauty of the region.

“In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of early fortifications, and the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows.”

F.Scott Fitzgerald and his wife returned to the Riviera for two seasons, living in Valescure, before his discovery of his wife’s affair led them to move away to Rome and finally back to America. Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night was set in the 1920’s on the Riviera- the Jazz Age- and has many overwhelming parallels with the world the Fitzgeralds lived amongst. The novel charts the disintegrating relationship between a husband and wife that most commentators take to be a thinly veiled account of Fitzgerald’s own problems with his schizophrenic wife. In another telling similarity, the fictional couple he creates in the novel also convince a hotel on Cap d’Antibes to stay open past April for a summer of glittering parties and wild abandon. Authors are always told to ‘write what you know’, and in conjuring up the darkness and light of the Riviera F.Scott Fitzgerald certainly did that- and in a way that still rings true today.

He is one of the Riviera’s most famous resident musicians- and wildly successful, with a personal fortune of around 700 million. Born Paul David Hewson in Dublin on 10 May 1960, he met the members of U2 and his wife at school- and both have stood the test of time. The band was formed in 1976 and has not looked back, while his wife Alison Hewson reportedly still considers herself very lucky indeed to be ‘Mrs Bono’.

In Eze-sur-Mer, he and his U2 bandmate The Edge bought a distinctive sea-front coral mansion at the reported price of 3.3 million euro. The four storey villa has a private beach (bien sur!) and was also the scene for the Electrical Storm video.

If you catch the train line from Nice, you will pass the back of the mansion on your way to Monaco- the train line passes right behind the villa as the train rattles along beside the glittering sea. Eze is a popular spot for the famous; Julian Lennon has a villa there, while Walt Disney and Fredrich Nietzsche have also walked the cobbled streets- in fact the steep climb from the beach up to Eze village proper is named Chemin de Nietzsche.

There is often a cluster of paparazzi hanging around the gates to the U2 mansion in summertime, and no wonder, for Brad and Angelina stayed here during her pregnancy in 2008, and other famous visitors include Robert de Niro, George Clooney, Cindy Crawford, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Queen Rania of Jordan.

While well-known for his charity work, Bono is not averse to spending his money- his 140ft superyacht Cyan is rumoured to have cost around 15 million euro- and you can charter this rock star yacht too, if you have a spare 200 0000 per week (and no, that doesn’t cover food. Or fuel. Or tips.)

So when the press attention gets too much, he can just hop on his yacht and head out to the glittering sea- of course there’s a grand piano on board if he gets the urge to play a tune.

Huxley was born into a famous family. His grandfather was ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, a controversial biologist who assisted Darwin in coming up with the theory of evolution, while his mother was from a family of writers and educators well known in the latter years of the 19th century.

A young man of obvious academic potential, the young Huxley was studying at prestigious boys’ school Eton when he contracted an eye disease which rendered him largely blind in one eye. This ailment would dash his later attempts to join the military to fight in the Great War, an intervention for which the world of literature must be profoundly grateful.

After graduating with a first class BA degree from Oxford, Huxley went on to work for a short time as a French teacher at Eton, although by all reports he was terrible at it and struggled with maintaining discipline. During the war he worked for some time as a farm labourer to assist the war effort, where he met his first wife, Maria, a Belgian refugee, whom he would move to the south of France with several years later.

Upon arriving on the Cote d’Azur they stayed at the fashionable Hotel Beau Rivage in Bandol, soon moving to the Villa Huley in the small village Sanary-sur-Mer near Toulon. They spent the next seven years in ‘Villa Huxley’ as it came to be known, living a life of contentment. Huxley wrote of this place, ‘Here, all is exquisitely lovely. Sun, roses, fruit, warmth. We bathe and bask’.

He wrote Brave New World in a short 4 months, and this creative time in the Mediterranean sun would also see the publication of Eyeless in Gaza and many other works which consolidated his reputation as a formidable essayist and a novelist of dazzling intellect.

The couple drove along the Cote d’Azur in a red Bugatti, socialising with their writer friends who also flocked to the Riviera during the 1930’s, including Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connelly, and poor doomed Katherine Mansfield. No less doomed, of course, was Huxley’s great friend and literary giant, DH Lawrence, who would fall victim to consumption and die in a house near Grasse.

And this is where it gets interesting.

The Huxleys were at Lawrence’s bedside when he died, and by his graveside when he was buried. Upon hearing 5 years later that Lawrence’s adulterous wife Freida had exhumed and cremated the remains and was intending to charge tourists money to visit his shrine, the Huxleys vowed to steal Lawrence’s ashes and scatter them to the desert winds. To which Freida threatened that she would put her late husband’s ashes in a cement mixer if they tried. And they say romance is dead.

Remarkably, nobody knows what happened to the ashes, although it seems they were either left in a train station, put in the cement mixer or poured over the side of an ocean liner by Freida’s Italian lover.

Regardless, it seems fitting that two men so famous for their imaginations were involved in such a dramatic plot.

The couple then moved to America, which he reportedly loved for its vitality and extravagant generosity, but deplored for its lack of conversation. While he was working as a scriptwriter in California, he used his generous salary to get refugees away from Hitler’s Germany. His wife Maria died in 1955; Huxley married again a year later to the writer Laura Archera.

Huxley became a strong proponent for the use of LSD, claiming that it allowed an escape from the body. When he was dying of laryngeal cancer, he asked his wife to administer a fatal dose, which she did on November 22, 1963, the same day that JFK was assassinated.

Just as JFK has left a lasting legacy, so too has Huxley, whose warnings of the risk to human freedom posed by technology and government seems more prescient by the day.

Brave New World seems increasingly quoted as the years go by and the modern world grapples with the very challenges to liberty and social order that technology and government pose in our brave new world.

After leaving school in 1880 upon witnessing an exhibition of Monet’s work, the young Signac met the artist Suerat soon after. The older artist shared his fascination with the science of colour and introduced him to the style of Pointillism (also called Divisionism): the technique of painting small daubs of colour very closely to each other to create a shimmering effect, a kind of optical illusion.

Signac would put this style to unforgettable use when he painted two of his great works depicting the Cote d’Azur- Antibes, Thunderstorms and The Harbour at Saint Tropez.

Those of us who have been lucky enough to pass the ramparts of Antibes on a yacht or come into Saint Tropez by sea will appreciate just how well he captures the character and light of these pretty seaside towns, even well over a century on.

After sailing and travelling much of Europe, Signac left his native Paris shortly after Seurat’s death. Saddened by the loss of his great friend, he moved the sleepy fishing village of Saint Tropez with his wife, where he would paint his famous work, ‘Women at the Well’ and many others.

During these years he turned his hand to other things as well- including writing on art and cultivating an involvement in anarchist politics, hoping to create a more democrat and just society. His art changed in nature over the years, becoming much more free-handed and dabbling in watercolours, and he amassed a great collection of artists’ work that he admired.

While he was regarded very highly by art critics from quite early in his career, it took some time for the rest of the world to catch on- his first solo exhibition was not until 1901. After his star finally rose, he became the President of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, a post he held for 26 years.

Signac repaid Seurat’s kindness as a mentor by taking many young artists under his tutelage, welcoming none other than a young Henri Matisse into his home in Saint Tropez 1904. In fact, Signac was the first owner of Matisse’s work, seeing the artist’s great potential.

At the age of 50, Signac moved to Antibes with his mistress after separating from his wife. He died of septicaemia in Paris in 1935, leaving a saddened art world and some extraordinary works behind him- including one lost piece which was discovered in 2010, hanging on a rusty nail in a Dutch hotel.

Verne anchored his yacht Le Saint Michel II off the Cap, where more than 150 years later the superyachts now gather in great force in the months of July and August, their tenders buzzing back and forth between the exceedingly glamorous Hotel Eden Roc. He rented the Villa Les Chenes Vertes, where he worked on the stage adaption of one of his most famous works, Around the World in 80 days, and would on later visits work on 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea and A Voyage to the Moon. One must wonder what images of spaceships and aliens his mind conjured up as he looked across the sparkling sea and ancient ramparts of Antibes. I hope a UFO landed on the castle tower - now the Picasso Museum - at least once in his daydreams.

Pleasingly, while Verne wrote of fantastical moon landings completely out of the reach of mankind at the time of writing, his villa on the Cap would later be briefly occupied by the man who made the spacesuits of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins. Here, fiction and future reality collided- as was the mission of Verne’s writing. He aimed to use the breadth of scientific knowledge and potential in his fiction, researching heavily and hypothesising to the limits of imagination. For this reason- this tremendous gift of taking new scientific discovery and pushing it beyond its known limits into adventure fiction- he is known as one of the fathers of the sci-fi genre.

No doubt the man would be endlessly pleased if he knew that a spacecraft would one day be named after him, and would in 2008 carry some of his notes and copies of From the Earth to the Moon and Journey to the Centre of the Earth into orbit. His writing showed the 19th century world the dream of space travel, and in the end his very words, written in his hand, would travel to space. There’s something just lovely about that.

He also found inspiration in tales of shipwrecks and derring-do upon the oceans, and the story goes that he tried to stow away on a ship to the West Indies when he was only 11 years old. According to the tale, his father caught him just before the ship set sail and he was made to promise that he would limit his future travels ‘to his imagination.’ The story is almost certainly false, but imagine the literary loss the world would have suffered had this young boy not delved into the travels of his imagination, and grown up to be one of the most translated authors on earth.

His fascination with adventure at sea stemmed from a young age. When he was at school, one of his teachers was a widow to a ship captain who had disappeared on a journey 30 years before. The teacher reportedly liked to tell Verne and the other pupils that her captain husband had been shipwrecked on a desert island like Robinson Crusoe, and would one day find his way back to her. This theme of separated love would return many times in his books- as would that of thwarted love, drawn from Verne’s own experiences of not being permitted to marry his first two great loves. He was not yet considered a suitable marriage prospect due to his aspirations as a novelist, but things would soon change as his literary star rose with the years, and he would eventually fall in love with and marry the young widow Honorine de Viane Morel.

He would spend years on Cap d’Antibes, yet he wasn’t the most voluble fan of the Riviera. ‘I have paid for this climate’, he wrote to his publisher after several visits. ‘I’ve been here three times and each time I’ve had neuralgia, sore throats and ear abscesses.’ Certainly the Mediterranean’s reputation as a place to cure illnesses was not working terribly well on Monsieur Verne.

Les Chenes Vertes is now 152 Boulevard President Kennedy, but you can still find his name engraved on the gate post of this magnificent white villa on the sea, where he wrote of ‘impossible’ things, many of which would, and still could, become possible.

A museum dedicated to Jules Verne can be found in Nantes.