Victoria's secret: "Dear Cimiez"

Written by Reporter, Sept 2007

Victoria's secret: "Dear Cimiez"

Princess Diana is reputed to have dismissed the Riviera as a "vulgar" place where she couldn't possibly have lived and she visited it very rarely. This was not at all the opinion of her husband's great-great-great grandmother Queen Victoria. In the last two decades of her life, after emerging from her prolonged years of mourning for Prince Albert, she spent a total of nearly twelve months in "this beautiful country I so love". She moved between Menton, Cannes, Grasse, Hy�res and especially Nice � or, more precisely, what writing during her last visit she called "dear Cimiez".

In his Queen Victoria and the Discovery of the Riviera (UK: I.B. Tauris) Michael Nelson offers "a well-researched and highly readable account of the Sovereign's love affair with the South of France". That's what I wrote when I reviewed the title on its first appearance in 2001. That this outstanding contribution to what might be called "Anglo-Riviera history" has taken so long to get into paperback only confirms the widespread view that I.B. Tauris is an interesting publisher with a somewhat lethargic management. Anyway, it's a great book which deserves a wide readership. Victoria emerges as a rather more complex character than suggested by those standard portraits of a grim granny � in Nice she even once took part in a bout of flower throwing! Her enthusiasm for the Riviera didn't extend, by the way, to Monaco where, driven through, she noted, "very nasty disreputable-looking people walking about". She finally took to drawing the curtains in her carriage once into the Principality.

Titles reviewed here can be obtained at local English bookshops