“IN A WORLD of struggle, of rain, of mud, of grey steel,” the French author and diplomat Paul Morand wrote of the Côte d’Azur in a 1929 article for this magazine, “it is the one region which strives to guard, in a softening air, the secret of doing nothing, and the sweetness of living nobly, that is to say, idly and slowly.”
The year prior, the writer, who had a villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer dubbed L’Orangerie, gained a new Riviera neighbor in Gabrielle Chanel. The 45-year-old couturier, who would, ironically, later describe her clientele to Morand as “busy women,” had purchased herself a slice of this Gallic paradise, a 1911 bungalow in the craggy hills of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin—the top of the regional portmanteau being, Morand wrote, “an old fortified village where red…
