I can’t finish my account of Nice without mentioning my evening at the Negresco.   I trailed in there on Sunday to book dinner for the next night -- my birthday.  The hotel is a Baroque masterpiece, built early in the last century.
Everyone has stayed there at some point -- everyone with pots of money, that
is.

  

It

 

It dominates the Promenade des Anglais, and inside it’s marble floored and very museum-like.   The attendants wear red knee-breeches, black stockings, a blue hunting-type jacket and top hats with plumes in them.   It’s worth a trip into the hotel just to see them.

The man at the desk, plume waggling, told me the main restaurant, the Chanticleer, was closed, but offered the Carousel instead.   He urged me to go and look at it although I kept shaking my head and indicating the dog, who was perfecting her rich-bitch insouciant look at my feet.   Such is the power in Nice of ladies-of-a-certain-age with canine accessory that I believe they would happily have let me in with her.   But good though she is (about some things) I’m not sure being in the vicinity of a lot of strangers eating tempting food would be conducive to her most sophisticated behaviour.  I declined, but booked for dinner.

The Carousel was reasonably full, for a Monday in February, but not packed. I should have been prepared for what it looked like by the name.  It’s round, with tables in a circle round a middle point, then a circular walk-way, then a ring of booths, which is where I was seated.   The room was decorated with fairground scenes, in a style reminiscent of the Second Empire.  Between the tables of the inner ring loomed six life-sized carousel horses on poles.   And in the middle, with her back to me, a simulacrum of a girl, wearing a long white dress, with flowing dark hair and a straw hat, her hand on the handle of a hurdy-gurdy.   The whole thing was garish and unsettling, and reminded me of when our local pub in north London was taken over by a steak-house chain.   They tore out the insides and redecorated in pantomime style, placing, as a piece de resistance, a leering balloonist in the centre of the restaurant.  He was supposed to represent Phileas Fogg, but he always made me think of the dead parachutist tangled in the trees in ’Lord of the Flies’ which didn’t help my digestion much.

 

The staff were polite, but not particularly pleasant, and I ran into a problem with the maitre d’hôtel when I ordered white wine with my steak.   He looked pained.   "But they will not go together.  They will not taste nice."

I started blithering on in my incompetent French about red wine giving me a headache, but pulled myself up in time.   "I like white wine.   I like it with steak," I said firmly.   He retreated, muttering.

I was distracted from the ire of the maitre d’ by a sudden wheezing sound which drowned out the faint piped music.   The carousel horses began to rise and fall, in a slow and wobbly progress, twisting slightly on their poles.    Hurdy-gurdy music filled the restaurant, and to my horror I saw that the mannequin in the centre had come to life, and the young girl was jerkily turning the handle on the instrument.

 

It was -- there’s no other word for it -- grotesque.   No-one else took the slightest notice.

 

Throughout the meal, without warning, the mechanism would suddenly crank up and the whole ghostly charade would be re-enacted.   I found it profoundly disturbing.

When I’d finished eating, I called for the maitre d’ to bring me the cork.  Bouchon.   It’s an essential bit of vocabulary.  (I know the word for ’corkscrew’ in about a hundred languages.)   He corked the bottle of white for me, and I thought his lips quirked slightly.  

 

He didn’t say a word, but I could see he was thinking  ’Lightweight...’