One can get lost on the Côte d'Azur, writes Fred Johnston
Looking for the last haunts of an Irish writer, in this wedge of Europe where writers of all sorts have scuttled about, two a sou, there are bound to be problems, diversions, errors.
William Butler Yeats spent his last days in the wonderfully named Hotel Idéal Séjour. The building is now a block of pink apartments sporting a decent commemorative plaque on the left of the front door.
We negotiated the cliff-foot village of Roquebrune-Cap Martin in decent heat and got nowhere. It was literally downhill all the way, Italy a grouchy blue whale on the very near horizon and the snaking Riviera behind us, and the sea everywhere. Roquebrune Cap-Martin, where the bus from Monaco stops on the dizzy corniche, is cosily residential, suburban and pleasantly inartistic. There was a park full of children, parents, ice-cream and soft cold drinks and the noise of it of crept over the green grass; in a caretaker's hut we asked more questions. Yes, everyone knew Yeats, the Irish poet. He'd lived over there.
Encouraged, we attempted to follow what were quite clear directions and became lost again. It took two elderly and graceful Italians, a man and wife taking a stroll, finally to direct us to the Hotel Idéal Séjour.
It's a frank, square building behind an odd picket fence and when we got there it glowed under a wide-mouthed sun. We took photographs. Over it, hard mountains shimmered.
Overcome by an indefinable sense of pilgrimage, we decided to find our way to old Roquebrune, which is halfway up the face of the cliffs, a solidly medieval stronghold of a village which can be reached by road, but by some route we never discovered.
Here the great poet had been laid to rest. For us, it was a steady hike upwards, the Mediterranean falling behind us like a fold of blue cloth, the Riviera unravelling away to the west, small fields and houses becoming visible as we climbed, red roofs, green trees; old Roquebrune was a maze of tiny ancient stone streets wide enough, with effort, for a horse or two but certainly not a car. The square was crowned by a solitary, spreading, magnificent tree, tourists drifted about looking over the walls down to the highway, a toy road now, and the background was full of mountains. A large hotel bordered one side of the square, on the other the beehive of the village. Interrogations amongst women and children standing at their medieval doors, a curious mounting desire never to leave here, never to go back to the dour grey rain-scoured west of Ireland; here was light, colour, heat!
Then we crept up to old Roquebrune's graveyard. A plaque on a wall of the public ossuary, a unicorn-and-star emblem, a few words, designed (but not sculpted) by the artist Edmund Dulac, a friend of the poet for a quarter of a century; Dulac and Edith Heald, another friend of Yeats, had applied officially at Roquebrune-Cap Martin to have the plaque installed "contre le mur limitant l'ossuaire souterrain du côte est, a la mémoire du poète Butler William Yeats (sic), décédé a Roquebrune-Cap-Martin . . ."
At the plaque we uttered a few lines from a Yeats play. The sea reached out like a great hand waiting to catch the poet's spirit if it fell.
Yeats didn't rest long in his grave above the sea. There was no trace of him in June 1947 when friends, Dulac among them, came to visit. Had there been some mistake?
How did the poet's bones now lie in a fosse commune, a communal ditch? Had there been, quite literally, some grave error? Every few years the fosse was cleared; some of the poet's bones were lifted in 1941, the rest in early 1946; Yeats was piled in the communal ossuary, the bone-pit.
His friends were distraught; and Yeats's wish to be buried in Drumcliffe was known to them.
Dulac set about burying the error at Roquebrune. He contacted the abbé at Menton, a nearby town famous for its perfumes, to avoid an unholy stink. Discretion was assured. Dulac worked furiously to avoid scandal, even to the point of deciding that George Yeats, the poet's widow, should be "kept out if it".
Then George decided, in 1948, that she wanted her husband's bones brought to Sligo. Dulac owned up. She was appalled, certain she had purchased a grave for 10 years, hardly one.
It was decided to hunt through the bones in the ossuary for those of her late husband, looking for anything that might provide a clue; is it possible that blundering about in an ossuary could have produced the genuine bones of W.B. Yeats, which were later loaded up and taken back to Drumcliffe?
An exhumation order, a demande d'exhumation, was signed at Roquebrune on March 12th, 1948, and authorised with an official 20 francs stamp, on paper headed Maison Roblot.
The tale was resurrected by avid reading in the library back in Monaco.
There too were the papers relating to his exhumation. The tale resembled a Gothic fantasy and it's not hard to imagine Yeats seated comfortably on a favourite bench in Parnassus having a good chuckle over the whole affair, curious himself, perhaps, to discover whether what's in Drumcliffe is merely an assortment of villagers' bones from Roquebrune, that stone village perched like a great bird's nest on the side of those mountains.
We stumbled by a very narrow footpath down towards the main road. Night fell and we were overcome by a peculiar sense of panic.
One can indeed get lost on the Côte d'Azur. Alive or dead.