Visit France - Cote d'Azur Health Resort

Famous Writers Visit Hyeres in Provence

The Provençal town of Hyères was one of the first resorts on the French Riviera. Favoured by British aristocrats in the late 18th century, it was made fashionable by Queen Victoria.

Hyères, with its mild winter climate, was already popular as a health resort. When Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy visited the town with his tubercular brother Nicolas in 1840, he remarked that the town was 'full of chest cases.'

Famous Writers Visit Hyères

Aristocrats, consumptives and writers alike were drawn to Hyères: Ivan Turgenev, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling and Georges Simenon all visited the town.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Scots author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde was both writer and tubercular. Dogged by chronic sickness from infancy, Stevenson led a peripatetic existence in pursuit of good health. He had visited Menton with his parents as a little boy and when ordered south by his doctor, age 23, returned there for 6 months.

Cote d'Azur - Robert Louis Stevenson Moves to Hyères

But it was to Hyères, 10 years later, in 1883, that he took his new American wife, Fanny, by way of Marseille. They stayed first at l'Hôtel les Isles d'Or (now the Grand Hotel) before moving to a rented house, Châlet de la Solitude, at no 4 rue Victor Basch on the edge of the Vielle Ville. It was tiny and enchanting, with a garden like a fairy story and a view like a classical landscape.

"This spot, our garden and our view," he wrote, "are sub-celestial. I sing daily with my Bunyan, that great bard, 'I dwell already the next door to Heaven!' If you could see my roses, and my aloes, and my fig-marigolds, and my olives, and my view over a plain, and my view of certain mountains as graceful as Apollo, as severe as Zeus, you would not think the phrase exaggerated…."

Stevenson's health was as ever precarious, but he was productive and cheerful. The couple only returned to England because Fanny feared a cholera outbreak .

They had spent a mere 16 months at La Solitude but Stevenson was to write later, from his final home in Samoa: "I was only happy once: that was at Hyères." He died, in 1894 aged only 44.

Côte d'Azur - Hyères - Edith Wharton's Garden

Stevenson had been dead for 25 years when American writer Edith Wharton (born only 12 years after the Scotsman) bought Castel Sainte-Claire, just a few hundred yards from La Solitude.

She was a wealthy heiress, and unhappily married. "I feel as if I were going to get married - to the right man at last," she joked, anticipating her move to Hyères in 1922. Wharton, who lived in Paris, spent winters there until her death in 1937. She created a magnificent garden with many rare species, which is now open to the public with free entry.

It's hard to imagine that this subtropical garden could ever have been subject to the rigours of frost, but almost all Wharton's plants were wiped out in a catastrophic frost in the winter of 1828-9 . "How dangerous to care too much," she wrote in her diary, "even for a garden!"

Hyères-les-Palmiers - Provencal Town of Palm Trees

Hyères, or Hyères-les-Palmiers, on account of the thousands of date palms cultivated there, is a wonderful holiday destination in the Var Department. It comprises both a lively medieval old town and a chic resort with elegant boulevards, and parks and buildings that are wonderfully reminiscent of La Belle Epoque.