La Marseillaise Antillaise by Henry Shukman
Featured Hotel in Martinique
Le Cap Est Lagoon Resort & Spa
See all hotels in Martinique >
“How long is the drive?” I ask the bronzed statue behind the car-hire desk in Fort-de-France airport. It’s midnight, and the manoir where I'm spending the night is at the other end of the island.
The statue pouts. “A cette heure-ci,” she says like a question, “trente minutes.” She throws off the figure dismissively, with a humbling hauteur only the French can pull off. She does it without thinking. She is a nice young woman.
I circle the airport a few times. The “Toutes Directions” signs are reassuringly familiar from trips to France, but there seems to be one too many of them. Finally I cautiously creep onto the double-lane highway. At once a pair of lights shows distantly in my rear-view mirror. Confidently I accelerate. The needle climbs with amazing rapidity past seventy, ninety, a hundred and ten kilometres an hour. The car is a zippy new Citroen, a European thoroughbred. Yet all of a sudden those lights are blazing in the mirror. A tiny Peugeot hurtles past in the outside lane. He must be doing a hundred and fifty, two hundred! No sooner have his tail lights vanished than a little Renault catapults past in hot pursuit. Thank God it’s a four-lane road. I haven't seen driving like this since I was last - where, exactly? Where but the autoroute outside Paris, on which it’s more expedient to keep your eyes on the mirror than the road.
Half an hour later, I clamp the little car to a crawl and disappear mistakenly into the streets of Sainte-Anne on the southern tip of Martinique. I'm lost. There’s a one-way system just like in any French town. I pass a Mairie with French and EC flags gleaming in street lamps, a place de ville full of closed up market stalls, then a smoky smelly Renault van roars by. Downtown is small. All of sudden I’m driving up a forest track past a sign that says, “Voie Sans Issue.”
The tarmac ends, lobbing me onto a potholed trail. I’m not racing from Paris to Strassbourg after all. This is a Caribbean island. Ahead the track disappears in shiny tropical foliage.
The French arrived in the Caribbean in 1635, and unlike the English and Dutch, who came earlier, they have yet to leave. There’s nowhere like the French Caribbean. Is anywhere in the world more romantic or glamorous than the island of Martinique? Home of Rum St James and the Empress Josephine, a steep green isle with an active volcano in the north, meadows and mangroves in the south, jungle and beaches everywhere, and among the splendour of a half-tamed nature, all the infrastructure of modern France - the whole caboodle, slick roads and new cars, the patisseries, epiceries, boulangeries and general bon-vivanteries of the world’s most civilized nation.
Martinique is a colonial dream still extant. No waking up just yet, and maybe there never will be. All the picturesqueness you could possibly want - markets galore, women with scarves and buckets on their heads, houses of mildewed white filigree - and supreme comfort with it. The population is affluent. Per capita income soars high above the Caribbean average at around five thousand bucks. Whatever the French touch, seems to come out just right. In the 1780’s they gave up all their American colonies, including even Canada, in order to keep just two, Martinique and Guadeloupe, while Britian added to its ungainly worldwide sprawl.
Then in this century, other colonial powers only considered two options, possession and independence, but France opted for a third way. Since 1946, the French Antilles have been départements of France itself. They are actually France. Their inhabitants have French passports, receive EC subsidies and get terrific benefits from the government. They send deputies to the parliament in Paris.
French are apt to point to Haiti and African ex-colonies to support the case for dependency. “They’re chaos, they can't get it together,” people say. And there’s no doubt that Martinique is a lot better off than many other Caribbean islands, and its inhabitants know it. There’s only the smallest independence movement to speak of.
We discuss these matters over breakfast, M. Saint-Cyr and I. He’s the owner of the Manoir de Beauregard, an old stone plantation house turned, in the manner the French are so good at, into a spacious, slightly under-furnished, in fact ever-so-slightly too-spacious period-piece of a hotel.
“Seventy percent of the island’s money comes from the French government,” he tells me, bending down to a bowl of cafe au lait. “All the services are French - Electricité de France, the schools, and so on.”
His mother, an elderly soft-spoken woman seated modestly at the next table, gently adds: “L’hopital aussi.”
Her son nods deeply. “Yes, the hospitals too.”
“Et l’eau....” she offers.
Her son shakes his finger. “Non, non, non. Pas l’eau.” Apparently the water is run by a local company.
The discussion reminds me of the bickery conversations that used to go on at the dining table of the French family I exchanged with - that trans-Manche middle-class puberty rite - when I was fourteen. The French are better at bickering than anyone else. They get indignant at the drop of a hat; they know not to defend but attack; they allow a faint smile to play on their lips, as if amused by their antagonist’s stupidity (that hauteur again).
“And the cost of living is high here,” M. Saint-Cyr continues. His hands have been itching to take over. Finally they do all the talking: “It has to be high. If you want electricity and telephone and water where you turn on the tap, you drink, you have to pay for it.” He glares at me. His hands are suddenly suspended at shoulder height. “Everything has a price,” he adds with an enormous double-bender of a shrug.
I solemnly agree, hoping not to get drawn into the family squall, and bow to my croissants and oeufs dures.
A little later I want to make a telephone call.
“We have a problem with the telephone at the moment,” he tells me. A medium-shrug. Palms heavenwards.
However much France has “influenced” Martinique and the other French islands, so they too have surely affected France. For one thing, they cost a lot, eating into the Parisian coffers. For another, the possession of tropical regions impresses itself on a national psyche. It may encourage the “white man’s superiority complex,” as Aimée Cesaire, Martinique’s great poet, put it, but it also bestows on the French a certain worldliness. It is worth something to know that your nation owns some of the most romantic corners of the globe. Who cares what they cost? How can you put a price on a tropical emerald like this?
For Martinique is spectacularly beautiful (sauf la route nationale at six o’clock, gridlocked with small cars). Suddenly you come upon fields of sugar cane smooth as a carpet, deep as the shaggiest shag-pile. A gulch appears, sunk in the weave of cane, red as an Algerian canyon, speckled with goats. Meadows dotted with herds of white zebu, green hills everywhere, green, green, green... This is the Garden of Eden, all sparkling in the sunshine. As you weave from hill to meadow and back so the sun ducks in and out of little clouds. Sometimes the road gleams from showers and cars ahead put up spurts of mist as they race through invisible puddles. Every roadside is manicured, tended by teams of mowers and strimmers. Later on, at close of day, you see lights far up a hillside, and in the dusk a plantation house, a faded white palace roosting amid the trees. It is a gem, a dream of an island.
At least for some. The békés, the white descendants of the old planters, constitute two percent of the population, as everyone seems to know. They are very grand; many have been very rich for a very long time. Empress Josephine was a béké. Recently, when one of their girls married a Parisian count, they all boycotted the wedding - she was marrying hopelessly beneath her. Nothing but empresshood for their girls, unless a fine béké heir. Like the Waspiest Wasps to England, they trace their lineage back to France - generally some lowly corner of France. For centuries they have lived far from their roots in wealth and spendour on their habitations.
Early one morning I pay a visit to Habitation Beauséjour, home of M. de Lucy de Farroise on the north coast. The road is a tiny twister that takes me under dripping black cliffs, past white falls spurting from hidden gullies, across girder bridges like the Kwai. Now and then I flash into sunlight and see the glistening sea with the green cloud of Dominica, the next island, hovering on the horizon.
I'm driving into the nineteenth century. Beauséjour’s innumerable hectares of banana trees cover the slopes like a silk quilt. Over the centuries it has seen other crops - indigo, sugar, pineapples - whatever the current markets wanted and permitted.
The owner is a béké among békés, and greets me with the ease of the super-grand, clad practically in his birthday suit, barefoot in tattered shorts. He has a fine belly, large and slack, a belly to be proud of, farci with the fruits of the best French kitchen. He has the most compelling kind of charm, the kind that appears charmless. No easy smiles or nice clothes, yet the manners of a duke. It’s a hard thing to define, something like charisma. Perhaps only generations of rule can ingrain it.
We drift into a white wooden house, one of three plantation houses. A breeze blows through the louvered walls. Antiques everywhere, model ships and telescopes and sextants and wonderful early colonial pictures. Cats and dogs and people come and go. The whole air of the place is Tolstoyan, an estate where the bonds of friendship, blood and employment have all mingled.
We eat breakfast on the lawn under an avenue of mango trees. Hummingbirds dart at the table, a breeze hisses in the trees, and below us on the expanse of misty-blue sea a ship goes by.
“They’ll be taking our bananas later,” de Lucy says, looking that way. He serves up a plate of scrambled eggs from a small pan, then slices a baguette, opens a can of paté - “Un vrai petit déjeuner Martiniquais” - and pours out the excellent black coffee.
Dominica turns from green smoke to green stone, the sea becomes a blue cloud. This may technically be Europe, but the real Europe - crowded, troubled, bureaucratized - lies somewhere beneath that cloud.
Martinique’s population is mostly black, along with some East Indians brought in as labourers after the abolition of slavery in 1848, and some Syrians. There is poverty, but there is also the phenomenal welfare system of modern France. Some suggest that the 30 percent unemployment rate is partly voluntary, dole payments being so high.
Frenchness here ignores skin-colour. In Anse a l’Ane (Donkey Beach), a village in the south, stands a small house with a hand-painted sign: “Musée de la Coquillage.” The French prefer an abstract. “Shellage” means making models out of sea-shells. The collection has seen better days (some of the horses are missing a leg, some carriages are wheel-less), but it still offers a panoply in miniature of eighteenth century French courtly life: carriages, balls, dinners, military platoons, and all made out of shells.
“Nothing that doesn't come from the sea,” says the sign. I get close, and yes, even the legs of the soldiers’ horses are made of thin sea-snails. The ladies’ dresses are mussels. A ladder of lobster antennae, cockles for roof-tiles, bushes of sea-fans.
There’s something supremely French about this undertaking. Its correctness, its parlourdom, its accuracy - it reminds me somehow of the Babar books with their reconstructed colonial world, and of French toys, which are often really too good for children, things you wouldn't want broken. Yet the old woman showing me round, who made or repaired most it, is black. And just like some French governess, she won’t let me rush round, even though I'm sweating profusely in the hot little room and dying to get back into the open air. I must see everything properly.
Fort de France, Martinique’s capital, is a mix of the smart and the shabby, of charm and decrepitude, somewhere between the Rue de Rivoli and the markets of the Gare du Nord. On Le Savane, for example, a small park that serves as main square, a statue of Impératrice Josephine gazes towards the sea. At least she used to gaze. Six years ago she lost her head. No one knows who did it (well, someone does) and no one knows what to do about it. Motive? Josephine is thought by some to have bent Napoleon’s ear into prolonging slavery. So she stands on, guillotined like her first husband (Bonaparte was her second).
Nearby is an old aviary: no birds in it, however, only a rusting motorcycle. I stroll about the run-down little park, picking up something of that compromised peace you get in city parks, then wander into the narrow grid of downtown streets, lined with boutiques and parfumeries. They’re all a little bon marché, none quite making it to haute couture. Whereas the flood of super-chic local girls is another matter. They would command the attention of the worldliest eye. Beauty upon beauty, floating by with the erect carriage of the strictest debutante. Where did they learn to walk like that? Timeless style, native beauty deftly accentuated by the couturier’s hand. Who are they, exactly? Why so lovely?
I endeavour to turn my attention to the city’s architecture. Henri Pick, author of the Eiffel Tower, France’s industriel answer to Spain’s Gaudi, built both the Cathedral and the Bibliotheque Schoelcher, two wrought-iron multi-colour fantasies. They provoked hot debate in their day. The idea was to be modern, of course, but also to defy the hurricanes. The Bibliotheque, designed to house Schoelcher’s legacy of books (Schoelcher was France’s Wilberforce), is a monstrous masterpiece of filigree ironwork, with hardly a straight line to its name. The eaves are a scrawl of tangled intricacy. The overall effect is curiously chinois. Within, a roll-call of French greats such as Voltaire and Pascal adorns the high ceiling, while far below, hidden behind the bookcases, well-coiffed schoolgirls spread Tintin comics over their textbooks.
Fort de France’s market is strategically deployed outside the railings of the Botanic Gardens, whose rainbow blooms overhang the makeshift stalls. The market seems ideally tropique - trees bearded with Spanish moss drooping above crates of dark watermelons and giant bananas, plump smooth-skinned ladies sporting straw boaters, acres of fish scales heaped like snowdrifts in the fish hall - even its brown canal that allows fishermen to unload in the heart of the city has a certain rough charm. Scruffy yet orderly, bustling not thronged...
No wonder Gauguin was so enamoured of Martinique when he came here on his way to Tahiti. He spent six months on the island and said later that under its “sky of flame” he first learnt to paint the way he wanted.
His description was prophetic. The main city used to be St Pierre in the north, the “Little Paris” of the West Indies. It clusters down by the sea in the terrific shadow of Mont Pelee, Martinique’s dominant volcano. On 8 May 1902, at 7.50 a.m., all of its 30,000 inhabitants were killed in a matter of seconds, when the volcano erupted. A wall of flame destroyed all shipping in the bay bar one vessel, which had just arrived and still had its engines running. The captain, a man from Liverpool, managed to steam away while his deck houses buckled in the heat and drifts of scalding ash piled up on deck. Around them the sea boiled.
In the museum today you can see stacks of plates fused by heat, boxes of nails that have melted like macaroni cheese. A giant church bell has warped like Plasticine into a single sheet. Only one man on shore escaped with his life, a condemned prisoner due to be executed that morning at eight o’clock, ten minutes later. The massive stone walls of his cell saved him.
Moving to Guadeloupe, just ninety miles to the north, is something like descending from the Pyrenees into the suburbs of Toulouse. You leave behind the pretty feudalism, the magic. You really do feel that this is part of France here, a slightly underprivileged part at that.
At least until you start looking about: a bank of green mountains up ahead. A constant flow of clouds hiding and revealing them. Rain on the windscreen, then sun, then rain. Nothing but fog below as you descend a slalom of a mountain road. Then a great expanse of the bluest blue resting easy on the eye in a gap of cloud. A town scattered white over the land. If Martinique has magic, Guadeloupe has grandeur.
Guadeloupe’s eastern half, Grande Terre, is flat and developed. Bargain holiday-makers from France flood its fleets of concrete hotels. But Basse Terre, the western half, is different, a mountainous bulk with a few settlements spilled round the edge.
Basse Terre Town is a pleasant place of 30,000 inhabitants. Nothing special, just pleasant and very French. Henri Maston, Quincaillerie, faces Jean-Pierre Maston, Quincaillerie. French LOTO signs, a Tabac, a modestly grand Hotel de Ville where, on the locked door, a sign has been posted about a campaign of “Dératisation.” There is a Port Autonome here, and efforts are apparently under way to rid it of rats. “Stop Aux Rats!”
The town never seems to be busy. It has all the chain stores of France - 8 a Huit, DéliFrance, Bata Shoes. What I remember from a visit seven years ago as an amazingly old-fashioned restaurant where there was one dish a day and it was all the old proprietress could do to get up and switch on the fan, has become a McDonald’s. Maybe she died.
Despite that loss, the Graham Greenian air lingers still. Up the street a shack of a restaurant offers soupe de cheval - the last thing you’d want in this heat. On the roof up above a woman is pegging out washing, while over the empty tables a TV blares. Further on, a plaque outside a doctor’s office declares in eighteen lines of copperplate engraving the list of his diplomes and titulaires. This is not like provincial France; it is provincial France.
I lunch at the Caprice des Iles. When the waiter delivers the starters to the next table, he stops to whisper to me: “Regardez la beauté des plats. Les couleurs.”
The lucky table, three young couples seated in a perfect boy-girl placement, have apparently noticed all by themselves. The talk of computers stops and huge smiles spontaneously break out all round. It might be un-French to display such delight at the sight of the repas, but to feel it, surely not.
After lunch I drive by the new marina south of town and out to an old lighthouse, a local beauty spot, a place for an afternoon walk with the dog and the kids. There I meet the Deux Sirenes, two local ladies disaffected with the island’s men. Sophie, a discontented wife in distractingly tight shorts, lists all the ills of island life, the predictable metropolitan litany of humidity, machismo, lack of culture. I offer the crumb of solace that dissatisfaction with location might be endemic to humanity. After all, many in the rainy cities dream of nothing other than Guadeloupe. She doesn't buy. She pouts, shakes her head: Non, non. Ici c’est terrible.
The other siren agrees. The men here are so bad that she simply had to turn down two offered hands and now can't find any men to her taste. She has become transparent, she says, eyeing me in a way that makes me uneasy. Of course not, I say, glancing away.
It’s a bit like being dropped into a walk-on role in a French soap. The music is different (up-tempo zouk), along with the backdrops and the colour of people’s skin, but the song remains the same: fast cars, nicely converted old houses, congested roads, loads of small businesses - the French really are a nation of shopkeepers - and manicured gardens bursting with matrimonial ennui.
There is a shack side to life on Guadeloupe too. Down near the sea stands the Paillotte de Pecheur. Two men sprawl on a concrete wall outside.
“Vous etes ouverts?” I ask.
One of them, bare-bellied, lumbers to his feet and leads me into the small empty restaurant. He fetches an Orangina for me then starts pressing his speciality on me, grilled lobster. I’m not hungry but curious. I ask: “Qu’est-ce que c’est une paillotte?”
“A paille is a shack so a paillotte is less than a shack. Each year the hurricanes take more and more away,” he says, glancing round the wooden walls that could use a lick of paint, “so we’re not even a shack any more.” He picks his nose so demonstratively that I no longer even feel like drinking my Orangina.
Further along I stop to make some notes. Beneath an almond tree a man dozes on the side of an upturned refrigerator (hors de service). A lady in a white dress comes by. “C’est pour moi?” she asks. She has to repeat it twice before I get what she’s on about: am I writing her a letter? We have a good laugh.
She walks up the path to meet a diesel van that has stopped at the roadside. She talks to the driver, who reaches into the back and hands her four baguettes. He is apparently the local boulanger making his last rounds of the day.
Pointe a Pitre, Guadeloupe’s main city, on Grande Terre, has arguably the ugliest suburbs of the Lesser Antilles. They deter most visitors from the centre, arguably one of the prettiest.
Place de la Victoire. I wonder what other writers would make of it. Conrad? “For while the drunks and loiterers of the town passed their time draped over the benches of the dusty park, the horns of vessels at the quays blew over them like the archangel himself mourning their souls. This was, above all, of course, a port first and a city second...”
Hemingway? “And the beautiful Place with its tall green trees and iron balconies, open forever on its fourth side to the sea and across the sea to the mountains, and meanwhile the tops of the trees are still bright green in the last of the light and this would be a good time for a biere a pression, a fine time, in one of the cafes on the square and etc.”
James? “While he mused that the French presence was, as it were, the authoritative, the expedient one to recognize, but that the humbler stamp of the African might after all turn out to be the subtler yet more persuasive of the two, he was surprised by a sudden longing, unplaceable at first, though indubitably provoked by the gurgle of a French motor-car … etc.”
What do I make of it? A fine old ugly bandstand, the ships moored just beyond the Place, the constant coming and going of cars and people, except for the exhausted, who slump on benches, and the odd hustler.
“M’sié!” one calls to me.
I glance at him - wrong!
“Vous voulez -” something I can’t hear.
I walk on.
“M’sié. Je suis tres discret.”
I can’t help a smile.
“Voyez,” he calls out, delighted, “comme je suis discret.”
I nod slightly.
He cackles with glee.
A sulky statue of some politician, a concrete pond with a useless bridge, and a lot of beautiful women, as always. How can they all be so beautiful? It's genetically impossible. It makes no sense. But there they go, one after another. One in clinging jeans and a blue top, hair pulled back, another with short hair and a green shirt, another in a little black dress over-ornamented with gold zips - a manifestly cheap dress, yet on her it looks like it’ll be the show-stealer at the ball. Yet another, in red leggings, a baby boy balanced on her shoulders, her carriage unaffected. Is it just the way they walk? Who are they? Where do they come from?
Hemingway had it right. Une biere a pression, s’il vous plait. I haven't wanted a beer this much in a long time.
You can't get far in the Caribbean without running into a fort. But the last place you might expect to find three of them is on the tiny archipelago of green isles known as Les Saintes, just south of Guadeloupe.
Trade routes are odd things. Why one island in this open sea should be the strategic one and not another is a matter for the historians. Les Saintes were the Gibraltar of the Caribbean, the key gateway. Here the Trafalgar of the West Indies was fought, the decisive battle when the hegemony tipped forever in Britain’s favour.
In the Fort Napoléon (who never visited it) innumerable models of many tiny ships arranged in different patterns on blue boards attempt to explain the French defeat in the battle of Les Saintes. It wasn’t Admiral de Grasse’s fault; it was partly his officers’, who failed to obey his commands, but mainly it was the wind’s. It blew at the wrong time in the wrong way. The British Admiral Rodney was merely the wind’s pawn.
Giant hydrofoils and catamarans whisk some 370,000 tourists a year across from Guadeloupe to Terre de Haut, the main island. It is only two miles long, and its lanes must be choked with rented scooters in high season. Just now it is peaceful but for an enormous Gallic quarrel going on among fishermen at the quay, a battle more of gesture than word - forehands, backhands, single-handers flying to left and right, double-handers exploding upwards, steps forward, backs turned.
The Saintes were settled by Breton fisherfolk, and though the islands are racially mixed, to this day a few of them, blond-haired, still look like they’ve just stepped off a trawler in Brest. Despite that dockside disputation, most of them seem incurably shy. I approach a group of six or seven men sitting on the steps outside one of the gingerbread houses singing boisterously to the radio and presumably drinking from the open rum bottle between them. Yet as I go by they all fall silent as if I were the village schoolmaster.
The sun sets memorably. White smoke when the sun strikes a cloud, blue smoke as Guadeloupe fades in the fading light, pale smoke as more clouds shift over the slate-grey sea, dark smoke of a nearer island across the bay. Also, ranked along the horizon, a row of towering cumulus clouds, as if a whole phalanx of volcanoes had fired off simultaneously. Guadeloupe lights up like a ship at night. For me, Les Saintes, site of that crucial naval battle, will forever be smoky.
Whereas St Barthélemy is beautiful - as in people.
Part of the département outremer of Guadeloupe, St Barthélemy lies a hundred or so miles to the north, a bare rock clad in a fig-leaf of vegetation. Which is more modesty than its sun-worshippers muster. You can't keep your breasts secret here, it's just not done. No sooner do you spy sand than hop!, off comes the top. The beach bars are full of affluent beachy types with masses of bleached hair and sandy faces. The whole island feels like a permanent fashion set, a Bacardi ad, one big upscale Club Med.
The preferred transport is the Mini Moke, a car that brings out the eleven year-old go-karter in you. You tear along the lanes with that wonderful throaty British engine roaring right by your knees, the sun burning overhead. This is a supremely topless isle - topless cars, topless women, topless sky-high bank accounts. It is full of utilitarian stores like the Casa del Habano, where you can get everything from Montecristo to Cohiba and back, or Le Cave (St Emilion to Epernay and back). In the former a cigar-maiden takes me on a tour of the humidors: do I prefer a lid of Florentine marble inlay for four thousand dollars or semi-precious Arabian stone for six? Perhaps I’m after a four-figure lighter, or a briefcase that holds nothing but cigars (only seven hundred)?
I was more interested in her. What was she doing here? She came from Lyons. She had been here three years. She liked living here. She could go to the beach and live well. C’est plus tranquille.
Maybe than Paris. But imagine high-season, when all those ranked Mini Mokes at the airport are honking down the lanes, pink people hurrying to the beach, when you need to book the restaurants before you leave home. We’re talking Santa Fe in July, Hamptons in season, only more so. You can buy all the caviar you want, but don't try and find a hamburger. Telephone lines lace the hillsides, white roofs showing among the foliage, satellite dishes nestling discreetly among bushes, and explosions of flowers lining the driveways. It is an island of villas, a holidayland that has somehow managed to develop randomly yet prettily, full of august hotel registers like that of the famous Eden Rock, hideaway to the likes of Garbo and Mitchum.
St Bart’s was never cultivated, and no plantations means no slaves. Today it is still a conspicuously white island. The only black face I saw was the driver of a France Telecom van. The first settlers didn't have an easy life. Their rock passed back and forth between England, France and Sweden. It was only in the Fifties, when a Monsieur de Haenen managed to land his plane in a goat meadow and started the Eden Rock hotel, that the island found its calling as a Caribbean Riviera.
Its restaurants are a bon-vivant’s dream, a neo-Puritan’s nightmare. How to ask for that unreal vinaigrette on the side? How to say non when the wine list arrives, short and perfectly chosen? And to ask for a decaf at the end of lunch would be treason.
So to St Martin, the French half of Saint Maarten, most northerly of the French Antilles. St Martin may be marinas galore and acres of duty-free boutiques, but once you get done with all the obligatory shopping - Rolex, Cerrutti, Nina Ricci, all the names are here - once your arms are full of little designer bags stuffed with tissue paper, make your way past the tall podgy Dutchmen and lean Caribbean gentlemen to one of the island’s brasseries.
St Martin’s eateries and drinkeries match anything on the Boulevard St Germain. You can sit at dockside tables marvelling at the tuna carpaccio or terrine St Jacques, or a supremely Marseillaise bouillabaisse washed down with Rosé de Provence. There has to be more good food per square inch here than practically anywhere else on the planet. And all served with that wonderful French aplomb and ease.
The Brasserie de la Belle Epoque has all the whiskies of the world, a pantheon of cognacs, armagnacs and eaux de vie, and only one solitary bottle of rum. Turn your back on the boats in the marina, turn up the air-conditioning, turn a blind eye to the prices - this may be a restaurant gastronomique, but the prices are astronomique - turn up the accordion’s lament on the hi-fi and you could be right back on the Rive Gauche. Raise that armagnac arm: vive la France!