If I were to suggest you spend a few hours’ layover in Nice some summer Sunday afternoon — arriving by air-conditioned TGV from Marseille or Avignon or even further off, and leaving again that evening for a pleasant medieval village in the foothills of the Maritime Alps — well, what would you imagine? Yourself perhaps sitting in a terrace overlooking the beach, eating a vastly overpriced lemon ice, a very tiny bit cross not to be able to ditch your luggage and join the frolicking in the waves?
What most likely you would not anticipate is the grim aspect of the streets around the SNCF station and the smaller Gare of the Chemins de Fer en Provence (France’s only remaining independent rail service). The remains of a monring market still fragrant (see: rotten) on the sidewalks; the special shabbiness of buildings left too long in the sun without repainting.
Now suppose it is a hot day, and you have two hours to kill, and a thirst and hunger exacerbated by having looked at (but not eaten) a very nice hotel breakfast that morning. You might wander the streets outside for a café but you would quickly find that everything — every café, boulangerie, patisserie, restaurant, and mini-market is shut tight for Sunday and that the only outcome is to involve you and your aging roller suitcase in a slow-motion dog-shit slalom: the inhabitants of Nice are no more particular about the behavior of their animals than anyone else in France.
Returning to the station, you find three vending machines. The one selling cold beverages is, first of all, openly out of water, and second, secretly out of sorts: it will not accept coin for the diet soda, though it claims not to have run out.
Beside it is a vending machine for hot beverages. Now the station is not air-conditioned and already your skin has begun to adhere to whatever it touches, but hot liquid is still liquid; with time and cultivation it might even become luke-warm liquid. The lemon tea looks most likely to be refreshing under the circumstances. You make the purchase: but what gushes into the tan plastic cup provided for its reception is not lemon tea by any imagination, cannot have encoungered either leaf or fruit in its life. It is tooth-batteringly sweet, highly artificial, and dingy brown in color. It agrees with its advertisement only one respect: it is exceedingly hot. You grasp the flimsy cup at your own peril.
The third vending machine contains nothing but sweets calculated to compound the awful dehydrating effects of the piping lemonade. The most substantial is a sort of round pastry full of almond paste, which crumbles when you try to extract it from its plastic sachet. But you really are that hungry and so you consume the crumbs. Then down the wretched, still very warm fake-lemon-flavored drink after it, tasting however little you can.
While you eat you have time to gain some sense of surroundings. The station is a big triangular room with a white marble-like floor, a specimen of that mid-20th-century architecture that attempts grandeur and achieves sterility. Around the sides of the empty floor (almost a ballroom) are three or four blue metal benches designed by someone who does not approve of sitting down. On the wall there are three landscape paintings of the train in its native habitat: a town, a village, and a hilly track in Provence, all executed as if seen from another car, by the Van Gogh of train-sickness.
Outside wait train cars. They are not trains, because “train” suggests a sequence of multiple items, and these are disconnected, mere trolleys. Though there is only one line and departures occur no more than every two hours, the station has granted itself the dignity of having three platforms and the necessary electronic sign to announce which platform to use next.
The station slowly fills with people. Something in a basket trills and howls and you are never sure whether it is a baby, a cat, a wounded dog. Passengers try the cold drink machine even though you explain to the first few that it does not work. Several turn away disappointed; but a fourth, a white-haired man of perhaps more than usual spiritual worthiness, somehow comes away with a diet Coke sweating frost, which he strains through a frost-colored mustache. His “ah!” of refreshment would suffice as an entire Coca-Cola advertising campaign. The evil eye of everyone is on his back but he does not care.
You clutch in your hand your ticket, which the ticket-seller printed off on discontinuous scraps of receipt paper and had to tape together with cellophane tape, so to be fair it was not very legible even before your sweat smudged the letters.
When at last the train departs, it departs trolley-fashion down a street of Nice and stops every 150 feet to let on another grandmother with a woven straw shopping bag. When it goes again the conductor honks a horn that sounds just like a bicycle horn. No one announces stops (like a trolley) and you can see out the front window (like a trolley). It is slow, rattly, uphill going, up into residential terraces. Outside are weedy gardens strung with laundry, and inflatable pools on the roofs of apartment blocks, and piles of bricolage junk. It’s like glancing accidentally up someone’s sleeve and getting an eyeful of armpit hair: Nice is not designed to be seen from this angle. No one takes this train seriously. The sun is flatly brilliant through the window and your hair becomes so hot to the touch that it might spontaneously combust. Still the slow progress, still the frequent stops.
Once the conductor gets out to look for several minutes at the front wheels. “Is it a crisis?” one passenger asks another in French, and the other replies “it is nothing serious,” as though this happened often.
Progress resumes, and slowly one leaves the city entirely and is traveling through a valley with steeper and steeper walls until the sun is at last mercifully blocked out and there are only trees. Beside the track is the river Var, low at this time of year, running in shallow channels over a wide bed of rocks and cracked white mud. Next to the usable track and the usable roads are others, derelict: wooden train cars painted a brave periwinkle but now left on sidings to rot, swaying rope bridges with the slats falling out, a shack with a sign over the door that says DANGER. Where the cliffs are bare they expose strata of rock that have been laid down and then upended, so what were horizontal layers have become vertical. The hillside is held back with walls of honeycomb masonry, and rockfalls prevented with netting on strong poles. It is a place where nature has been violent and people have had a violent struggle with it.
As the train-trolley rattles around steep bends and up slopes, it increasingly resembles a ride at a cheap amusement park. Underneath the jaunty air of simulated adventure is a faint apprehension that the car will genuinely fall into a ravine or (more likely) just stop dead.
After two hours or so you begin to worry about your stop. You are clearly not traveling on schedule, so you won’t be able to tell from the time when to get off, but on the other hand no one says the names of the stations when you reach them, and there aren’t even consistent signs. Everyone else just seems to know when to get off. The conductor is chatting with the other passengers as though they are all acquainted. He asks a question and some of them raise their hands and you are not sure what you missed or whether it matters that you did not raise yours. But — aided by a downy French boy with an electronic keyboard in a bag — you do manage to find your stop: Entrevaux, a walled and gated medieval city held in a bend of the Var, watched by a fortress high up the cliff.
It is just as well: it would have been another two hours, or two and a half, to Digne-les-Bains at the upper end of the line.
