In the Mediterranean tides were negligible, and fishermen and coastal freighters were discovering day by day what could be safely negotiated; attempts were being made to resecure the Rhone’s main channel through the new lagoon, and to reestablish the flanking canals as well, so that boats wouldn’t have to challenge the flow of the Rhone when returning upstream. Sylvie pointed out at features Michel couldn’t see, and told him of sudden shifts of the Rhone’s channel, of ships’ groundings, loose buoys, ripped hulls, rescues by night, oil spills, confusing new lighthouses— false lighthouses, set by moonlighters for the unwary— even ordinary piracy on the high seas. Life sounded exciting at the new mouth of the Rhone.
After a while they got back in the little car, and Sylvie drove them south and east, until they hit the coast, the true coast, between Marseilles and Cassis. This part of the Mediterranean littoral, like the Côte d’Azur farther east, consisted of a range of steep hills dropping abruptly into the sea. The hills still stood well above the water, of course, and at first glance it seemed to Michel that this section of the coast had changed much less than the drowned Camargue. But after a few minutes of silent observation, he changed his mind. The Camargue had always been a delta, and now it was a delta still, and so nothing essential had changed. Here, however: “The beaches are gone.”
“Yes.”
It was only to be expected. But the beaches had been the essence of this coast, the beaches with their long tawny summers all jammed with sun-worshiping naked human animals, with swimmers and sailboats and carnival colors, and long warm thrilling nights. All that had vanished. “They’ll never come back.”
Sylvie nodded. “It’s the same everywhere,” she said matter-of-factly.
Michel looked eastward; hills dropped into the brown sea all the way to a distant horizon; it looked like he might be seeing as far as Cap Sicié. Beyond that were all the big resorts, Saint-Tropez, Cannes, Antibes, Nice, his own little Villefranche-sur-mer, and all the fashionable beach resorts in between, big and small, all drowned like the stretch under them: the sea mud brown, lapping against a fringe of pale broken rock and dead yellow trees, with the beach roads dipping into dirty white surf. Dirty surf, washing up into the streets of deserted towns.
Green trees above the new sealine tossed over whitish rock. Michel had not remembered how white the rock was. The foliage was low and dusty, deforestation had been a problem in recent years, Sylvie said, as people had cut trees for firewood. But Michel barely heard her; he was staring down at the drowned beaches, trying to recall their sandy hot erotic beauty. Gone. And he found, as he stared at the dirty surf, that in his mind he couldn’t remember them very well— nor his days on them, the many lazy days now blurs, as of a dead friend’s face. He couldn’t remember.
• • •
Marseilles however had of course survived— the only part of the coast one could not care about, the ugliest part, the city. Of course. Its docks were inundated, and the neighborhoods immediately behind them; but the land rose quickly here, and the higher neighborhoods had gone on living their tough sordid existence, big ships still anchored in the harbor, long floating docks maneuvered out to them to empty their holds, while their sailors flooded the town and went mad in time-honored fashion. Sylvie said that Marseilles was where she had heard most of the hair-raising tales of adventure from the mouth of the Rhone and elsewhere around the Med, where the charts meant nothing anymore: houses of the dead between Malta and Tunisia, attacks by Barbary corsairs . . . “Marseilles is more itself than it has been for centuries,” she said, and grinned, and Michel got a sudden sense of her nightlife, wild and perhaps a bit dangerous. She liked Marseilles. The car lurched in one of the road’s many potholes and it felt like his pulse, he and the mistral rushing around ugly old Marseilles, stricken by the thought of a wild young woman.
More itself than it had been for centuries. Perhaps that was true of the entire coast. There were no tourists anymore; with the beaches gone, the whole concept of tourism had taken a knife to the heart. The big pastel hotels and apartment buildings now stood in the surf half-drowned, like children’s blocks left at low tide. As they drove out of Marseilles, Michel noted that many of these buildings appeared to have been reoccupied in their upper stories, by fishermen Sylvie said; no doubt they kept their boats in rooms downstairs, like the Lake People of prehistoric Europe. The old ways, returning.
So Michel kept looking out the window, trying to rethink the new Provence, doing his best to deal with the shock of so much change. Certainly it was all very interesting, even if it was not as he remembered it. New beaches would eventually form, he reassured himself, as the waves cut away at the foots of sea cliffs, and the charged rivers and streams carried soil downstream. It was possible they might even appear fairly quickly, although they would be dirt or stones, at first. That tawny sand— well, currents might bring some of the drowned sand up onto the new strand, who knew? But surely most of it was gone for good.