Pain is Just French Bread

Apart from perhaps the World Cup and vegetables, I make a point of not liking that many things just because you’re supposed to. As we’ve covered, I’ll watch a game with a lively attacking side that makes quick runs and audacious crosses, and I’ll be enraptured with the lack of commercials until the other side secures the ball and just passes it among the defenders, even back to the goalie, playing as though to run out the clock despite the 0-0 score. Who’s winning? What do you mean one side hasn’t gotten a shot off? Meanwhile, spinach is fine, but if it weren’t for Popeye, forget about it. Other things people like, I usually turn my nose up at. IPAs? No thank you. Squid Game/Peaky Blinders/I Will Find You? You won’t find me. 

However, when it came to my first summer free, it was getting late, and the only trip I had planned was the aforementioned trip Emma planned to Corsica. As somebody still technically young and without material responsibilities, it felt like the South of France was the place to be. For a vacationing teacher whose shorts are short, heading to one of the less oppressively priced towns on the riviera felt vaguely comme il faut.

Comme il faut, literally, as it should be, more or less stands in for that nagging feeling that uncertain young people feel imprisoned by, the same one that leads Tolstoy’s protagonist in Childhood, Boyhood, Youth to be a complete knob. He’s trying to do the right thing, he’s trying to control situations he can’t control, but he ends up not doing his own thing and putting on airs, and everybody can smell it. Putting on airs is famously not cool. 

However, the South of France famously is cool. Coco Chanel “invented” the tan after she didn’t do a good enough job protecting herself on a trip on the Riviera. In 2024, GQ interviewed Brad Pitt and George Clooney from Pitt’s home somewhere in the south. So I thought, if this is what constitutes spinach for the summer, and if it’s during a world cup played by what is alleged to be an awfully strong France side (not strong enough, it would turn out), I should behave and carve out a few days at an affordable place in Juan-les-Pins, the paradise of 1950s seaside apartment blocks between Antibes and Cannes. 

Everything seemed well and good until the woman at the bakery barked at me that they were only had white baguettes left, and I needed to drop my coins into the coin counter myself. The thing had no crust, no crumb, no softness. Things deteriorated further when I failed repeatedly to order food at a café that’s actually a bar where I could have sworn I saw people eating, and where I settled for a slim charcuterie board on a day so hot it rendered the fat before my eyes. This, too, came with sliced Papa Murphy’s Take-and-Bake Baguette. 

Articulating that the bread in France just didn’t taste like anything felt like articulating symptoms of depression: flowers don’t smell, birds don’t chirp, a man has tired of London. My first dinner, I began to ask for my steak frites à point, but he interrupted me in English to ask if I wanted it medium. I’m told it’s unwise to order steak rare in France, but I felt on edge and asked for it as such, and it came half mooing, half medium, indicating that perhaps their pan was unevenly heated. The next evening, the chicken guy across the street told me his rotisserie chickens wouldn’t be ready for another half hour. I came back, and he had closed for the night. Combine these small speed bumps with the real challenges of the latest and most recently historic European heat wave, and my objectives became ambiguous. I really couldn't have told you why I was there.

In light of this uncertainty, I figured I’d head down to the plage for a little swim and sun. It was jammed; framed photograph of a packed French beach one would buy on Instagram jammed. I tried to take as little as I could with me, going so far as to keep one key in my pocket and leave the other in my shoe. The idea was that the key in my trunks would protect me if the one in my espadrille were stolen, while the one in my espadrille would protect me in case the magnetic fob turned out to not be waterproof. 

Treading water, I wondered where the older man playing volleyball with a group that, in the US, would be MBA students kept his articles, given his thong had no pockets. I had been atypically diligent about SPF, and I felt confident that neither he nor any of his crisply tanned junior associates would be stealing my sunscreen. A feather and a cigarette butt floated by me, so I decided I ought to head back, lest somebody break into my apartment for my cash or passport. 

On my defeated walk home, I was lost in thought envying the camaraderie of the volleyball team and the devil-may-care embrace of tanning until I noticed that the espadrilles I’d picked up that afternoon were two different colors. Back at the apartment, I washed the soles off so I could try to exchange at least one shoe. I collected my passport, but I could not for the life of me remember where I’d stuck the 50-odd euros.

At this point, a light panic set in. This is what happens when you don’t do your own thing. When you rely on Google reviews because it’s too hot to hit the pavement and look with your eyes, you get Subway baguette. When I chose to come here, I had some vague vision about living simply, spending the morning out and about, walking around, hitting the market, and the afternoon holed up on my balcony or in the apartment with a notebook or book. As tends to happen, I overlooked that I really am an activity person, that I hate the heat, and that I don’t much care for yachts and their associated culture. I am not somebody outgoing enough to join a foreign volleyball game or relaxed enough to sit still and listen as my skin sizzles.

Just as things were looking pretty bleak, I sat for a gauchely early dinner, motivated to be unfashionable because my meager lunch was the paltry charcuterie puddle. I was beginning to worry about my calorie deficit long after my morning run when a whole fish was placed in front of me. Long-time readers might know that I was relatively late to the fish game, and I am still less-than-skilled at deboning and taking care of the whole thing. I know the cheeks are supposed to be the second best part (after the eyes, which I forwent), but I’m not sure how to get them off without mangling. 

This fish changed the outlook of my entire trip. The skin was so salty, the fish part so delicate, the caper sauce so buttery, the frites so fried. I had what readers might call a Proustian moment but what people my age would liken to the scene at the end of Ratatouille when the evil food critic tries the ratatouille that Remy/Linguini made for him. I went from scowling and wearing a scarf to feeling alive and experiencing child-like wonder once again. Magnifique! Never mind that I was the only one in the restaurant; they put the Japan/Brazil game on, and Japan even SCORED!

I felt so back that I wanted to give an inspirational speech where I pointed at everybody and said “you’re captain tibes! And you’re captain tibes! And you’re captain tibes! Everybody here is captain tiiiiiiiiiiiibes!”

The next morning, I took a long walk around the cape that gives the name to Cap d’Antibes. Fractals, the mathematical objects, were discovered as a consequence of the observation that, the more closely one measures a coastline, the more zigzags appear, and the longer it appears to be. And so the walk was longer than it might have been had I taken bigger steps. It entailed a new detour each time I was chased out of one of the choicer beachfront properties, but it led me to a relatively chichi cafe where I had the best omelet I’ve ever had (a medium bar, as I seldom order them and typically disdain them, but here they’re comme il faut) and I learned that having some mustard with one’s omelet, as one might do at a French brunch place in New York, hypothetically, was literally unheard of to the gentleman running at least one 4.8 Google star establishment. Childlike wonder! 

Later that day, I resolved the baguette crisis and found a different bakery whose bread I couldn’t stop thinking about until such time as I also procured an across-the-road chicken. The guy remembered me but didn’t apologize for closing up shop and leaving me out in the cold. The chicken! I would cross and recross. The bread! Breaking it open, dropping a million dark shards of crust (the crumb is the inside, actually) on the balcony, I could have eaten it plain but I soaked up the gravy with the same urgency with which a French retiree soaks up the sun.

A nice lady let me swap out my espadrilles, and the euros were in a pants pocket on a day too hot for long pants. Needless to say, these things all came without a line, without much thought, and at perhaps half of what they would fetch back home in New York. After the requisite 30 minutes, I meandered through the special trees in La Pinède and ambled to a different beach than I’d visited before, one where the sand was softer, they had lockers to keep my stuff safe, and I walked out into the sea until I couldn’t stand. 

Turning around, I dunked, wiped my face, dunked, wiped my face, dunked, wiped my face and began to count the different colors of balcony on the apartments before me. More people played volleyball, some teenagers had a literal chicken fight, people of all ages grew crisper and darker than the skin of my chicken, and I thought: wow, these people really, really love the beach. Maybe they know something, or perhaps they're just less thin-skinned.