As well as being the world’s most fabled holiday resort the Riviera was, for many, an intense stimulus to creativity. Around Christmas 1931 the writer Georges Simenon had rented the villa Les Roches Grises in Antibes. To get about, he imported a Chrysler Imperial from the US and settled down to write three of the Maigret novels for which he would become famous. He was not the only one to have found sudden, spectacular fame on the Riviera.
In Sanary, Aldous Huxley wrote his seminal novel Brave New World (published in 1932) in four months between May and August. Set in London in the year ad 2540 (632 AF – ‘After Ford’ – in the book), it anticipated developments in reproductive technology, attitudes to sex, addiction, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and conditioning. The mechanistic society it produced, governed at a distance by the Resident World Controller of Western Europe, gives a horrific vision of what Huxley himself called ‘a negative utopia’. The Connollys, who had given up trying to form an intimate friendship with Huxley, returned to London.
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