The French have a genius for elegance; but they are also endowed with a genius for ugliness.

From Music at Night by Aldous Huxley.  The essay is Wanted, a New Pleasure.  1931

Nineteenth-century science discovered the technique of discovery, and our age is, in consequence, 

the age of inventions. Yes, the age of inventions; we are never tired of proclaiming the fact. The age of inventions — and yet nobody has succeeded in inventing a new pleasure. 

 

It was in the course of a recent visit to that region which the Travel Agency advertisements describe as the particular home of pleasure — the French Riviera — that this curious and rather distressing fact first dawned on me. From the Italian frontier to the mountains of the Esterel, forty miles of Mediterranean coast have been turned into one vast ‘pleasure resort’.  Or to be more accurate, they have been turned into one vast straggling suburb — the suburb of all Europe and the two Americas — punctuated here and there with urban nuclei, such as Mentone, Nice, Antibes, Cannes. The French have a genius for elegance; but they are also endowed with a genius for ugliness.  There are no suburbs in the world so hideous as those which surround French cities. The great Mediterranean banlieue of the Riviera is no exception to the rule. The chaotic squalor of this long bourgeois slum is happily unique. The towns are greatly superior, of course, to their connecting suburbs. A certain pleasingly and absurdly old-fashioned, gimcrack grandiosity adorns Monte Carlo; Nice is large, bright, and lively; Cannes, gravely pompous and as though conscious of its expensive smartness. And all of them are equipped with the most elaborate and costly apparatus for providing their guests with pleasure.