Villa La Mauresque Saint Jean Cap Ferrat

The Return

In the autumn of 1946, Somerset Maugham stepped back onto the grounds of a house he had not seen in six years and found the facade pocked with bullet holes. The cars were gone. The wine cellar had been drained to the last bottle. Three occupying armies — German, Italian, French — had passed through in succession, and each had left its mark on the plaster and the paint. What Maugham did not find, when he finally worked up the nerve to look, was any sign that the paintings had been touched. The Gauguins were where he had left them. So were the Picassos, the Matisses, the Pissarros, the Toulouse-Lautrecs. Somewhere in the chaos of occupied France, someone had taken the trouble to hide them.

The house was called La Mauresque, and by the time Maugham returned to it, it had already lived one entire life before he ever set foot inside.

A Bishop's Retreat

That first life belonged to a bishop. Around 1900, Major Félix Charmetant, fresh from years of missionary work across Africa, arrived on the still-undeveloped peninsula of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat to oversee "l'oeuvre des écoles d'Orient" — an organization dedicated to Eastern schools — and decided he would build himself a home there that recalled the one he had left behind. He drew the plans himself: a patio ringed with pillars, horseshoe arches forming a shaded arcade, and at one corner, a domed minaret that housed not a study or a guest room but a private chapel. The result, set inside four hectares of parkland, was close enough to his old African residence that the resemblance was the point.

Every winter he went back to Africa anyway, usually in the company of his sister, Aline Géraldy, whose son Paul would go on to become one of France's more celebrated poets. Between the two households — the bishop's and his sister's — the guest list at Saint-Jean ran to people like Isadora Duncan, who kept her own villa out on the Saint-Hospice peninsula nearby. Charmetant himself cut an odd figure through all of it: a man in a long homemade robe, more often found bent over his files or working a vegetable patch than entertaining anyone at all.

Maugham's Reinvention

He died in 1921. Aline held onto the villa for six more years before selling it to Maugham, who took one look at the Moorish patio and the minaret chapel and decided almost none of it suited him. He brought in the architect Henri Delmotte and had the place rebuilt around a harder, more modern geometry — cubic lines replacing the domes, an extension added, the chapel converted into an office where a bishop had once said Mass. Maugham was, by most accounts, considerably less devout than his predecessor, though he had his own superstitions: a strange talismanic motif went up by the entrance hall, meant to keep bad luck out.

What he did share with Charmetant was a fondness for the garden, though his tastes ran to fruit. He planted avocado trees — among the first in Europe to bear usable fruit — added a swimming pool and a tennis court, where he played most often with his secretary, and kept a household large enough to run a small hotel: a butler, a footman, two waitresses, a chef, a chauffeur, seven gardeners. Between the wars, that household fed and housed a guest list that ran from Winston Churchill to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who lived not far off at the Château de la Croë on Cap d'Antibes, along with Adlai Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Noël Coward, Harpo Marx, Lord Beaverbrook, and the Aga Khan. Inside, the rooms were furnished in a Spanish style and hung with the art Maugham had spent decades collecting on his travels through Asia, Africa, and Polynesia — the same collection that would later survive the war intact while the house around it did not.

War and Survival

The Nazi regime, for its part, had no patience for Maugham's fiction, which it judged as morally corrosive as it found his politics suspect. He fled to England for the war's duration and did not come back until 1946, to the shot-up facade, the empty cellar, and the paintings that had somehow made it through untouched. He called in another architect, the American Barry Dierks, to put the place back together, and lived there for close to two more decades. He tried to sell in the early 1960s, but his ex-wife and daughter contested the sale and the villa stayed in limbo until his death in 1965, after which it finally passed to new owners.

What Remains

What remains of that history today is thinner than it once was. The four hectares Charmetant laid out have been carved down to a quarter of their original size, parceled off over the decades since. Of the two very different houses built on the same foundations — the bishop's Moorish retreat and the novelist's cubist rebuild — almost nothing survives above ground except the name itself. La Mauresque persists, attached now to a much smaller garden, the last trace of a bishop who once modeled a French villa on the house he'd left behind in Africa, and never got to see what came after him.