"The War Upset Everybody"

DALLAS PRATT

Beatrice Cartwright, late owner of one of the two houses described
below, was a granddaughter of Park Benjamin. She was one of the
donors of the Park Benjamin Collection at Columbia, and is herself
remembered at the Library by the "Beatrice Benjamin Cartwright
Memorial Collection: Books About New York.'" Andre Malraux's
wartime experiences, appearing in the last issue of the Columns, coin¬
cided with the events of this article, which continues the story of the
war years and sketches some personalities of the "Cote d'Azur."

editor's note
 

T
 

I/" If ^HIS is the wartime story of two houses in the south of
France. One of them, "Casa Estella," is a white-painted,
pine-shadowed villa, with many terraces leading steeply
down to the blanched rocks of Cap d'Antibes and the sea. Before
the discovery of the Riviera's "summer season," beginning in the
late nineteen-twenties, the house belonged to Lloyd Osbourne,
stepson and collaborator of Robert Louis Stevenson. It had a liter¬
ary atmosphere, with Osbourne at work in his studio under the
eaves, and George Bernard Shaw sometimes to be seen, afloat,
beard and all, off the rocks. Then came the sun-seekers, English
and American, tired of the rain and formality of the Channel re¬
sorts—among them my mother, Beatrice Benjamin Cartwright.
She bought the villa in 1932. With the arrival of the summer peo¬
ple, the literati abandoned the coast (with one or two exceptions:
Somerset Maugham at Cap Ferrat; Paul Gallico at Antibes) and
sought the seclusion of the mountainous back-countty or less fash¬
ionable refuges elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

The other house is very different. A small, ancient, rustic
"chateau," with vineyard and several hundred olive trees, ten
miles inland from Casa Estella, it is on a 1200-foot ridge, with

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