Living on the Riviera. Nobody tells you this part.
Inside the French Riviera
For more than twenty-five years, people have been asking me the same question.
“Is there an English version of your books?”
They asked it casually.
They asked it politely.
They asked it insistently.
Hotel guests. Journalists. Friends of friends. Once even a film director who had made more than a dozen feature films and said, almost in passing:
“There’s a book in this. A real one.”
For a long time, I ignored the question.
Not because the stories weren’t there — they were. Too many of them, in fact.
But because translating anecdotes is easy, and understanding what they mean is not.
Living and working on the French Riviera is often presented as a postcard: light, leisure, luxury, beauty. And yes — all of that exists. But there is also a parallel reality, one you only encounter when you stay long enough, invest something of yourself, or make the mistake of believing that charm automatically implies innocence.
I lived there for years. I ran a hotel. I dealt with administrations, neighbors, courts, police officers, charming liars, dangerous men, and very decent people trying to survive between them. Nothing extraordinary. And precisely for that reason: everything revealing.
I didn’t want to write a sensational book.
I didn’t want to name names.
And I didn’t want to explain France.
What I wanted was distance.
So instead of translating my earlier books, I started again. I selected. I removed. I compressed years into patterns. What remained was not a collection of stories, but a line — one that runs underneath them.
That line became Inside the French Riviera.
It’s not a guide.
It’s not a memoir in the usual sense.
And it’s certainly not a revenge story.
It’s a book about what happens when an outsider stays long enough to stop being exotic — but never long enough to become invisible.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll share fragments here. Not spoilers, not chapters, but observations: about power, routine, silence, humor, fear, absurdity — and the strange calm that comes when you stop being surprised.
If you’re interested in places beyond their postcards, in systems rather than incidents, and in stories that don’t raise their voice to be heard, you may want to subscribe.
No promises.
No hype.
Just perspective.
— Arnold