Word: azur
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...year history of the French Riviera, a place which in Queen Victoria's day thought itself a winter resort. From Menton on the Italian border all along the beautifully indented 165-mile coast to La Ciotat outside Marseille, the sunlit Côte d'Azur was jammed with a half-million vacationing Frenchmen and hundreds of thousands of foreign tourists...
...down. As the sleek cars sped by, campers stood at the edge of the road washing themselves-when there was water. For all the tourists this season the Riviera seemed cramped, and the resort towns are blending into each other to form an endless Côte d'Azur city. At no place is the coast wider than ten miles between mountains and sea, and the roads are inadequate. It took 90 fume-choked minutes to traverse the Croisette in Cannes; six hours to drive the 35 miles from Fréjus to Nice...
Marcel Cardinal, an ex-commando captain, began underwater exploration out of curiosity, rapidly became an addict. He took to carrying a sketchbook with him to the Cannes beach, would plunge into the deep blue sea off the Côte d'Azur, then flipper to the surface to jot down notes. Worked up first in watercolor and finally in oils, his paintings evoke the mysterious transparency of undersea scenes where objects-a ship's hull, rock outcropping-loom more evocatively than their above-the-surface counterparts...
...Soho hipsters who swelter and suffocate for it in the Cat's Whisker, the Côte d'Azur or The Two I's, skiffle is brand-new; to jazz critics and non-skiffling professional musicians, it is old-"a bastardized, commercialized form of the real thing," said one critic, "watered down to suit the sickly orange-juice tastes of musical illiterates...
...Russian museums of modern art were stocked by Czarist merchants who wintered on the Cóte d'Azur in the balmy days before World War I and were among the first to patronize school-of-Paris art. Leningrad's Hermitage Museum and Moscow's Pushkin Museum between them remain the world's greatest repository of early Matisse paintings...