Word: azure
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...battle of Actium in 31 B.C. It was at Fréjus that Napoleon made his triumphant return from Egypt in 1799, and it was a key beachhead when the Allies landed on France's southern shore in 1944. The golden CÓte d'Azur begins at Fréjus' beach, and this year the dry summer had brought a record in tourists and a good wine crop. But for five days torrential rains had lashed the Riviera, and the lake behind the Malpasset Dam was ominously rising...
...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...
...bumper with homeward-bound cars. Many tourists swore they would never return, but might well change their minds by next summer, especially if they listen to the men of vision on the Riviera who are talking excitedly of building artificial islands off the Côte d'Azur, inaugurating helicopter service, and even of building Plexiglas tunnels to newer, better and dimmer cellars...
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...