These days, the summer parking-lot attendant jobs had given way to an automated barrier. I took my ticket, found a space near the harbormaster’s office, and walked along the quays. Many things had changed in twenty years; the entrance to the harbor had been completely redesigned, the road had been widened, and most of the area had been pedestrianized. But the view was the same. For me, it is one of the most beautiful on the Côte d’Azur: the blue sea in the foreground, a vast, reassuring silhouette of the Fort Carré rising behind the forest of masts, the azure sky sweeping everything away, and the pale mountains just visible in the distance.

The mistral was blowing hard today, and I loved it. Everything came together to reconnect me with my past, to make me feel rooted in this place I loved, this place I had left for tragic reasons. I had no illusions—the city was no longer what it had been when I was a teenager, but as with New York, I liked my idea of Antibes. A place apart, sheltered from the tawdry glitz of many towns on the Côte. The city I had once introduced Vinca to was the city of jazz, of the Lost Generation, one that had welcomed almost every artist who mattered to me. Maupassant had moored his yacht Le Bel-Ami here. In the 1920s, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had stayed at the Hôtel Belles Rives. Picasso had set up his studio in the Château Grimaldi, a stone’s throw from the apartment where Nicolas de Staël executed his most beautiful paintings. Finally, Keith Jarrett, whose concerts provided the soundtrack for all of my novels, still regularly played at La Pinède.

I walked through the stone arch of the Porte Marine, the ancient ramparts dividing the harbor from the old walled city. It was a spring weekend; the place was buzzing, but the tidal wave of tourists that robbed the city of its atmosphere had yet to arrive. It was possible to walk along the rue Aubernon without being jostled. On the Cours Masséna, grocers, florists, cheesemongers, and local craftsmen were packing up their stalls, but the covered market still shimmered with a myriad of colors. People chatted in patois, solving the world’s problems amid a symphony of scents: black olives, candied lemons, mint, sun-dried tomatoes. Outside city hall, the last wedding of the morning was ending, and a beaming couple was coming down the steps to a shower of cheers and fluttering rose petals. Although my life was far removed from such festivities—these days, the idea of being married made no sense to me—I let myself be swept along by the whoops of joy and the wide smiles.