The French Riviera, the sun-drenched south-eastern corner of France squeezed between the southern Alps and the Mediterranean Sea, has been a magnet for writers for seven centuries. Early in the 14th century, the exiled Florentine poet Dante passed through and wrote of its vertiginous mountains in his Inferno.  Since then, generations of literary migrants have followed.

The Cap Ferrat dangles like an earring from the Riviera coastline, its shores adorned with sumptuous villas. In the early years of the 20th century many of them were owned by King Leopold II of Belgium. In 1926 one of them, the Villa Mauresque (Moorish Villa), which had been built to house the King’s personal priest (Leopold’s nocturnal frolics required convenient access to a doctor and a confessor), was bought by the English novelist and playwright, W. Somerset Maugham.

It was to be his home and refuge for the next 40 years: when his lawyer suggested that he put the villa in his daughter’s name to avoid estate duties, he said, ‘Thank you, I’ve read King Lear.’

Jean-Paul Sartre: Existential Hero