‘Heard of the blue hour? […] It’s not an hour…a minute, really. Just before dawn, there’s a minute of silence. The day birds aren’t up yet, and the night birds are already asleep. Then… there’s real silence…’

So tells Reinette to Mirabelle in Éric Rohmer’s charming Quatre Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle. Mirabelle, being from Paris and not from the country like her new friend Reinette, had in fact not heard of the blue hour. And, so it happens, neither had I. The pairs first attempt to witness this minute of silence together is rudely spoiled by the presence of a noisy car in the distance, but the following night they try again and succeed in witnessing the brief moment in which it appears that the whole Earth is asleep. Mirabelle finds herself caught all of a sudden in a world she has never experienced before. There is total peace. All is quiet. And when the minute is over, both Mirabelle and Reinette are overcome with emotion; they embrace. It isn’t Reinette’s first blue hour, but it is Mirabelle’s. And that Reinette could be a witness to that makes the moment one that neither of these friends will forget. So ends Part One of the film. And so entered a new entry onto my bucket list – and the second entry inspired by a Rohmer film. I wanted to witness the blue hour, the minute of silence. And the following day I set off for the south of France with a group of twelve friends.

Of course, the trip was not a spontaneous one come about as a result of me watching Reinette et Mirabelle. We had all booked our flights to Nice several months prior (well, almost all of us. One of the group got around to it a little later, arrived the following evening too late to catch a bus to where we were staying, and had to fork out a hundred euros for a taxi so as to not have to sleep in the airport’s arrivals lounge). Thirteen of us, all friends since school, abroad together – a strange and lucky phenomenon, as one American tourist let us know later in the week. We were not actually staying in Nice itself, but in a small village around an hour’s drive from the city, called Fayence. The village is perched on a hill which, in the August sun, soon becomes quite the feat to walk up after a trip to the Super U which resides at the hill’s base. It is a beautiful area, and with rarely a cloud to be seen a walk to the top of the village afforded us a panoramic view of the mountains and the other perched villages and small towns that make up the north-east Var department of France’s Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region. Being a little way out of the city, Fayence offers a serenity and a closeness to nature which perhaps wouldn’t have been so accessible were we to have resided in Nice: the geckos scurrying across the bedroom walls; the greenery that made up the horizon; and the singing of the crickets that acted as a constant backdrop to our conversations from the moment we awoke until well into the night. This, I thought on our first evening, could prove to be the perfect place for me to experience the blue hour for the very first time.

Our first morning consisted of locating the nearest supermarket, the Super U. Things were needed: snacks, ingredients for that evening’s dinner, cigarettes, and wine. Despite the drunkenness of the night before, we arose early to beat the worst of the heat and headed down the hill upon which our home for the week was situated. After five or ten minutes, upon reaching a tennis court, if you were to look back you could see resting under the sun the dome of houses that make up Fayence, perched on the side of the hill, topped with the little bell tower that later that week, unbeknownst to me yet, I would watch the sunrise from. Continuing along the road from this spot, we took a left and then followed the road a short distance before reaching a roundabout. This little journey from home to roundabout became very familiar very quickly, for if you take a right at the roundabout you shortly arrive at the Super U, from which we bought lunch and dinner ingredients each day, and if, instead, you continue straight and cross over the roundabout you stumble across a Boulangerie, a Tabac, and a friendly little bar. We ended up visiting this bar, named Bar de La Gare, almost every day, for a beer or an espresso and a game of cards. The owner of this bar, and the only member of staff we ever saw working there, was an elderly Frenchman called Claude. Despite only two of our group being able to speak French, Claude was very accommodating each visit, whether early in the morning or late in the afternoon, supplying us with a mat to play our cards on, encouraging us to eat our pastries from the Boulangerie while sat at his tables, and on two occasions providing a free replacement for a spilt drink (the card games got a little competitive, evidently). I would have liked to have spoken more to Claude and learned about his life here in Fayence, but sadly I speak not a word of French beyond bonjour, au revoir, and merci – oh how I regret not studying languages beyond my GCSEs.

For some of the group, less time was spent out exploring Fayence and more time was spent in the pool or lounging in the shade than preferable, but it was just too hot for most of the day to be out walking in the sun (for our unadjusted British temperaments, anyway). I think this suited a few people quite well, but I know that I for one would have liked to have seen more of the local area. That said, when we could we did get out, and one such place we braved the sun for was a vineyard that offered a free wine tasting. Domaine Grande Bastide offers a selection of reds, whites, and rosés, all of which are made using the grapes grown on their vineyard. While perusing the shop you are invited to taste a little of each of these wines, nine in total, three of each colour, to better inform a decision on which bottles you’d like to buy, and through one of the windows you could look upon the field of Syrah grapes while sipping the wine that a previous year’s vintage had produced. I enjoyed that part in particular, the sight taking me back to the Camino and the walk through Spain’s Rioja region. Once we had tried a little of each, purchases were made and we all left with one or several bottles, back into the heat that we’d momentarily been able to hide from, and bracing for our long walk home (getting a taxi in this remote little area was nigh-impossible).

One of the most memorable parts of the trip was something we stumbled upon purely by chance, which, as experience continually presents to me, seems to be how the best things in life are usually discovered. It was Thursday evening and we had taken the hill up into Fayence for a dinner out. The name of the restaurant at which we were eating escapes me, but the place itself does not. Our table was situated on the opposite side of the street from the restaurant, running parallel to the road that lay between us and the other diners, on a platform that at one end was on the same level as the road, but at the opposite end was a sizeable step up from it due to the fact that the street was, of course, on a hill; you’d do well to find a stretch of even twenty meters in Fayence that lies completely flat. On the table were black and almost neon-green napkins which, with their brat summer-esque appearance, looked out of place among the sandy coloured stone buildings which lined both sides of the street, and which turned golden for a few moments before the sun finally sank below the horizon. As the evening wore on and our plates emptied, music could be heard playing from somewhere lower down in the town, and it seemed that a party of sorts was beginning to take shape. The sun had set, and the temperature was finally becoming cool enough that a loose linen shirt no longer felt like you were wearing a fleece. A streetlamp, protruding from the wall of a building next to us, had switched on and flickered rapidly between hues of warm orange and yellow. The whole town seemed very much alive. So we finished our crème brûlées, settled the tab, and headed down the hill in the direction of the music.

The music was coming, we discovered, from Fayence’s little town square. Earlier in the day this area had been full of stalls selling spices, fresh croissants, dresses, tees, rings, hats, fruit, meat, even little works of pottery by a man who was sat spinning the wet clay right there among the bustle of tourists and locals alike. Now, the stalls had all been packed away and replaced by a little stage at the square’s edge for a DJ and his speakers, and while the tables outside the café remained full, the people populating them were no longer drinking espressos, but beer and wine. The town’s square was lively with the happy townsfolk of Fayence, dancing away the night. We joined them for a while, but it soon became apparent that several of these French songs came accompanied with a choreographed dance that the whole square seemed to know, and so I dipped to the side before long and contented myself with being a spectator instead, while the braver of the group committed to learning the routines – or giving it their best shot. The atmosphere there was great. Everyone was dancing, having fun, living. And it was a Thursday night. I longed right there and then to be able to move abroad more permanently. One of the things I find so beautiful and so uplifting about Europe outside the UK – at least from my experiences in Spain and here in Fayence – is the enjoyment that people have for life; work doesn’t seem to consume people the way it does back home. This Thursday evening in Fayence typified this beautifully for me. The whole town appeared to be here in the square, any troubles left someplace else, just smiling, laughing, drinking, dancing. The atmosphere that night will stick in my memory for a long time, I’m sure.

Near enough every day of the trip I told myself that I would get an early night so that I could wake up before the sun the following day and catch the blue hour and its accompanying minute of silence. But every day turned into an evening and then a night of wine drinking that I didn’t wish to say goodbye to. And so it finally became clear that my only chance of ticking this item off my bucket list was to not sleep at all, but to stay up the entire night right through to sunrise. And so, on Saturday the eleventh, along with five others, this is just what I did. It’s hard to tell for certain whether we caught a minute of silence or not, which might sound foolish but let me explain. Until well into the early hours of the morning the crickets continued their racket. We would cease talking every so often to listen in case they had stopped, for that was to be our signal that the silent minute had begun, but their humming and buzzing was still there. It must have been about three in the morning when a cockerel some distance away in the valley somewhere awoke and started its call, which surprised me for I thought they notoriously awoke with the sunrise. Every few minutes – maybe less than – its ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ rung out across the night. More time passed, and the six of us continued to wait. I don’t know who it was who noticed it first, or what the time was when they noticed it, I only remember the excitement that was felt when someone pointed out that they could no longer hear the crickets. This was it. We each fell silent and cautiously but hastily got up from our chairs around the table and moved up the garden further away from the house. Each of us found our own little spot to sit or lie down and there we stayed silent, listening. I lay by the pool’s edge, looking at the stars above. The crickets had indeed stopped their singing. It was like nothing I’d experienced before. Here in the dark, with five friends, listening for nothingness. We didn’t quite get it. Some distance off a faint whirring or rustling could be heard, very gentle. I thought it was the sound of water, maybe a flowing stream. Someone else believed it to be the breeze through the leaves. Whatever it was, it meant we weren’t in total silence, but if it hadn’t had been for that cockerel offering up his occasional cry, I think that moment might have counted as the minute of silence we had been waiting for. Regardless, the moment was magic. There was an excitement about it hard to articulate. It was like the air was pulsating with energy while at the same time finally becoming completely still, calm, tender. We stayed there for a while without speaking, as the blue hour formed slowly around us. The sky became a rich, deep blue, unlike any sky I’d seen in my life up to that point. The sun was on its way up, and we wanted to catch it.

Being situated part way down the hill, the sunrise wasn’t to be visible from where we were at current. So we all agreed we’d walk up the hill, through Fayence, past the now-empty square, past the restaurant we’d eaten at two nights prior, all the way up to the bell tower that crowned the town – and there we watched as the sky gradually transformed from a deep navy to an orange, a red, a yellow, and finally a crisp baby blue that marked Sunday morning. With each new minute a new stroke of colour was brushed gently across the sky. The greens and blues and pinks of the painted wooden shutters on the houses below came into being. It was a sunrise that stands out in its significance from the bulk of others I’ve seen. It wasn’t the most striking of them all, but alongside two others (both experienced while walking across the north of Spain) it is one that remains most vivid in my memory.

We spent our final day of the trip in Nice itself, and the little snapshot of the city that this entitled us to made me wish we’d spent the whole week here. It’s tall narrow streets; it’s markets selling old cameras and books and rings; the port; the old town and the new town; the warmth of its orange and yellow buildings; the laundry hung out the windows to dry; the sea. Everything here captivated me. Very quickly Nice became one of my favourite places that I’ve ever visited, and I was there for a mere half day. Admittedly, the heat there was even more stifling than it had been in Fayence, but the beauty of it all meant it was impossible to not feel energised and enchanted. It’s the sort of place I’d enjoy getting lost in for a while, for each street had a character of its own that you could get to know, and in that hot sun everywhere seemed intriguing, uplifting. I’ll have to return sometime (many times, hopefully) and explore it further, for at current I have only this briefest experience of it, this skimming of the city’s surface, and really not even that. So, I cannot say much more about it just now, except that Nice captured my attention in a way that not many places do. I’ll leave it there for now, and hope to return to Nice at a later date, when I’ll be able to write more in depth about the charm and the life of this city.

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