Just one more look at Sanary, neither photo having a great deal to do with anything I plan to write about, before I move on.
Back at home, I found myself watching a People - in the French sense, meaning celeb gossip - programme that seemed to go on for ever, and covered three mega-rich characters, none of whom I'd ever heard, and what they got up to during the holidays.
There was an American divorcee called Denise Rich. Her name (OK, I've seen it in print once or twice) appears to do scant justice to her wealth she was shown flitting from one glitzy Cannes boutique to the next in hideous spend spend spend mode.
More commendably, she was also intent on organising, in honour of a daughter who died from cancer, a fabulously glitzy charity bash in St Tropez which a bit of bad family news, which I think remained unexplained, led her to cancel at disarmingly short notice.
For some reason it made me think of the revered French actor, Roland Giraud, who insisted on going on stage and somehow getting through a performance In Paris just after learning that his daughter had been murdered.
We were also invited to follow the distressing holiday woes of a French designer, Max Azria, who lives in America and planned to charter a sumptuous yacht for £20,000 a day to cruise the Med between the Riviera and Italy.
I swear I took no pleasure in seeing film of choppy seas making everyone as seasick as I'd been on a little catamaran in the French West Indies last year.
The the yacht conked out, and everyone had to make do with a palatial St Trop hotel until it was repaired. Max rarely looked very happy with his lot, though his very American daughters made touching speeches in his honour.
What one of my early Salut! Forum guest writers, Robb Johnson, would have made of the third subject is open to question.
Old Chap, old ChevroletChristian Audigier probably means as little to Robb as he did to me, but is another made-it-Stateside French fashion designer.
For his 49th birthday party, he wanted his own rock concert. Well, it is a milestone of sorts, the day he entered his 50th year (I have tried but cannot think of any other justification for such self-indulgence, save that he could clearly afford it).
So what better than to import Johnny Hallyday to crown the celebrations in a mega-luxurious American dream villa?
As it happens, Audigier was comfortably the most likeable of the three characters. He flew in childhood pals from Avignon - the ambulanceman, the restaurateur, the bar-owner and so on - and cried a lot with seemingly genuine emotion. Johnny sat with him for a little interview to camera, explaining that they were kindred souls because "we have been poor, are now maybe not so poor but could tomorrow be poor again".
Robb, as left wing as it sometimes seemed you could be in Blair's Britain and not get locked up, would have been dismayed by much of what was on show. But maybe he would have seized on that sentiment as proof that Johnny's a true rock 'n' roller ay heart after all. Perhaps he'd also seize of the snapshots of his performance that we were included in the programme.
Because I am not a fan, I am bound to be more difficult to please. Johnny in French I quite enjoy in smallish doses, but here he chose an almost exclusively English repertoire, and Johnny doing Blue Suede Shoes in English seemed, to me, little better than the average pub band singer doing Blue Suede Shoes.
But I'd warmed to Christian and the obvious pride he took in the success he'd made of his life, and the decent touches like remembering the jolly ambulancier and other pals and giving them, separately, swell times in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
The programme, incidentally, was on the M6 channel and, since I have now checked with the Var-Matin TV magazine, I can admit to having devoted two hours and five minutes of my life to watching it with grim fascination.
It was self evidently a big budget production (unless the celebs stumped up the cost, or part of it, in return for having their egos massaged so expertly). Filming and reportage occurred in LA, Las Vegas, Miami, Marrakesh, the Côte d'Azur, Capri and Sardinia (and even then I have probably missed a few).
And it was just one episode in a flashy weekly series called Zone Interdite. Who said the French were snootily above taking an interest in the private lives of the rich and famous?
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