La Salle des Mariages

MENTON, PROVENCE-ALPES-COTE-D'AZUR

If you want to get married or renew your vows, may I recommend the Salle des Mariages in Menton town hall?

It was decorated with murals on three walls and the ceiling by Jean Cocteau in the late 1950s - and although it's hard to capture on camera, it's dreamy...

Criticised throughout his life because people didn't understand him, Cocteau was always trying something new to please his critics.

First a poet then a self-taught cinematographer then an artist, and so on

The naive lines and curves on the murals are what Cocteau called 'Menton Style' and they depict different mythical stories about love.

In the preliminary sketches, Cocteau had planned to write 'La femme doit suivre son mari' (the wife must follow her husband) on one, but in the final version he left off 'la femme'.

Interpret that how you want. Was he telling wives to claim some agency and 'hold their space' or was he playing on the ambiguity of the his/her of 'son', and nodding to homosexual marriage that would only come decades later? Or both?

Although a Parisian all his life, Cocteau became a “true Mediterranean” and his time in the south was one of intense creativity and joie-de-vivre.

Cocteau’s Menton story started in 1955 when he went to a music festival and got to know the mayor of the town.

He asked Cocteau to do a poster for the following year’s festival – which he did – and then as a reward he got given the ruin of a bastion on the seafront as a reward.

I only mention this because one time I stayed in Menton it was La Nuit des Musées when the museums stay open late at night and are free to enter.

I wandered along after dinner to visit le Bastion which is now the Musée Jean Cocteau.

Decide between yourselves but I think what I found is possibly one of the most French things I’ve ever experienced.

The place was stuffed with Cocteau fans. Men, women, teens, children; everyone was there watching a mad musical play about the man himself. I couldn’t even get in the room so I had to watch through someone’s legs.

I reckon the man who was always trying to be accepted and to please people would have been pretty chuffed with that.