In his plays and his novels, British writer Somerset Maugham described the high society, the Far East, the Pacific.islands. But it was in Cap-Ferrat that he installed his main home in the magnificent property La Mauresque which he acquired in 1926. Thanks to the success of his books, (Of human bondage, the painted Veil , the razor’s edge, the collections of short stories as the Three big ladies of Antibes), he became richer, he surrounded himself with expensive works of art and received luxuriously, notably H.G. Wells, Jean Cocteau, Evelyn Waugh, Ian Fleming, Winston Churchill, the duke and the duchess of Windsor... He wrote regularly until 1958 in a room the window of which he made condemn for not being distracted by the magnificent sight until the Estérel mountains. Caustic, having little esteem for humanity, more and more disenchanted in his old days, he died on December 16, 1965 in the English hospital of Mont-Boron.
Ralph SCHOR
