The Old Port of Nice

The place, briefly

The old port of Nice was dug from 1749, when the city belonged to the House of Savoy and its trade had outgrown a beach. It is a rectangular basin at the eastern end of the seafront, under the hill of the Château, and it has been the working end of a holiday town ever since. Ferries leave from it for Corsica. Fishing boats called pointus, double-ended and painted, are still moored along the inner quay.

James Baldwin sends David here at the end of Giovanni's Room, though he never uses the word port.[1]

What Baldwin does write is a sequence. David has left Hella asleep in their house in the south and gone, alone, to Nice. He roams the bars of the town, and at the end of the first night he goes up the stairs of a dark hotel with a sailor. The sailor's leave is not over. The sailor has friends. David stays with them for days, and on the last night of that leave, drinking in a crowded bar, he looks into the mirror and sees Hella's face behind him. She has come to find him. The engagement ends there, in front of the sailor, who asks whether she has got the wrong bar.[1]

The port is the inference, and it is a reasonable one. Nice is a Mediterranean port city; a sailor on shore leave with several days to spend and friends to introduce is a man moving through the bars near his ship. Baldwin does not draw the harbour, but he puts a sailor at the centre of the scene, and the harbour is why the sailor is in the town at all.[2]

That is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up. The port is a probable setting, inferred from the characters Baldwin chose, not a place he names. He names Nice. He names the bars. He does not name the water.

What the port supplies to the book is anonymity. A harbour town's bars run on people who will be gone in a week, which is precisely what David wants on the night he is trying to stop being himself. He is not looking for a relationship; he has just refused one. The transience is the appeal, and a port is where transience is the local industry.[3]

The basin is easy to visit and has changed less than the seafront. The Quai Lunel and the Quai des Docks run the length of it, the ferry terminal sits at the far end, and the bars along the quays still open onto the water.