Grasse's mountain resort
- Tom Richardson
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
About an hour’s drive north of Grasse lies Thorenc*, which has long had close ties with our town. A rich merchant family in Grasse, the Théas, made the upwardly mobile leap into the aristocracy by becoming seigneurs of Thorenc in the seventeenth century. Other eminent Grasse families, such as the Isnards and the Fantons, also had land in the area. The Théas’ castle, which dominates the valley of the river Lane, was visited by Goethe in the eighteenth century and by Guy de Maupassant in the nineteenth.
But apart from the castle, what makes Thorenc quite different from other villages in the area is that it became a mountain resort in the 1890s. At the time, investment capital was abundant in Grasse due to the revolution in perfumery driven by steam distillation and to extravagant spending by rich incomers such as Alice de Rothschild and the Bowes family. All that money had to go somewhere, and hotels which took advantage of the interest of the rich and unhealthy in the clean air of the mountains were an investment opportunity.
A competitor to Davos
A major nineteenth century beneficiary of the fashion for mountain cures was Davos in Switzerland, which was famous for its sanitoria. A group of Grasse investors, led by Jean Luce, a rich banker, decided that Thorenc could become another Davos. Luce was quite a character. Émile Litschgy* recounts that Grassois at the time, instead of saying ‘he’s as rich as Croesus’ would say ‘Il est riche comme Monsieur Luce’ (‘he is as rich as M Luce’)! He was also a keen amateur photographer, and there is a large trove of his images of the time in the Alpes-Maritimes archives in Nice.
Others involved were the head of the Grasse hospital (then at St Hilaire), the perfumer Hugues Ainé, one of the Rothschild banks and Ferdinand Rost, the German hotelier who managed Grasse’s successful Grand Hotel.
The Grand catered for ‘hivernants’ (‘winterers’) and lay closed for the rest of the year. The investors built an equally upmarket establishment at Thorenc as a summer equivalent. To emphasise the link, they named it the Grand Hotel Climaterique. It was opened in 1898 and operated from 1st May until mid-November while the Grand was closed, so the two could provide consistently high standards of service through continuous employment for management and staff. The promoters also constructed a casino, a hippodrome, a golf course and in 1902 dammed the Lane river to create an artificial lake.
A tourist guide invited visitors to enjoy "the atmospheric purity, the absence of humidity and fog, the strong sunshine, and " (perhaps crucially?) an "absence of mosquitoes."
By 1900, what was once an agricultural settlement had, according to another guide, "three hotels, twenty-five cottages and villas, post office, telephone, doctor, pharmacist, two chapels, two butchers, two bakers, greengrocers, haberdasher, tobacconist, public works contractors, carriage rental companies, wine merchant, hairdresser, grocer, laundry, etc".
Getting to Thorenc
When Thorenc's resort was conceived, it took about four hours to travel there from the railway station in Grasse. The cost for a private party by landau was 30 francs, and individuals could pay 5 francs each by public carriage.
It seems unlikely that the promoters had any idea in the mid-1890s that automobile technology would revolutionise travel just as their investments were being made. They even mooted an expensive railway line from Grasse to make reaching the new resort quicker. But by the early 1900s, rapid advances made it easy for rich tourists to reach Thorenc by car, while char-a-bancs became available for the less well-off. The railway was never built, no doubt because the availability of motor travel destroyed the economics of such an undertaking.
The rapid expansion of the new resort must have owed much to the new technology: the promoters' timing was lucky!
Between the wars there was a regular public bus service to the resort from the railway station at Grasse.
Today, things have changed. While there are still bus stops in the village, there is no actual service closer than Andon and Thorenc can only be reached by car.
A Russian connection
Wealthy visitors came to Thorenc from all over Europe. In 1900, during the Boxer rebellion in China, pre-revolutionary Russia invaded Manchuria. While their military resources secured success, Russian losses in killed and wounded were significant, and a Russian Grand Duke, who lived mostly in Cannes, decided that Thorenc was an ideal location for the convalescence of Russian officers. Two of Jean Luce’s photographs show groups of Russian soldiers and nurses in 1904.
The Russian connection survives today in the forms of the Genévriers residence, built in 1903 in ‘dacha’ style, and a chapel said to be one of only two Orthodox chapels in France built to wooden traditional design.
After the Great War
After the revolution in Russia, Thorenc became something of a refuge for ‘White’ Russians (as distinct from the ‘Red’ Bolsheviks) and it seems it was they who had the chapel built.
Thorenc remained popular for tourists in the twenties and thirties. The Société Immobilière et Hôtelière de Thorenc which had been created in 1896 developed the Park-Palace hotel in Grasse on the foundations of Alice de Rothschild’s Villa Victoria and owned the Hotel Wagram in Paris.
The resort also thrived as a refuge for sufferers from tuberculosis and other respiratory illnesses. A sanatorium was built in 1928 by the Church for the clergy. It had a chapel which was originally consecrated by Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII. As with all mountain sanitoria, the need for it was ended by antibiotics and it closed in the 1960s.
What happened to the hotels?
Very much as in Grasse (see my blog here), Thorenc's historic hotels have faded from the scene but can still be seen in the form of apartments.
The village today
Unsurprisingly, Thorenc looks quite different from other villages in the area. There is no obvious square with terraced village houses. Most of the buildings are larger, on big plots and designed in chalet style. The local web-site rather strangely suggests that the village has ‘un air de Harry-Potter’, but actually French Indo-China seems to have been influential. Several large buildings, including even the church, have pagoda-style pinnacles which lend the village a slightly exotic air. Indeed, one part of the village is known as Place de Tonkin.
The lake
When I visited Thorenc, there were few people about (although I can recommend the Auberge de la Foret, which also has bedrooms, for lunch) but the lake was very popular on a sunny day with, as the original promoters of the resort claimed, clean and fresh air. Although the lake is artificial, the dam is unobtrusive and the scenery is impressive by almost any standards.
Unlike in previous times, there don’t seem to be any boats on the waters, but ‘English-style’ fishing (with a weight and float) is promoted on noticeboards on the lakeside. Judging by the old photographs, such fishing has been in fashion here for over one hundred years!
The nature reserve
Thorenc and its surroundings are well worth a visit for their own sake. As an additional attraction, next to the village is La Réserve des Monts d’Azur, a re-wilding nature reserve with European bison, Przewalski’s horses, deer, boar and perhaps wolves.
*Thorenc has two useful websites. The main one is www.thorenc-station.com, but the Association des Amis de Thorenc has one of its own here. I also recommend a short paper on the history of Thorenc written by Dominique Laredo which can be downloaded from an archive site here. For the quote about Jean Luce, see Emile Litschgy, 'On lui disait Maubert-la-Piece', TAC 2001.
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