Un Touriste À Vence
The First Guidebook to Vence from 1855

It’s a very small book, only 9cm by 14cm (about 3.5 inches by 5.5 inches). It’s also old. Very old. Published in 1855 Un Touriste À Vence (A Tourist In Vence) is the first real guide/history book devoted exclusively to Vence. It not only provides detailed information about the town itself, but a lot of interesting stories and history as well. Written by E. Tisserand de Melun and published by the printing press of Madame V. Belin (in French, of course), the book contains 31 short chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of Vence and/or its history.

Original copies of the book are not easy to come by these days. Currently, I do not see any for sale online at any of the old and/or rare booksellers. I was lucky to find this copy about six months ago and when I stumbled across it I bought it right away. Overall, the book is in pretty good condition. There is some discoloring on the cover, the corners are torn and tattered and some of the page edges are a bit worn (though the book was published with very ragged page edges to begin with). Some pages have been taped together at the binding in three or four places as well.

In 2009 the Vence author Anne Verots-Guilbaud published a large, coffee table style book called Deux Touristes À Vence. The first half of the book is a faithful reproduction of Un Touriste À Vence, reproducing the entire contents of the book. The second half is a journey in photos through the town of Vence at the beginning of the 1900s. Deux Touristes À Vence is fairly easy to find, but again, it’s in the original French.

Un Touriste À Vence was also reissued in 2013 by Hachette Livre – BNF (in French) and these more recent editions are easy to find online, so if you’re looking for a hard copy of the book you might want to go that route.

To the best of my knowledge this book has never been translated into English. At least I can’t find anything online. So, I decided to translate the book and make it available in our store for download. I’m excited to share this English translation with other English speakers who are interested in Vence.

I have been able to find very little information about E. Tisserand de Melun, the author, other than that he was a French abbot who wrote several books on Antibes, Nice, Vence and the Alpes-Maritimes. In 1860, a few years after the publication of A Tourist In Vence, he published a much more in-depth history of Vence titled Histoire de Vence.

I am by no means currently fluent in French. To create this English translation I did the following: I copied most of the text from a public domain PDF, though because of the poor quality of this PDF I also needed to scan some of the pages from a different source. I used ChatGPT and Google Translate to translate the text and then read through it carefully making any obvious corrections. I followed the design and layout of the original book, copying the style and fonts as closely as possible. On the whole, I think this is a very good translation and quite readable. I hope you find it worthwhile.

We are also offering a French text version PDF and a PDF that faithfully reproduces the original book. All three versions are available in our store, with discounts if you buy more than one version.

Here’s a breakdown of the chapters in the book and a look at some sample pages from the three different versions.

Un Touriste À Vence
Prologue
The Grimaldi of Cagnes
Gaspard of Besse
The Bandit
The Beautiful Malvan Valley, Saint-Paul and la Colle
Sainte-Elisabeth
The Appearance of Vence
Vence and Its Administration, Ancient and Modern
February in Vence
The Tauribole and Its Old Inscriptions
The First Bishop of Vence
Saint Lambert
The Bishops of Vence
A Pope
Guillaume le Blanc (1588-1601)
Bishop Godeau
Bishop Surian, Acaddemician
Bishop Pisani of la Gaude
The Villeneuves of Vence
The Duel
The Lord of Malvan and the Lord of Vence
The Lord of Tourettes and the Lord of Bar
Place Saint-Michel Square
The Grand-Jardin of Vence
The Streets and Squares of Vence
The Seminary
The Calvary
The Hermit of Calvary of Vence
The Templars
The Hermit of Saint-Martin
A Procession in Vence
A Church Service in Vence
The Dog of Courmettes
Epilogue

[click on any image to see sample pages of the English version]