A LIVING LEGEND

Brigitte Bardot and her costar Christian Marquand painstakingly get out of the water and fall exhausted on the sand of the seemingly deserted beach. When she gets up, Bardot’s wet shirtdress is half open, and after a few teasing invitations from her side, an erotic scene soon unfolds by a pine tree a little higher up the shore. The year is 1956 and the movie being shot is And God Created Woman (Et Dieu… créa la femme). Next to the film crew, led by the French director Roger Vadim, a bunch of curious locals are privileged enough to watch. Eight-year-old Patrice de Colmont is one of them. The vast Pampelonne beach in Ramatuelle, just south of Saint-Tropez, is his home and playground.

It was his father, the aristocratic ethnologist and explorer Bernard de Colmont, who fell