Clive Bell's love for all things French was often a source of irritation to the British arts establishment. In an epistolary battle with Wyndham Lewis, Bell once wrote that ‘at any given moment the best painter in England is unlikely to be better than a first-rate man in the French second-class’, a sentiment unlikely to win over even the most tolerant of his critics. His wide circle of friends in France, first in Paris, and later in the south, included not only the painters who were also friends with Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, but writers such as Georges Duhamel and Georges Gabory. Among his closest French friends were Jean Cocteau, who introduced Bell to his own circle, including the musicians known as Les Six, and the painter André Derain. Bell certainly considered Picasso a friend and treated him as such, but always with the understanding that the artist lived within a milieu he could never completely penetrate.

Both of Clive and Vanessa's sons studied in Paris with a private tutor, Henri Pinault, and before he went up to Cambridge Julian had the benefit of introductions to his father's friends, among whom one of the closest was Matisse's son-in-law, the writer Georges Duthuit. Clive was at home in France but never made a home there, as Vanessa did at La Bergère in Cassis. At the end of his life, Clive and his companion Barbara Bagenal regularly joined the many English expatriates on the Côte d’Azur amongst other prominent figures such as Winston Churchill, W. Somerset Maugham and Graham Sutherland.

Darling, my legs have almost given way, and I have turned into the pretty little café Voltaire opposite the Odéon to rest them and drink a glass of vermouth – so you perceive that a letter can be nothing but a parergon. This is a Sunday – la fête des morts – the shops all shut, and all the little parisiennes trotting about in their black frocks – I won't deny, however, that in their very short skirts – that they know how to make not ridiculous – and their long bottines, with just a little gap of stocking showing between the two, I find them extremely seductive.