The story of the French couple who spent a year living in a public toilet

The Côte d'Azur, or French riveria as it's often known in English, is internationally renowned as being one of those places that is a playground of the rich and famous.

It's home to a host of cities and resorts that, on paper at least, conjure up images of sun, sea and the good life: Nice, Cannes, Antibes, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Saint Raphaël, Saint Tropez...and so the list goes on.

But of course life in spite of the climate - sunny, hot and dry in summer and relatively mild in winter - is not so wonderful for all that live there.

Such as in the case of 62-year-old Marie Rolin and her 69-year-old husband, Jeannot, who have spent the best part of the past year living in a public toilet in the town of Menton.

The story of how they came to find themselves living in less-than-desirable conditions began after Jeannot fell ill; his diabetes worsening to such an extent that he was hospitalised and had to have one of his legs amputated.

The couple's landlord reportedly took advantage of the situation to repossess their apartment and - to cut a long story short - Marie and Jeannot found themselves homeless.

And without anywhere else to go, they turned to the public conveniences, the place Marie had been cleaning and looking after for around 12 years.

"Some days I spent the whole time scrubbing and trying to get rid of the smells," she told the regional newspaper, Nice Matin, which first broke the story last week.

"And we built a room where we stored household products and somewhere for Jeannot to sleep," she continued.

"For my part, I managed with a camping bed, and to cook, we set up a small kitchen area," she added.

It wasn't as though the couple were resigned to their fate though, and they certainly didn't want to spend the rest of their days living in a public toilet.

"We made housing applications but it was complicated," she told the newspaper.

And in spite of the couple earning about €1,000 a month and being able to pay a modest rent, local authorities didn't appear in any sort of a rush to rehouse them.

Until last week that is.

Their story made it into the national media, being picked up by a radio station, and was heard by Pierre Charon, an advisor to the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

"I heard their daughter interviewed on the radio and found it disgusting that they were living in a public toilet and nobody was doing anything," he said.

"I asked myself what I, as just an advisor the the president, could do to try to get things moving, so I rang Francis Lamy, the prefect (or state representative) in the département of Alpes-Maritimes, who told me he was unaware of their situation," he continued.

"Just three hours later I had a call telling me that a room had been found for the couple in a hotel where they would stay until the authorities had found permanent accommodation for them."

So a happy - if only temporary solution - to the couple's plight has been found with the promise of a more permanent result to come.

But what does it say about our society that their predicament went unnoticed for so long by so many, and that nobody seemed to be in a position to be able to - or to want to - help them out until their story made the headlines?