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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Riviera Towns, by Herbert Adams Gibbons,
+Illustrated by Lester George Hornby
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Riviera Towns
+
+
+Author: Herbert Adams Gibbons
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 4, 2007  [eBook #21996]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RIVIERA TOWNS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 21996-h.htm or 21996-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/1/9/9/21996/21996-h/21996-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/1/9/9/21996/21996-h.zip)
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+      In the original book, all the illustrations were on the inside
+      of the book's front and back covers.  In this e-text they have
+      been distributed where they fit the book's text.
+
+
+
+
+
+RIVIERA TOWNS
+
+by
+
+HERBERT ADAMS GIBBONS
+
+Illustrations by Lester George Hornby
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Robert M. McBride & Company
+1931
+
+Copyright, 1920, by
+Robert M. McBride & Co.
+
+Copyright, 1917, 1918, 1920,
+by Harper & Brothers
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+Helen and Margaret
+
+Who Indulge
+
+The Author and the Artist
+
+
+
+
+ACKNOWLEDGMENT
+
+  We wish to thank the editors of _Harper's
+  Magazine_ for allowing the republication
+  of articles and illustrations.
+
+H. A. G.
+
+L. G. H.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+    I.  GRASSE
+   II.  CAGNES
+  III.  SAINT-PAUL-DU-VAR
+   IV.  VILLENEUVE-LOUBET
+    V.  VENCE
+   VI.  MENTON
+  VII.  MONTE CARLO
+ VIII.  VILLEFRANCHE
+   IX.  NICE
+    X.  ANTIBES
+   XI.  CANNES
+  XII.  MOUGINS
+ XIII.  FRÉJUS
+  XIV.  SAINT-RAPHÄEL
+   XV.  THÉOULE
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+"A grandfather omnibus, which dated from the Second Empire."
+
+"The hill of Cagnes we could rave about."
+
+"The houses in the courts were stables downstairs."
+
+The river was swirling around willows and poplars.
+
+"Down the broad road of red shale past meadows thick with violets."
+
+Medieval streets and buildings have almost disappeared.
+
+"The Old Town takes you far from the psychology of cosmopolitanism and
+the philosophy of hedonism."
+
+"La Napoule, above whose tower on the sea rose a hill crowned with the
+ruins of a chapel.  Behind were the Maritime Alps."
+
+
+
+
+RIVIERA TOWNS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+GRASSE
+
+For several months I had been seeing Grasse every day.  The atmosphere of
+the Midi is so clear that a city fifteen miles away seems right at hand.
+You can almost count the windows in the houses.  Against the rising
+background of buildings every tower stands out, and you distinguish one
+roof from another.  From my study window at Théoule, Grasse was as
+constant a temptation as the two islands in the Bay of Cannes.  But the
+things at hand are the things that one is least liable to do.  They are
+reserved for "some day" because they can be done "any day."  Since first
+coming to Théoule, I had been a week's journey south of Cairo into the
+Sudan, and to Verdun in an opposite corner of France.  Menton and St.
+Raphaël, the ends of the Riviera, had been visited.  Grasse, two hours
+away, remained unexplored.
+
+I owe to the Artist the pleasure of becoming acquainted with Grasse.  One
+day a telegram from Bordeaux stated that he had just landed, and was
+taking the train for Théoule.  The next evening he arrived.  I gave him
+my study for a bedroom.  The following morning he looked out of the
+window, and asked, "What is that town up there behind Cannes, the big one
+right under the mountains?"
+
+"Grasse, the home of perfumes," I answered.
+
+"I don't care what it's the home of," was his characteristic response.
+"Is it old and all right?"  ("All right" to the Artist means "full of
+subjects.")
+
+"I have never been there," I confessed.
+
+The Artist was fresh from New York.  "We'll go this morning," he
+announced.
+
+From sea to mountains, the valley between the Corniche de l'Estérel and
+Nice produces every kind of vegetation known to the Mediterranean
+littoral.  Memories of Spain, Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor,
+Greece and Italy are constantly before you.  But there is a difference.
+The familiar trees and bushes and flowers of the Orient do not spring
+here from bare earth.  Even where cultivated land, wrested from the
+mountain sides, is laboriously terraced, stones do not predominate.
+Earth and rock are hidden by a thick undergrowth of grass and creepers
+that defies the sun, and draws from the nearby mountain snow a perennial
+supply of water.  Olive and plane, almond and walnut, orange and lemon,
+cedar and cork, palm and umbrella-pine, grape-vine and flower-bush have
+not the monopoly of green.  It is the Orient without the brown, the
+Occident with the sun.
+
+The Mediterranean is more blue than elsewhere because firs and cedars and
+pines are not too green.  The cliffs are more red than elsewhere because
+there is no prevailing tone of bare, baked earth to modify them into
+brown and gray.  On the Riviera one does not have to give up the rich
+green of northern landscapes to enjoy the alternative of brilliant
+sunshine.
+
+As we rode inland toward Grasse, the effect of green underground and
+background upon Oriental foliage was shown in the olives, dominant tree
+of the valley and hillsides.  It was the old familiar olive of Africa and
+Asia and the three European peninsulas, just as gnarled, just as
+gray-green in the sun, just as silvery in the wind.  But its colors did
+not impress themselves upon the landscape.  Here the olive was not master
+of all that lives and grows in its neighborhood.  In a landscape where
+green replaces brown and gray pink, the olive is not supreme.  Its own
+foliage is invaded: for frequently rose ramblers get up into its
+branches, and shoot out vivid flashes of crimson and scarlet.  There is
+also the yellow of the mimosa, and the inimitable red of the occasional
+judas-tree.  Orange trees blossom white.  Lilacs and wisteria give the
+shades between red and blue.  As if in rebellion against too much green,
+the rose-bushes put forth leaves of russet-brown.  It is a half-hearted
+protest, however, for Grasse rose-bushes are sparing of leaves.
+Carefully cultivated for the purpose of bearing to the maximum, every
+shoot holds clusters beyond what would be the breaking-point were there
+not artificial support.  Nature's yield is limited only by man's
+knowledge, skill and energy.
+
+As we mounted steadily the valley, we had the impression that there was
+nothing ahead of us but olives.  First the perfume of oranges and flowers
+would reach us.  Then the glory of the roses would burst upon us, and we
+looked up from them to the flowering orange trees.  Wherever there was a
+stretch of meadow, violets and daisies and buttercups ran through the
+grass.  Plowed land was sprinkled with mustard and poppies.  The olive
+had been like a curtain.  When it lifted as we drew near, we forgot that
+there were olives at all!
+
+The Artist developed at length his favorite theory that the richest
+colors, the sweetest scents were those of blossoms that bloomed for pure
+joy.  The most delicate flavors were those of fruits and berries that
+grew without restraint or guidance.  "Nature is at her best," he
+explained, "when you do not try to exploit her.  Compare wild
+strawberries and wild asparagus with the truck the farmers give you.  Is
+wisteria useful?  What equals the color of the judas-tree in bloom?  Do
+fruit blossoms, utilitarian embryo, compare for a minute with real
+flowers?  Just look at all these flowers, born for the sole purpose of
+expressing themselves!"  All the while we were sniffing orange-blossoms.
+I tried in vain to get his honest opinion on horse-chestnut blossoms as
+compared with apples and peaches and apricots.  I called his attention to
+the fact that the ailanthus lives only to express itself, while the maple
+gives sugar.  But you can never argue with the Artist when he is on the
+theme of beauty for beauty's sake.
+
+From the fairyland of the valley we came suddenly upon the Grasse railway
+station, from which a _funiculaire_ ascends to the city far above.
+Thankful for our carriage, we continued to mount by a road that had to
+curve sharply at every hundred yards.  We passed between villas with
+pergolas of ramblers and wisteria until we found ourselves in the upper
+part of the city without having gone through the city at all.
+
+We got out at the promenade, where a marvelous view of the Mediterranean
+from Antibes to Théoule lies before you.  The old town falls down the
+mountain-side from the left of the promenade.  We started along a street
+that seemed to slide down towards the cathedral, the top of whose belfry
+hardly reaches the level of the promenade.  Before we had gone a block,
+we learned that the flowers through which we had passed were not blooming
+for pure joy.  Like many things in this dreary world of ours, they were
+being cultivated for money's sake and not for beauty's sake.  Grasse
+lives from those flowers in the valley below.  We had started to look for
+quaint houses.  From one of the first doors in the street came forth an
+odor that made us think of the type of woman who calls herself "a lady."
+I learned early in life at the barber's that a little bit of scent goes
+too far, and some women in public places who pass you fragrantly do not
+allow that lesson to be forgotten.  Is not lavender the only scent in the
+world that does not lose by an overdose?
+
+The Artist would not enter.  His eye had caught a fourteenth-century
+_cul-de-sac_, and I knew that he was good for an hour.  I hesitated.  The
+vista of the street ahead brought more attraction to my eye than the
+indication of the perfume-factory to my nose.  But there would still be
+time for the street, and in the acquisition of knowledge one must not
+falter.  I knew only that perfumes were made from flowers.  But so was
+honey!  What was the difference in the process?  Visiting perfumeries is
+evidently "the thing to do" in Grasse.  For I was greeted cordially, and
+given immediately a guide, who assured me that she would show me all over
+the place and that it was no trouble at all.
+
+Why is it that some of the most delicate things are associated with the
+pig, who is himself far from delicate?  However much we may shudder at
+the thought of soused pigs' feet and salt pork and Rocky Mountain fried
+ham swimming in grease, we find bacon the most appetizing of breakfast
+dishes, and if cold boiled ham is cut thin enough nothing is more dainty
+for sandwiches.  Lard _per se_ is unpleasant, but think of certain things
+cooked in lard, and the unrivaled golden brown of them!  Pigskin is as
+_recherché_ as snakeskin.  The pig greets us at the beginning of the day
+when we slip our wallet into our coat or fasten on our wrist-watch, and
+again when we go in to breakfast.  But is it known that he is responsible
+for the most exquisite of scents of milady's boudoir?  For hundreds of
+years ways of extracting the odor of flowers were tried.  Success never
+came until someone discovered that pig fat is the best absorbent of the
+bouquet of fresh flowers.
+
+Room after room in the perfume factory is filled with tubs of pig grease.
+Fresh flowers are laid inside every morning for weeks, the end of the
+treatment coming only with the end of the season of the particular flower
+in question.  In some cases it is continued for three months.  The grease
+is then boiled in alcohol.  The liquid, strained, is your scent.  The
+solid substance left makes scented soap.  Immediately after cooling, it
+is drawn off directly into wee bottles, the glass stoppers are covered
+with white chamois skin, and the labels pasted on.
+
+I noticed a table of bottles labeled _eau-de-cologne_.  "Surely this is
+now _eau-de-liége_ in France," I remarked.  "Are not German names taboo?"
+
+My guide answered seriously: "We have tried our best here and in every
+perfumery in France.  But dealers tell us that they cannot sell
+_eau-de-liége_, even though they assure their customers that it is
+exactly the same product, and explain the patriotic reason for the change
+of name.  Once we launched a new perfume that made a big hit.  Afterwards
+we discovered that we had named it from the wrong flower.  But could we
+correct the mistake?  It goes today by the wrong name all over the world."
+
+I was glad to get into the open air again, and started to walk along the
+narrow Rue Droite--which makes a curve every hundred feet!--to find the
+Artist.  I had seen enough of Grasse's industry.  Now I was free to
+wander at will through the maze of streets of the old town.  But the law
+of the Persians follows that of the Medes.  Half a dozen urchins spied me
+coming out of the perfumery, and my doom was sealed.  They announced that
+they would show me the way to the confectionery.  I might have refused to
+enter the perfumery.  But, having entered, there was no way of escaping
+the confectionery.  I resigned myself to the inevitable.  It was by no
+means uninteresting, however,--the half hour spent watching violets,
+orange blossoms and rose petals dancing in cauldrons of boiling sugar,
+fanned dry on screens, and packed with candied fruits in wooden boxes for
+America.  And I had followed the flowers of Grasse to their destination.
+
+The Artist had finished his _cul-de-sac_.  I knew that to find him I had
+only to continue along the Rue Droite to the first particularly appealing
+side street.  He would be up that somewhere.  The Artist is no
+procrastinator.  He takes his subjects when he finds them.  The buildings
+of the Rue Droite are medieval from _rez-de-chaussée_ to cornice.  The
+sky was a narrow curved slit of blue and gray, not as wide as the street;
+for the houses seemed to lean towards one another, and here and there
+roofs rubbed edges.  Sidewalks would have prevented the passage of
+horse-drawn vehicles, so there were none.  The Rue Droite is the
+principal shopping-street of Grasse.  But shoppers cannot loiter
+indefinitely before windows.  All pedestrians must be agile.  When you
+hear the _Hué!_ of a driver, you must take refuge in a doorway or run the
+risk of axle-grease and mud.  Twentieth-century merchandise stares out at
+you from either side--Paris' hats and gowns, American boots, typewriters,
+sewing-machines, phonographs, pianos.  One of the oldest corner
+buildings, which looks as if it needed props immediately to save you from
+being caught by a falling wall, is the emporium of enamel bathtubs and
+stationary washstands, with shining nickel spigots labeled "Hot" and
+"Cold."  These must be intended for the villas of the environs, for
+surely no home in this old town could house a bathroom.  Where would the
+hot water and cold water come from?  And where would it go after you
+opened the waste-pipe?
+
+But there are sewers, or at least drains, on the hillside.  Grasse has
+progressed beyond the _gare-à-l'eau_ stage of municipal civilization.
+Before your eyes is the evidence that you no longer have to listen for
+that cry, and duck the pot or pail emptied from an upper window.  Pipes,
+with branches to the windows, come down the sides of the houses.  They
+are of generous size, as in cities of northern countries where much snow
+lies on the roofs.  Since wall-angles are many, the pipes generally find
+a place in corners.  They do not obtrude.  They do not suggest zinc or
+tin.  They were painted a mud-gray color a long time ago.
+
+After lunch, we strolled along the Boulevard du Jeu-de-Ballon, the
+tramway street.  In old French towns, the words boulevard and tramway are
+generally anathema.  They suggest the poor imitation of Paris, both in
+architecture and animation, of a street outside the magic circle of the
+unchanged which holds the charm of the town.  But sometimes, in order to
+come as near as possible to the center of population, the tramway
+boulevard skirts the fortifications of the medieval city, or is built
+upon their emplacement.  It is this way at Grasse.  One side of the
+Boulevard du Jeu-de-Ballon is modern and commonplace.  The other side
+preserves in part the buildings of past ages.  Here and there a bit of
+tower remains.  No side street breaks the line.  You go down into the
+city through an occasional arched passage.
+
+We stopped for coffee at the Garden-Bar, on the modern side of the
+boulevard.  The curious hodge-podge opposite, which houses the Restaurant
+du Cheval Blanc and the Café du Globe, had caught the Artist's eye.  The
+building, or group of buildings, is six stories high, with a sky-line
+that reflects the range of mountains under which Grasse nestles.  Windows
+of different sizes, placed without symmetry or alignment, do not even
+harmonize with the roof above them.  Probably there was originally a
+narrow house rising directly above the door of the Cheval Blanc.  When
+the structure was widened, upper floors or single rooms were built on _ad
+libitum_.  The windows give the clew to this evolution, for the wall has
+been plastered and whitewashed uniformly to the width of over a hundred
+feet, and there is only one entrance on the ground floor.  Working out
+the staircases and floor levels is a puzzle for an architect.  We did not
+even start to try to solve it.  The Artist's interest was in the
+"subject," and mine in the story the building told of an age when man's
+individual needs influenced his life more strongly than they do now.  We
+think of the progress of civilization in the terms of combination,
+organization, community interest, the centralized state.  We have created
+a machine to serve us, and have become servants of the machine.  When we
+thank God unctuously that we live not as our ancestors lived and as the
+"uncivilized" live today, we are displaying the decay of our mental
+faculties.  Is it the Arab at his tent door, looking with dismay and
+dread at the approach of the Bagdad Railway, who is the fool, or we?
+
+Backed up at right angles to the stoop of the Cheval Blanc was a
+grandfather omnibus, which certainly dated from the Second Empire.  Its
+sign read: GRASSE-ST. CÉZAIRE.  SERVICE DE LA POSTE.  The canvas boot had
+the curve of ocean waves.  A pert little hood stuck out over the driver's
+seat.  The pair of lean horses--one black, the other white--stood with
+noses turned towards the tramway rails.  The Artist was still gazing
+skylineward.  I grasped his arm, and brought his eyes to earth.  No word
+was needed.  He fumbled for his pencil.  But to our horror the driver had
+mounted, and was reaching for the reins.  I got across the street just in
+time to save the picture.  Holding out cigars to the driver and a soldier
+beside him on the box, I begged them to wait--please to wait--just five
+minutes, five little minutes.
+
+[Illustration: "A grandfather omnibus, which dated from the Second
+Empire."]
+
+"There is no place for another passenger.  We are full inside," he
+remonstrated.
+
+But he had dropped the reins to strike a match.  In the moment thus
+gained, I got out a franc, and pressed it into his hand.
+
+"Your coach, my friend," I said, "is unique in all France.  The coffee of
+that celebrated artist yonder sitting at the terrace of the Garden-Bar is
+getting cold while he immortalizes the Grasse-St. Cézaire service.  In
+the interest of art and history, I beg of you to delay your departure ten
+little minutes."
+
+The soldier had found the cigar to his liking.  "A quarter of an hour
+will do no harm at all," he announced positively, getting down from his
+place.
+
+The driver puffed and growled.  "We have our journey to make, and the
+hour of departure is one-thirty.  If it is not too long--fifteen minutes
+at the most."  He pocketed the franc less reluctantly than he had spoken.
+
+The soldier crossed the boulevard with me.  Knowing how to appreciate a
+good thing, he became our ally as soon as he had looked at the first
+lines of the sketch.  When the minutes passed, and the soldier saw that
+the driver was growing restless, he went back and persuaded him to come
+over and have a look at the drawing.  This enabled me to get the driver
+tabled before a tall glass of steaming coffee with a _petit verre_.
+
+Soon an old dame, wearing a bonnet that antedated the coach, stuck out
+her head.  A watch was in her hand.  Surely she was not of the Midi.
+Fearing that she might influence the driver disadvantageously to our
+interests, I went to inform her that the delay was unavoidable.  I could
+not offer her a cigar.  There are never any bonbons in my pocket.  So I
+thought to make a speech.
+
+"All my excuses," I explained, "for this regrettable delay.  The coach in
+which you are seated--and in which in a very, very few minutes you will
+be riding--belongs to the generation before yourself and me.  It is
+important for the sake of history as well as art that the presence in
+Grasse of my illustrious artist friend, coincident with the St. Cézaire
+coach before the door of the Cheval Blanc, be seized upon to secure for
+our grandchildren an indelible memory of travel conditions in our day.
+So I beg indulgence."
+
+Two schoolgirls smothered a snicker.  There was a dangerous glitter in
+the old dame's eye.  She did not answer me.  But a young woman raised her
+voice in a threat to have the driver dismissed.  Enough time had been
+gained.  The Artist signified his willingness to have the mail leave now
+for St. Cézaire.
+
+Off went the coach, white horse and black horse clattering alternately
+hoofs that would gladly have remained longer in repose.  The soldier
+saluted.  The driver grinned.  We waved to the old woman with the poke
+bonnet, and lifted our glasses to several pretty girls who appeared at
+the coach door for the first time in order that they might glare at us.
+I am afraid I must record that it was to glare.  Our friendly salutation
+was not answered.  But we had the sketch.  That was what really mattered.
+
+We were half an hour late at the rendezvous with our carriage man for the
+return journey to Cannes.  But he had lunched well, and did not seem to
+mind.  Americans were scarce this season, and _fortes pourboires_ few and
+far between.  On the Riviera--as elsewhere--you benefit by your
+fellow-countrymen's generosity in the radiant courtesy and good nature of
+those who serve you until you come to pay your bill.  Then you think you
+could have got along pretty well with less smiles.  We knew that our man
+would not risk his _pourboire_ by opposing us, so we suggested with all
+confidence that he drive round the curves alone and meet us below by the
+railway station in "half an hour."  We wanted to go straight down through
+the city.  The _cocher_ looked at his watch and thought a minute.  He had
+already seen the Artist stop suddenly and stay glued on one spot, like a
+cat patiently waiting to spring upon a bird.  He had seen how often
+oblivion to time comes.  The lesser of two evils was to keep us in sight.
+So he proposed with a sigh what we could never have broached to him.
+"Perhaps we can drive down through the city--why not?"  "Why not?" we
+answered joyously in unison, as we jumped into the victoria.
+
+Down is down in Grasse.  I think our _cocher_ did not realize what he was
+getting into, or he would have preferred taking his chances on a long
+wait.  He certainly did not know his way through the old town.  He asked
+at every corner, each time more desperately, as we became engaged in a
+maze of narrow streets, which were made before the days of victorias.
+There was no way of turning.  We had to go down--precipitously down.
+With brake jammed tight, and curses that echoed from wall to wall and
+around corners, the _cocher_ held the reins to his chest.  The horses,
+gently pushed forward, much against their will, by the weight of the
+carriage, planted all fours firm and slid over the stones that centuries
+of sabots and hand-carts had worn smooth.  The noise brought everyone to
+windows and doors, and the sight kept them there.  Tourist victorias did
+not coast through Grasse every day.  Advice was freely proffered.  The
+angrier our _cocher_ became the more frequently he was told to put on his
+brake and hold tight to the reins.
+
+After half an hour we came out at the funicular beside the railway
+station.
+
+"How delightful, and how fortunate!" exclaimed the Artist.  "That
+certainly was a short cut.  We have saved several kilometers!"
+
+I thought the _cocher_ would explode.  But he merely nodded.  Far be it
+from me to say that he did not understand the Artist's French for "short
+cut."  Perhaps he thought best to save all comment until the hour of
+reckoning arrived.  He did not need to.  The ride back to the sea was
+through the fairyland of the morning climb, enhanced a thousandfold, as
+all fairylands are, by the magic of the twilight.  One never can make it
+up to hired horses for their work and willingness and patience.  But we
+did live up to local American tradition in regard to the _cocher_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CAGNES
+
+American and English visitors to the Riviera soon come to know Cagnes by
+name.  It is a challenge to their ability to pronounce French--a
+challenge that must be accepted, if you are in the region of Grasse or
+Nice or Antibes.  Two distinct tramway lines and several roads lead from
+Grasse to Cannes and Cagnes.  Unless you are very careful, you may find
+yourself upon the wrong route.  Once on the Cagnes tramway, or well
+engaged upon the road to Cagnes, when you had meant to go to Cannes, the
+mistake takes hours to retrieve.  At Nice, chauffeurs and _cochers_ love
+to cheat you by the confusion of these two names.  You bargain for the
+long trip to Cannes, and are attracted by the reasonable price quoted.
+In a very short time you are at Cagnes.  The vehicle stops.  Impossible
+to rectify your mispronunciation without a substantial increase of the
+original sum of the bargain.  Antibes is between Cagnes and Cannes.
+Cagnes is nearer, and it is always to Cannes that you want to go.  Spell
+the name, or write it on a piece of paper, if you are to be sure that you
+will be taken west instead of east.
+
+The place, as well as the name, is familiar to all travelers--from a
+distance.  Whether you move by train, by tramway or by automobile, you
+see the city set on a hill between Cannes and Nice.  But express trains
+do not stop.  The tramway passes some distance from the old town, and
+prospect of the walk and climb is not alluring to the tramway tourist,
+whose goal is places important enough to have a map in Baedeker, or a
+double-starred church or view.  If motorists are not in a hurry to get to
+a good lunch, their chauffeurs are.  You signal to stop, and express a
+desire to go up into Cagnes.  The hired chauffeur declares emphatically
+that it cannot be done.  If you do not believe him, he drives you to the
+foot of the hill, and you see with your own eyes.  Regretfully you pass
+on to towns that are _plus pratiques_.  More than once I had done this:
+and I might have done it again had not the Artist come to the Riviera.
+
+We were afoot (the best way to travel and see things) on an April Sunday,
+and stopped for lunch at the restaurant opposite the Cagnes railway
+station.  The Artist was not hungry.  While I ate he went out "to find
+what sort of a subject the _ensemble_ of the city on the hill over there
+makes."  He returned in time for cheese and fruit, with a sketch of
+Cagnes that made the waitress run inside to get better apples and
+bananas.  She insisted that we would be rewarded for a climb up to the
+old town, and offered to keep our coats and kits.
+
+Along the railway and tramway and motor-road a modern Cagnes of villas
+and hotels and pensions, with their accompaniment of shops and humbler
+habitations, has grown for a mile or more, and stretched out across the
+railway to the sea.  Two famous French artists live here, and many
+Parisians and foreigners.  There is also a wireless station.  All this
+shuts off from the road the town on the hill.  Unless you had seen it
+from the open country, before coming into the modern Cagnes, you would
+not have known that there was a hill and an old city.  It was not easy
+for us to find the way.
+
+Built for legs and nothing else, the thoroughfare up through Cagnes is a
+street that can be called straight and steep and stiff, the adjectives
+coming to you without your seeking for alliteration, just as
+instinctively as you take off your hat and out your handkerchief.
+
+"No livery stable in this town--come five francs on it," said the Artist.
+
+"Against five francs that there are no men with a waistline exceeding
+forty-five inches!" I answered, feelingly and knowingly.
+
+But we soon became so fascinated by our transition from the twentieth
+century to the fifteenth that we forgot we were climbing.  Effort is a
+matter of mental attitude.  Nothing in the world is hard when you are
+interested in doing it.
+
+Half way and half an hour up, we paused to take our bearings.  The line
+of houses, each leaning on its next lower neighbor, was broken here by a
+high garden wall, from which creepers were overhanging the street, with
+their fresh spring tendrils waving and curling above our heads.  There
+was an odor of honeysuckle and orange-blossoms, and the blood-red branch
+of a judas-tree pushed its way through the green and yellow.  The canyon
+of the street, widening below us, ended in a rich meadowland, dotted with
+villas and trees.  Beyond, the Mediterranean rose to the horizon.  While
+the Artist was "taking it," the usual crowd gathered around: children
+whose lack of bashfulness indicated that many city people were here for
+the season or that tourists did find their way up to Cagnes; women always
+eager to gossip with strangers, especially with those from lands across
+the sea; old men proud to tell you that their city was the most
+interesting, because the most ancient, on the Riviera.
+
+When we resumed our climb, the whole town seemed to be going our way.
+Sunday-best and prayer-books gave the reason.  Just as we were coming to
+the top, our street made its first turn, a sharp one, and in the bend was
+a church tower with a wee door under it.  Houses crowded closely around
+it.  The tower was the only indication of the church.  An _abbé_ was
+standing by the door, calling in the acolytes and choir boys who were
+playing tag in the street.  The Artist stopped, short.  I went up to the
+_abbé_, who by features and accent was evidently a Breton far from home.
+
+"Do any fat men live up here?" I asked.
+
+"Only one," he answered promptly, with a hearty laugh.  "The _curé_ has
+gone to the war, and last month the bishop sent a man to help me who
+weighs over a hundred kilos.  We have another church below in the new
+town, and there are services in both, morning and afternoon.  Low mass
+here at six, and high masses there at eight and here at ten.  Vespers
+here at three and there at four-thirty.  On the second Sunday my
+coadjutor said he was going to leave at the end of the month.  So, after
+next week, there will be no fat man.  Unless you have come to Cagnes to
+stay?"  The _abbé_ twinkled and chuckled.
+
+"It is not to laugh at," broke in an oldest inhabitant who had overheard.
+"We live from ten to twenty years longer than the people of the plain,
+who have railways and tramways and carriages and autos right to their
+very doors.  We get the mountain air from the Alps and the sea air from
+the Mediterranean uncontaminated.  It blows into every house without
+passing through as much as a single neighbor's courtyard.  But our long
+lease on life is due principally to having to climb this hill.
+Stiffness, rheumatism--we don't know what it means, and we stay fit right
+to the very end.  Look at me.  I was a grown man when people first began
+to know who Garibaldi was in Nice.  We formed a corps of volunteers right
+here in this town when Mazzini's republic was proclaimed to go to defend
+Rome from the worst enemies of Italian unity, those Vatican--But I beg M.
+le Curé's pardon!  In those days of hot youth the church, you know, did
+not mean--"
+
+The _abbé_ twinkled and chuckled again, and patted the old man's shoulder
+affectionately.  "When you did not follow Briand ten years ago, it proved
+that half a century had wrought a happy change.  I understand anyway.  I
+am a Breton that has taken root, as everyone here does, in this land of
+lofty mountains and deep valleys, of wind and sun, of sea and snow.
+Mental as well as physical acclimatization comes.  The spirit, the life,
+the very soul of the _Risorgimento_ had nothing Italian in it.  It was of
+Piedmont and Savoy and the Riviera--a product of the Alpes Maritimes."
+
+I would have listened longer.  But the bell above us began to ring,
+several peals first, and then single strokes, each more insistent than
+the last.  The _abbé_ was still in the Garibaldi mood, and the volunteer
+of '49 and I were in sympathy.  He knew it, and refused to hear the
+summons to vespers.  But out of the door came a girl who could break a
+spell of the past, because she was able to weave one of the present.  She
+dominated us immediately.  She would not have had to say a word.  A hymn
+book was in her hand, opened at the page where she intended it to stay
+open.  "This afternoon, M. l'Abbé, we shall sing this," she stated.
+
+"No, we cannot do it!" he protested rather feebly.  "You see, the
+encyclical of the Holy Father enjoins the Gregorian, and I think the boys
+can sing it--"
+
+The organist interrupted: "You certainly know, M. l'Abbé, that we cannot
+have decent singing for the visits to the stations, unless the big girls,
+whom I have been training now for two months--"
+
+"But we must obey the Papal injunction, Mademoiselle Simone," put in the
+priest still more mildly.
+
+Mademoiselle Simone's eyes danced mockingly, and her mow confirmed beyond
+a doubt the revelation of clothes and accent.  Here was a
+twentieth-century Parisienne in conflict with a reactionary rule of the
+church in a setting where turning back the hands of the clock would have
+seemed the natural thing to do.
+
+"Pure nonsense!" was her disrespectful answer.  "With all the young men
+away, the one thing to do is to make the music go."
+
+I had to speak in order to be noticed.  "So even in Cagnes the young
+girls know how to give orders to M. le Curé?  The Holy Father's
+encyclical--"  I could stop without finishing the sentence, for I had
+succeeded.  The dancing eyes and the _moue_ now included me.
+
+"M. l'Abbé, it is time for the service," she said firmly.  "If this
+_Anglais_ comes in, he will see that I have reason."
+
+She disappeared.  The _abbé_ looked after her indulgently, shrugged his
+shoulders, with the palms of his hands spread heavenward, and followed
+her.
+
+In the meantime the worshipers, practically all of them women and
+children, had been turning corners above and below.  I made the round of
+the group of buildings, and saw only little doors here and there at
+different levels.  There was no portal, no large main entrance.  When I
+came back to the bend of the road, the music had started.  I was about to
+enter the tower door--Mademoiselle Simone's!--when I saw the Artist put
+up his pencil.  The service would last for some time, so I joined him,
+and we continued to mount.
+
+Above the church tower, steps led to the very top of the hill, which was
+crowned by a château.  Skirting its walls, we came to an open place.  On
+the side of the hill looking towards the Alps, a spacious terrace had
+been built out far beyond the château wall.  Along the parapet were a
+number of primitive tables and benches.  The tiny café from which they
+were served was at the end of a group of nondescript buildings that had
+probably grown up on a ruined bastion of the château.  Seated at one of
+these tables, you see the Mediterranean from Nice to Antibes, with an
+occasional steamer and a frequent sailing-vessel, the Vintimille _rapide_
+(noting its speed by the white engine smoke), one tramway climbing by
+Villeneuve-Loubet towards Grasse and another by Saint-Paul-du-Var to
+Vence, and more than a semi-circle of the horizon lost in the Alps.
+
+The Sunday afternoon animation in the _place_ was wholly masculine.  No
+woman was visible except the white-coiffed grandmother who served the
+drinks.  The war was not the only cause of the necessity of Mademoiselle
+Simone's opposition to antiphonal Gregorian singing.  I fear that the
+lack of male voices in the vesper service is a chronic one, and that
+Mademoiselle Simone's attempt to put life into the service would have
+been equally justifiable before the tragic period of _la guerre_.  For
+the men of Cagnes were engrossed in the favorite sport of the Midi, _jeu
+aux boules_.  I have never seen a more serious group of Tartarins.  From
+Monsieur le Maire to cobbler and blacksmith, all were working very hard.
+A little ball that could be covered in one's fist is thrown out on the
+common by the winner of the last game.  The players line up, each with a
+handful of larger wooden balls about the size and weight of those that
+are used in croquet.  You try to roll or throw your balls near the little
+one that serves as goal.  Simple, you exclaim.  Yes, but not so simple as
+golf.  For the hazard of the ground is changed with each game.
+
+Interest in what people around you are doing is the most compelling
+interest in the world.  Train yourself to be oblivious to your neighbor's
+actions and your neighbor's thoughts, on the ground that curiosity is the
+sign of the vulgarian and indifference the sign of the gentleman, and you
+succeed in making yourself colossally stupid.  Here lies the weakest
+point in Anglo-Saxon culture.  The players quickly won me from the view.
+Watch one man at play, and you can read his character.  He is an open
+book before you.  Watch a number of men at play, and you are shown the
+general masculine traits of human nature.  Generosity, decision,
+alertness, deftness, energy, self-control--meanness, hesitation,
+slowness, awkwardness, laziness, impatience: you have these
+characteristics and all the shades between them.  The humblest may have
+admirable and wholesome virtues lacking in the highest, but a balance of
+them all weighs and marks one Monsieur le Maire or the stonebreaker on
+the road.
+
+The councils of Generals at Verdun did not take more seriously in their
+day the problem of moving their men nearer the fortress than were these
+players the problem of rolling their big balls near the little ball.  Had
+the older men been the only group, I should have got the idea that _jeu
+aux boules_ is a game where the skill is all in cautious playing.  But
+there were young _chasseurs alpins_, home on leave from the front, who
+were playing the game in an entirely different way.  Instead of making
+each throw as if the destinies of the world were at stake, the soldiers
+played fast and vigorously, aiming rather to knock the opponent's ball
+away from a coveted position near the goal than to reach the goal.  The
+older men's balls, to the number of a couple of dozen, clustered around
+the goal at the end of a round.  Careful marking, by cane-lengths,
+shoe-lengths and handkerchief-lengths preceded agreement as to the
+winner.  At the end of a round of the _chasseurs alpins_, two or three
+balls remained: the rest had gone wide of the mark, or had been knocked
+many feet from the original landing-place by a successor's throw.  During
+half an hour I did not see the young men measure once.  The winning throw
+was every time unmistakable.
+
+The Artist leaned against the château wall, putting it down.  The thought
+of Mademoiselle Simone, playing the organ, came to me.  How was the music
+going?  I must not miss that service.  The view and the château and the
+_jeu aux boules_ no longer held me.  Down the steps I went, and entered
+the first of the church doors.  It was on the upper level, and took me
+into the gallery; I was surprised to find so large a church.  One got no
+idea of its size from the outside.
+
+The daylight was all from above.  Although only mid-afternoon, altar and
+chancel candles made a true vesper atmosphere, and the flickering wicks
+in the hanging lamps gave starlight.  This is as it should be.  The
+appeal of a ritualistic service is to the mystical in one's nature.
+Jewels and embroideries, gold and silver, gorgeous robes, rich
+decorations, pomp and splendor repel in broad daylight; candles and lamps
+sputter futilely; incense nauseates: for the still small voice is
+stifled, and the kingdom is of this world.  But in the twilight, what
+skeptic, what Puritan resists the call to worship of the Catholic ritual?
+I had come in time for the intercessory visit to the stations of the
+cross.  Priest and acolytes were following the crucifix from the chancel.
+Banners waved.  Before each station the procession stopped, the priest
+and acolytes knelt solemnly (with bowed heads) and prayers were said.
+While the procession was passing from station to station, the girls sang
+their hymn in French.  It was the age old pageantry of the Catholic
+church, a pageantry that perhaps indicates an age old temperamental
+difference between the Latin and the Anglo Saxon.
+
+When the service was over, I went around to the door under the tower.  Of
+course, it was to meet the _abbé_.  Still, when I realize that I had
+missed the organist, I was disappointed.  The _abbé_ soon appeared from
+the sacristy.  I gave one more look around for Mademoiselle Simone while
+he was explaining that he had just twenty minutes before it was necessary
+to start down to the other church, but that it was long enough to take me
+through the Moorish quarter.  Although I had come to Cagnes to see the
+old town, and to get into the atmosphere of past centuries, I must
+confess that I followed him regretfully.
+
+The houses of the Moorish quarter are built into the ancient city walls.
+Baked earth, mixed with straw and studded with cobblestones, has defied
+eight centuries.  There are no streets wide enough for carts, for they
+hark back to the days when donkeys were common carriers.  And in
+hill-towns the progressive knowledge of centuries has evolved no better
+means of transport.  You pass through _ruelles_ where outstretched hands
+can touch the houses on each side.  Often the _ruelle_ is like a tunnel,
+for the houses are built right over it on arches, and it is so dark that
+you cannot see in front of you.  The _abbé_ assured me that there were
+house doors all along as in any other passage.  People must know by
+instinct where to turn in to their houses.
+
+When the _abbé_ left me to go to his lower vesper service, after having
+piloted me back to the main streets, I decided to go up again to the
+_place_ to rejoin the Artist.  But under an old buttonwood tree, which
+almost poked its upper branches into the château windows, stood
+Mademoiselle Simone, waving good-by to another girl who was disappearing
+around the corner of a street above.  Her aunt, she declared, was waiting
+for her at a villa half-way down the hill, at five.  Just then five
+struck in the clock-tower behind us.
+
+"Had you looked up before you spoke?" I asked.
+
+"Clocks do strike conveniently," she answered.
+
+Although Mademoiselle Simone repulsed firmly my plea that she become my
+guide through the other side of the town, where two outlying quarters,
+the _abbé_ had said, contained the best of all in old houses, queer
+streets and an ivy-covered ruin of a chapel, she lingered to talk under
+the buttonwood tree of many things that had nothing to do with Cagnes.
+When I tried to persuade her to show me what I had not yet seen, on the
+ground that I had made the climb up to the top because of my interest in
+hill cities and wanted to write about Cagnes, she immediately answered
+that she would not detain me for the world and made a move to keep her
+rendezvous with the aunt.  So I hastened to contradict myself, and assure
+her that I had no interest whatever in Cagnes, that I was stuck here
+waiting for the Artist, who would come only with the fading light.
+
+After Mademoiselle Simone left me under the buttonwood tree, I thought of
+the Artist.  He had finished and was smoking over a glass of vermouth at
+one of the tables by the parapet of the _place_.
+
+"Great town," he said.  "Bully stuff here.  In buildings and villagers
+have you found anything as fascinating as that purple and red on the
+mountain snow over there?  It just gets the last sun, the very last."
+
+"Yes," I answered, "but neither in a building or a villager of Cagnes.
+There is a Parisienne--"  And I told him about Mademoiselle Simone.  He
+was silent, and his fingers drummed upon the table, tipity-tap,
+tipity-tap.  "Show me your sketches," I asked.
+
+"No," he said scathingly.  "No!  You are not interested in sketches.  Nor
+should I have been, had you been more generous.  You had the luck in
+Cagnes."
+
+The prospect of a trout dinner at Villeneuve-Loubet took us rapidly down
+the hill.  We soon passed out of the fifteenth century into the
+twentieth.  Modern Cagnes, with its clang of tramway gong, toot of
+locomotive whistle, honk-honk of motor horn, café terraces crowded with
+Sunday afternooners, broad sidewalks and electric lights was another
+world.  But it was our world--and Mademoiselle Simone's.  That is why
+coming back into it from the hill of Cagnes was really like a cold
+shower.  For a sense of refreshment followed immediately the shock--and
+stayed with us.
+
+The hill of Cagnes we could rave about enthusiastically because we did
+not have to go back there and live there.  It will be "a precious
+memory," as tourists say, precisely because it is a _memory_.  The bird
+in a cage is less of a prisoner than we city folk of the modern world.
+For when you open the cage door, the bird will fly away and not come
+back.  We may fly away--but we do come back, and the sooner the better.
+We love our prisons.  We are happy (or think we are, which is the same
+thing) in our chains.  And in the brief time that we are a-wing, do we
+really love unusual sights and novel things?  In exploring, is not our
+greatest joy and delight in finding something familiar, something we have
+already known, something we are used to?  An appreciative lover and
+frequenter of grand opera once said to me, "'The Barber of Seville' is my
+favorite, because I know I am going to have the treat of 'The Suwanee
+River' or 'Annie Laurie' when I go to it."  There is an honest
+confession, such as we must all make if we are to do our souls good.
+
+[Illustration: "The hill of Cagnes we could rave about."]
+
+So you understand why there is so much of Mademoiselle Simone in my story
+of Cagnes, and why the Artist had a grouch.  His afternoon's work should
+have pleased him, should have satisfied him.  He would not have finished
+it had he met Mademoiselle Simone.  He knows more of Cagnes than I do,
+but he would rather have known more of Mademoiselle Simone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+SAINT-PAUL-DU-VAR
+
+At the restaurant opposite the Cagnes railway station the waitress
+welcomed us as old friends.  She told us how lucky we were to come on a
+Friday.  Fish just caught that morning--the best we would ever eat in our
+lives--were waiting for us in the kitchen.  We flattered ourselves that
+the disappointment was mutual when we had to tell her that there was time
+only for an _apéritif_.  Precisely because it was Friday and not Sunday,
+there was no reasonable hope of running into Monsieur le Curé or
+Mademoiselle Simone or a game of _boules_, if we climbed the steep hill
+to Cagnes.  On our last visit, we had seen from the top of Cagnes a
+walled city crowning another hill several miles inland.
+Saint-Paul-du-Var was our goal today.
+
+Electric trams run to Grasse and to Vence from Cagnes.  The lines
+separate at Villeneuve-Loubet, a mile back from the Nice-Cannes road.
+The Vence tram would have taken us to Saint-Paul-du-Var along the road
+that began to avoid the valley after passing Villeneuve-Loubet.  It was
+one of those _routes nationales_ of which the France of motorists is so
+proud, hard and smooth and rounded to drain quickly, never allowing
+itself a rut or a steep grade or a sharp turn.  This national highway was
+like all the easy paths in life.  It meant the shortest distance
+comfortably possible for obtaining your objective.  It eliminated
+surprises.  It showed you all the time all there was to see, and kept you
+kilometrically informed of your progress.  It was paralleled by the
+electric tram line.  It enabled you to explore the country in true city
+fashion.
+
+We were walking, and the low road, signpostless, attracted us.  It
+started off in the same general direction, but through the valley.  It
+was all that a country road ought to be.  It had honest ruts and
+unattached stones of various sizes.  Cows had passed along that way.
+Trees met overhead irregularly, and bushes grew up in confusion on the
+sides.  The ruthlessness of macadam, the pressure of fat tires, the
+scorching of engines, had not banished the thick grass which the country
+wants to give its roads, and would give to all its roads if the country
+were not being constantly "improved."  There were places where one could
+rest without fear of sun and ditch-water and clouds of dust.  Why should
+one go from the city to the country to breathe tar and gasoline?  Why
+should one have to keep one's eyes wandering from far ahead to back over
+one's shoulder for fifty-two weeks in the year?  We wanted to get away
+from clang-clang and honk-honk and puff-puff.  Since the real vacation is
+change, we welcomed the task of looking out for hostile dogs instead of
+swiftly moving vehicles.  Our noses wanted whiffs of hay and pig, and our
+boots wanted unadulterated mud.
+
+We were not allowed to have our way without a warning.  There always is
+someone to keep you in the straight and narrow path.  As we were turning
+into the low road a passer-by remonstrated.
+
+"If you're going to Saint-Paul-du-Var," he explained, "you want to keep
+to the high road.  It's very muddy down there, and will take you longer."
+
+When our adviser saw that we did not stop, he raised his voice and
+called, "There are no signposts and you may get lost."
+
+"You take the high road and we'll take the low," sang back the Artist.
+
+He who had meant well disappeared, shaking his head.  No doubt, as he
+shuffled along, he was muttering to himself over the inexplicable actions
+of _ces drôles d'Anglais_.
+
+The miles passed coolly and pleasantly.  Trees and bushes did not allow
+many glimpses of the outside world.  The dogs that barked were behind
+farmhouse gates, and we had use for our stones only at an occasional
+jackrabbit.  "At" is a convenient preposition.  It gives one latitude.
+Jackrabbits on the Riviera are not like human products of the south.
+They jump quickly.  They jump, too, in directions that cannot be
+foretold.  After one particularly bad throw, the Artist explained that he
+did not enjoy inflicting pain.  His boyish instincts had long ago been
+controlled by reading S. P. C. A. literature.  I told him that I thought
+he had given up baseball too early in life.  So had I.  The jackrabbits
+escaped.
+
+I am rarely oblivious to the duty of the noon hour.  Although I knew the
+Artist's habit of stopping suddenly, and the hopelessness of budging him
+by plea or argument as long as the reason for stopping remained, it had
+not occurred to me that there would be a risk in taking the low road.  We
+had started in plenty of time, and as we were out for a medieval town, I
+thought he would not be tempted until we reached the vicinity of a
+restaurant.  But about a mile below Saint-Paul-du-Var the low road
+brought us to a view of the city that would have held me at any other
+time than twelve noon.  I tried the old expedient of walking faster, and
+calling attention to something in the distance.  When the Artist halted,
+moved uncertainly a few yards, and stopped again, we were lost.  He did
+not need to pronounce the inevitable words, "I'll just get this little
+bit."  The Artist's "just" means anything from twenty to ninety minutes.
+
+Food without companionship is not enjoyable, least of all on a holiday.
+There was no use suggesting that we could come back this way, and
+advancing that the light would be so much better later.  The Artist had
+started in.  I cast around for some way of escape from an impossible
+situation.  The only farmhouse in sight was at the end of a long lane,
+and did not look as if it could produce the makings of a meal.  The
+poorest providers and preparers of foodstuffs are their producers.  Who
+has not eaten salt pork on a cattle ranch and longed for cream on a dairy
+farm?  What city boarder has not discovered the woeful lack of connection
+between the cackling of hens and the certitude of fresh eggs on the table
+at the next meal?  What muncher of Maine doughnuts in a Boston restaurant
+has not thought of the "sinkers" offered to him when he was on his last
+summer's vacation?
+
+A bridge crossed a stream just ahead of us.  On the other side was a
+thick clump of trees.  I walked forward with the thought that a drink of
+water at least might not be bad.  When I got to the bridge I heard
+plaintive barking and a man's voice.  The man was explaining to the dog
+why he ought not to be impatient.  He would have his good bone, with
+plenty of meat on it, in a little quarter of an hour.  A house-wagon was
+standing back from the side of the road.  The owner was shaking a
+casserole over a fire, and the dog was sniffing as near as he dared.  The
+dog gave me his attention, and the man turned.  It was a favorite waiter
+of a favorite Montparnasse café.
+
+"Pierre," I cried, "where did you drop from?  What luck!"
+
+Pierre put the casserole on the window ledge, out of the dog's reach, and
+greeted me.  You never could surprise Pierre.  He was always master of
+the situation.  One has to be in a Montparnasse café.  I noted with
+approval the precaution that Pierre had taken.  Either the dog was very
+hungry or there was something particularly tempting in the casserole.
+
+Pierre had gone to join his regiment on the second day of the war.  I had
+not seen him or heard of him since then.  He told me that he had been
+unable to shake off a _bronchite_, caught in the trenches.  It was the
+old story.  When he left the hospital, the medical board declared him
+unfit for further service and warned him against returning soon to city
+life.  The hope of recovery lay in open air and sunshine.
+
+"I determined to get well, Monsieur," he said.  "I had money saved up.  I
+bought this wagon and a cinematograph outfit.  I go to the little towns
+in the Midi.  One can take only four sous--two from the children--but I
+get along.  Now, when I am well, I shall not go back to Paris.  Have you
+ever lived in a wagon, Monsieur?  No?  Well, never do it, if you do not
+want to realize that it is the only life worth living."
+
+Pierre was interested in the gossip of the Quarter.  A frequent "_c'est
+vrai_" and "_dîtes donc_" punctuated my news of American artists who had
+gone home at last.  When I told him of the few who had sold pictures in
+America, his comment was "_épatant_," which he meant in no
+uncomplimentary sense.  The Artist was an old favorite of Pierre's.  I
+restrained his impulse to go right out to greet the Artist.  Pierre
+entered into my idea with alacrity.  The dog was given a bone and
+chained.  The coal box was brought out from the wagon, and turned upside
+down for a table beside a fallen tree.  When all was ready, I watched
+Pierre surprise the Artist.  He put a napkin over his arm, and froze his
+face.  Then he tip-toed up to the Artist's elbow, and announced,
+"_Monsieur est servi._"  For once I was able to get the Artist away from
+his work.
+
+What a meal we did have there beside that little stream!  There were
+bottles in Pierre's wagon, and he insisted upon opening more than one.
+When we finally left Pierre to his dishes, we were well fortified for the
+climb to Saint-Paul-du-Var, and in the mood to appreciate
+enthusiastically all that was before us.
+
+Above on the left we could see the high road that we had deserted at
+Villeneuve-Loubet.  It did not come out of its way for Saint-Paul-du-Var,
+but went straight on inland Vence-wards.  A side road, on the level, came
+over towards the gate of Saint-Paul-du-Var.  To this road ours mounted,
+and joined it just outside the town.  In climbing we had the opportunity,
+denied to the conventional, of seeing that Saint-Paul-du-Var was really
+on the top of a hill.  The walls rose sheer, and only the outer houses,
+directly behind the ramparts, were in our line of vision.  Nearly up to
+the entrance to the city we passed between a tiny stone chapel and a
+mill, whose wheel was a curious combination of metal and wood.  The
+Artist exclaimed that it would make a bully sketch.  He saw its
+picturesque possibilities.  I wondered, on the other hand, whether it
+would work and how it worked.  Moss and grass on a millwheel in the Midi
+are no surer signs of abandonment and disuse than a dry millrace.  Where
+things die fast they grow fast.  A little water brings forth vegetable
+life in a single day.  Southern streams are not perennial.  On the
+Riviera, they are fed from nearby mountains, and are intermittent even in
+their season.  When the water ceases, the sun quickly bakes a crust of
+silt and dries the stones of the river-beds gray-brown.
+
+A dwarf could hardly have said mass in the chapel.  Its rear wall was the
+rising ground, and there seemed to be a garden on the roof.  Burial space
+extending no farther than the roots of a sentinel cypress told the tale
+of one man's vanity or devotion.  The situation of the chapel prompted us
+to look over the ground for traces of a lunette bastion on the
+counterscarp.  We found that the chapel was built upon an earlier
+foundation of stone taken from a fortification wall, and that later
+builders had made over the chapel into a belvedere.  Steps on the side of
+the slope led to the roof, upon which two benches had been placed.  What
+past generations have left us we use for purposes of our own.  We talk
+sentimentally of our traditions, but we test them by their utility.
+
+Saint-Paul-du-Var fails to satisfy twentieth-century standards.  It is
+not a thriving, bustling city.  It is not a tourist center.  The walls
+are as they were five centuries ago.  The space inside is sufficient for
+the population, and one gate serves all needs.  The medieval aspect is
+not destroyed by buildings outside the walls, and the medieval atmosphere
+is undisturbed by hotel touts and postcard vendors.  When we presented
+ourselves before the gate, not a soul was in sight.  A bronze cannon of
+Charles-Quint's time stuck its nose out of the ground by the portcullis.
+We had to pull off grass and dirt to find the inscription.  While we were
+examining the towers that flanked the gate, a wagon rattled slowly by.
+The driver did not look at us.  A woman with a basket of vegetables on
+her head met us under the arch.  She did not look at us.  We found the
+same indifference in the town.  Even the small boys refrained from
+staring or grinning or yelling or asking for pennies.  None volunteered
+to show us around.
+
+"The interest in our arrival at Saint-Paul-du-Var," commented the Artist,
+"is all on our side."
+
+Human nature is full of contradictions.  We should have been annoyed if
+people had bothered us.  We were as much annoyed when they paid no
+attention to us.
+
+We went up in one of the towers to reach the ramparts.  Keeping on the
+walls all the way around the town involved an occasional bit of climbing.
+We had to forget our clothes.  That was easy, however, for every step of
+the way was of compelling interest _extra et intra muros_.  Outside, the
+panorama of the Riviera, sea and mountains, towns and valleys, lay before
+us to the four points of the compass.  Inside, houses of different
+centuries but none post-Bourbon, each crowding its neighbor but none
+without individuality of its own, faced us and curved with us.  For once,
+the Artist failed to single out a subject.
+
+Seaward, beyond the valley through which we had come, were
+Villeneuve-Loubet and Cagnes.  On the right we could see to the Antibes
+lighthouse, and on the left, across the Var, to the point between Nice
+and Villefranche.  Landward were Vence and the wall of the Alpes
+Maritimes.  The afternoon sun fell full on the snow and darkened the
+upper valleys of the numerous confluents of the Var and Loup rivers.
+
+Sketching was tomorrow's task.  There was time only for exploration of
+the city before sunset.  We came down at the tower opposite the one from
+which we had started on our round.  On the road to the electric tram, we
+saw the _restaurant-hôtel_, a cube of whitewash, but we were far from the
+temptation of banalities.  Tea or something, and a place to spend the
+night, could be found within the walls.
+
+Saint-Paul-du-Var caught us in its fascinating maze.  We forgot that we
+were thirsty.  There was just one street.  It zigzagged its way across
+the town from the gate.  You lost the points of the compass and hardly
+realized that you were going over the top of a hill.  The street curved
+every hundred yards, and frequently turned around three sides of a single
+building.  Fountains were at the bends.  One of them, opposite the
+market, fed a square pool that was the city laundry.  Women, kneeling on
+the edge, were at the eternal task.  We passed the centers of municipal
+life, post-office, _mairie_, _gendarmerie_, school and church.
+
+Churches of Riviera towns, like the character and speech and features of
+the people, are a reminder of the recency of the French occupation.
+There is a replica of the church of Saint-Paul-du-Var in a thousand
+Italian cities.  When you enter the colorless building from the plain
+curved porch, the chill strikes right into your bones.  Windows do not
+compete with candles.  You have to grope your way toward the altar.
+Unless you strain your eyes, or lamps are burning, side chapels pass
+unnoticed.  If you are looking for inscriptions or want to admire the old
+master's picture, with which every church claims to be endowed, you must
+get the verger with his taper.  Altars are gaudily decorated and statues
+bejeweled and be (artificial) flowered in Hispano-Italian fashion.  The
+_mairie_, reconstructed from an ancient palace or castle, was more
+interesting.  Beside the mairie a medieval square tower, which may have
+been a donjon, was occupied on the ground floor by the _gendarmerie_.
+Bars on the upper windows indicated that it was still the prison.
+
+We tried the alleys that led off from the street, thinking each might be
+a thoroughfare to take us back to the ramparts.  They ended abruptly in a
+_cul-de-sac_ or court.  The _culs-de-sac_, uninviting to eye and nose,
+were as Italian as the church.  The houses in the courts were stables
+downstairs.  Man and beast lived together.  Flowers and wee bushes grew
+up around the wells in the center of the courts.  Everything was built of
+stone and red-tiled.  But there was none of the dull gray-and-red
+monotony of northern towns near the sea or of the sharp gray-and-red
+monotony of towns of the Mediterranean peninsulas.  Grass sprouted out
+between the stones of the walls and the tiles of the roofs.  From
+window-ledges and eaves hung ferns.  A blush of moss on the stones added
+to the green of plant life, and softened the austerity of the gray.
+Nature was successful in asserting herself against man and sun and sea.
+
+[Illustration: "The houses in the courts were stables downstairs."]
+
+We were expressing our enthusiasm in a court where the living green
+combined with age to glorify the buildings.  We did not see the
+dilapidation, we did not smell the dirt, we did not feel the squalor.  A
+woman was lighting a fire in a brazier on her doorstep.  She looked
+hostilely at us.  We beamed in counteraction.  She looked more hostilely.
+As the Artist wanted to sketch her house, some words seemed necessary.  I
+detailed our emotions.  Was not her lot, cast in this picturesque spot,
+most enviable?
+
+"We want to take away with us," I said, "a tangible memory of this
+beautiful, this picturesque, this verdant court in which you live."
+
+"If you had to live here," she announced simply, "you'd want to go away
+and forget it."
+
+The fumes had burned from the charcoal.  The woman picked up the brazier,
+carried it inside without another word or look, and slammed the door
+behind her with her foot.
+
+The Artist was already in his sketch, but he paused to growl and
+philosophize.  "If she had waited a minute longer," he complained, "I
+should have had her and the brazier.  Funny how unappreciative people
+are.  You and I, _mon vieux_, would like nothing better than to stay
+here.  From the other side of her house that woman must have a great view
+of the sea and the mountains.  Is she going to watch the sunset?  No, she
+is going to make soup for her man on that brazier in a dark hole of a
+room, and feel sorry for herself because she doesn't live in Paris where
+she could go to the movies every night."
+
+Our ardor for Saint-Paul-du-Var lasted splendidly through the sunset on
+the ramparts.  We had found the ideal spot.  Hoi polloi could have their
+Nice and their Cannes!  But when night fell, there were few lights on the
+street, and shopkeepers looked at us in stupid amazement when we inquired
+about lodgings.  We did not dare to ask in the drinking places, for fear
+they might volunteer to put us up.  In the _épiceries_, we were offered
+bread and sardines.  There was no butter.  So we went rather less
+reluctantly than we had thought possible an hour earlier out of the gate
+towards the _hôtel-restaurant_.  An old man was camped against the wall
+in a wagon like Pierre's.  He had been sharpening Saint-Paul-du-Var's
+scissors and knives.  We confided in him, and asked if he thought the
+_hôtel-restaurant_ would give us a good dinner and a good bed.  The
+scissors-grinder wrinkled his nose and twinkled his eyes.  "The last tram
+from Vence to Cagnes stops over there at eight-ten," he said decisively.
+"You have five minutes to catch it.  Get off at Villeneuve-Loubet, and go
+to the Hôtel Beau-Site.  The proprietor is a _cordon bleu_ of a _chef_.
+He has his own trout, and he knows just what tourists like to eat and
+drink.  Motorists stop there over night, so you need have no fear."
+
+"But--" I started to remonstrate.
+
+The Artist was already hurrying in the direction of the tram.  I followed
+him.
+
+The next morning the Artist went back to Saint-Paul-du-Var for his
+sketches.  I did not accompany him.  Saint-Paul-du-Var was a delightful
+memory, and I wanted to keep it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+VILLENEUVE-LOUBET
+
+On a hill a mile or so back from the Cannes-Nice road, just before one
+reaches Cagnes, a castle of unusual size and severity of outline rises
+above the trees of a park.  The roads from Cagnes to Grasse and Vence
+bifurcate at the foot of the hill on which the castle is built.  What one
+thinks of the castle depends upon which road one takes.  The traveler on
+the Vence road sees a pretentious entrance, constructed for automobiles,
+with a twentieth-century iron gate and a twentieth-century porter's
+lodge.  The park looks well groomed.  The wall along the Vence side is as
+new as the gate and the lodge.  The stone of the castle is white and
+fresh.  One dismisses the castle as an imitation or a wholesale
+restoration by an architect lacking in imagination and cleverness.  But
+if the left hand road toward Grasse is taken, one sees twelfth-century
+fortifications coming down from the top of the hill to the roadside.
+There are ruins of bastions and towers overgrown with bushes and ivy.
+Farther along an old town is revealed climbing the hill to the castle.
+There is nothing _nouveau riche_ about Villeneuve-Loubet.  The only
+touches of the modern are the motor road with kilometer stones, the iron
+bridge over the Loup, and the huge sign informing you that the hotel is
+near by.
+
+Had we limited our inland exploration to the Vence side of the hill, the
+Artist and I would not have discovered Villeneuve-Loubet.  Had we been
+hurrying through toward Grasse in automobile or tram, we would probably
+have exclaimed "how picturesque" or "interesting, isn't it?" and
+continued our way.  Luck saved us.
+
+A scissors-grinder at the gate of Saint-Paul-du-Var recommended the trout
+and beds of the Villeneuve-Loubet hotel.  Just as the moon was coming up
+one April evening, we got off the Vence-Cagnes tram at the junction of
+the Grasse tramway, and walked to the revelation of what the castle
+really was.  We decided to eat something in a hurry, and go around the
+town that very evening.
+
+When, helped by the sign, we reached the Hôtel Beau-Site, the proprietor
+came forward with his best shuffle and bow.  Trout?  Of course there were
+trout, plenty of them.  Alas, in these days when business was very, very
+bad, when people had no money to travel, and visitors accordingly were
+scarce, there were too many trout.  But that was to the advantage of
+_messieurs_.  He, Jean Alphonse, could give a large choice, and the
+dinner would have all his attention.  It was his pride and rule to give
+personal attention always to every dish that left his kitchen, but with
+the _monde_ of a regular season, he could not take every fish out of the
+pan himself, and see that the slices of lemon were cut, and the parsley
+put, just as he had always done when he was the _chef_ of Monsieur Blanc.
+We knew Monsieur Blanc.  Monsieur Blanc died eight years ago, but that
+was the way of the world.  Now messieurs could go right along with him
+and pick out their own fish.  The net was down by the pool, and he would
+get a lamp in just one little minute.  For that would be best.  The moon
+was coming up, true.  But one could not trust the moonlight in choosing
+fish.
+
+The garden of the Hôtel Beau-Site contains a curious succession of bowers
+made by training bamboo trees for partitions and ceilings.  As we went
+through them, Jean Alphonse explained that these natural _salons
+particuliers_, where parties could have luncheon out-of-doors and yet
+remain sheltered from the sun and in privacy, combined with the trout to
+give his hotel a wonderful vogue in tourist season.  We, of course,
+insisted that the reputation of the chef must be the third and
+controlling attraction.  The pool was full, and the trout had no chance.
+It was not a sporting proposition; but just before dinner one does not
+think of that.  Even our choice out of the net was gently guided by Jean
+Alphonse.  Since human nature is the same the world over, is it
+surprising that the tricks calculated to captivate and deceive are the
+same?  I recalled a famous restaurant in Moscow, where one went to the
+fountain with a white-robed Tartar waiter and thought he picked his fish.
+I have no doubt that Jean Alphonse believed that his idea was original,
+and that we were experiencing a new sensation.
+
+Jean Alphonse did not boast idly of his cuisine.  He possessed, too, the
+genius of the successful boniface for knowing what would please his
+guests.  He sensed our lack of interest in the wines of the Midi, and,
+helped by the Artist's checked knickers and slender cane, set forth a
+bottle of old Scotch.  We refused to allow him to open the dining-room
+for us, and had our dinner in a corner of the café.  Villeneuve-Loubet's
+_élite_ gathered to see us eat.  The _garde-champêtre_, the veteran of
+1870, the chatelain's bailiff, the local representative in the Legion of
+Honor (rosette, not ribbon, if you please), and two _chasseurs alpins_,
+home from the maneuvers on sick leave, ordered their coffee or liqueur at
+other tables, but were glad to join us when we said the word.  Soon we
+had a dozen around us.  The history of the war--and past and future
+wars--and of Villeneuve-Loubet was set forth in detail.
+
+Had it not been for the moon, we should certainly have gone from the
+table to our rooms.  But the full moon on the Riviera makes a more
+fascinating fairyland than one can find in dreams.  We did not hesitate,
+when the last of our friends left, to follow them out-of-doors.
+Villeneuve-Loubet might prove to be a modest town tomorrow, old, of
+course, and interesting: but we were going to see it tonight under the
+spell of the moon.  We were going to wander where we willed, with all the
+town to ourselves.  We were going to live for an hour in the Middle Ages.
+For if there was anything modern in Villeneuve-Loubet, the moonlight
+would hide it or gloss it over; if there was anything ancient, the
+moonlight would enable us to see it as we wanted to see it.  I pity the
+limited souls who do not believe in moonshine, and use the word
+contemptuously.  One is illogical who contends that moonshine gives a
+false idea of things; for he is testing the moonshine impression by
+sunshine.  It would be as illogical to say that sunshine gives a false
+idea of things on the ground that moonshine is the standard.  If sunshine
+is reality, so is moonshine.  The difference is that we are more
+accustomed to see things by sunlight than by moonlight.  Our test of
+reality is familiarity, and of truth repetition.
+
+Villeneuve-Loubet is built against a cliff.  The houses rise on tiers of
+stone terraces.  They are made of stone quarried on the spot.  Red tiles,
+the conspicuous feature of Mediterranean cities, are lacking in
+Villeneuve-Loubet.  The roofs are slabs of stone.  The streets are the
+surface of the cliff.  We climbed toward the castle through a ghost-city.
+The moon enhanced the gray-whiteness that was the common color of ground,
+walls and roofs.  The shadows, sharp and black, were needed to set forth
+the lines of the buildings.
+
+The picture called for a witch.  The silence was broken by the tapping of
+a cane.  Around the corner the witch hobbled into the scene, testing each
+step before her.  She was dressed in black, of course, and bent over with
+just the curve of the back the Artist loves to give to his old women.
+She was a friendly soul, and did not seem amazed to find strangers
+strolling late at night in her town.  We were "_Anglais_," and that was
+explanation enough to one who had seen three generations of tourists.
+She stopped to talk with us.  When had we arrived at Villeneuve-Loubet?
+Had we come up from Nice that afternoon and did we plan to stay for a day
+or two with Jean Alphonse at the Hôtel Beau-Site?  Did we not agree that
+Villeneuve-Loubet was superb?  Perhaps we were artists?  So many artists
+came here to paint and sketch the old houses.  What was our impression of
+her country?  We knew that she meant by "country" not France but
+Villeneuve-Loubet, and mustered our best vocabulary to admire the town,
+the solid foundations, the houses, the protecting castle, and above all,
+the unique streets of stone.
+
+"But it must be very difficult to go up and down in winter.  How do you
+manage when the rock is frozen over with snow and ice?" I asked.
+
+"It does not freeze here," she answered.
+
+The moon-whiteness had made me think of winter, and it had not occurred
+to me that there would be no snow and ice.  Ideas are pervasive.  We
+place them immediately and unquestioningly upon the hypothesis that
+happens to fit.
+
+The church, of eighteenth-century architecture, is the last building at
+the upper end of the town.  It stands on a terrace outside the lower wall
+of the castle, an eloquent witness of the survival of feudal ideas.  In
+order that the lord of the manor need not go far to mass, when there
+happened to be no private chaplain in the castle, the town-folk must
+climb to their devotions.  I tried the church door from habit.  It was
+not locked.  The Artist refused to go in.
+
+"Why should one poke around a church, especially at night and this
+night?" he remonstrated, and walked over to the wall of the terrace.
+
+"There may be something inside," I urged.
+
+"There _is_ something outside," he answered, with his back turned upon
+the castle as well as church.
+
+I could see my way around, for the windows of nave and transept were
+large, and had plain glass.  Moonlight was sufficient to read
+inscriptions that set forth in detail the pedigree of the chatelains.
+The baptismal names overflowed a line, and were followed by a family name
+almost as long, MARCH-TRIPOLY DE PANISSE-PASSIS.  Longest of all was the
+list of titles.  The chatelains were marquesses and counts and knights of
+Malta and seigneurs of a dozen domains of the northlands as well as of
+Provence.  March-Tripoly and some of the seigneural names told the story
+that I have often read in church inscriptions near the sea in Italy, in
+Hungary, in Dalmatia and in Greece, as well as in Provence and Catalonia.
+The feudal families of the Mediterranean are of Teutonic and Scandinavian
+origin.  They were founded by the stock that destroyed the Roman Empire,
+barbarians, stronger, more energetic, more resourceful, more resolute
+than the southerners whom they made their serfs.  When feudalism, through
+the formation of larger political units by the extension of kingly
+rights, began to decline, the chatelains preserved their prestige by
+supporting the propaganda to redeem the Holy Sepulcher.  They took the
+Cross and went to fight the Saracens in Africa and Asia.  When climate
+rather than culture latinized them, later northmen came and dispossessed
+them.  The men of the north have always been fighting their way to the
+Mediterranean.  Are Germans and Russians disturbing the peace of Europe
+any more or any differently than Northern Europeans have always done?
+Since the dawn of history, the Mediterranean races have had to contend
+with the men of the north seeking the sun.
+
+Behind the church, ruins of centuries, overgrown with shrubbery and ivy,
+cling to the side of the cliff from the castle to the valley road.  The
+great square mass of the castle rises on top of a slope far above the
+church terrace.  A moat, filled with bushes, is on a level with the
+terrace, and beyond the moat is a wall.  An unkept path leads through the
+moat to a modest door.  From the towers and arch above one can see that
+the former entrance to the castle, by means of a portcullis, was on this
+side.  But the outer wall has been rebuilt, leaving only a servants'
+door.  Evidently the chatelain used to enter by climbing up through
+Villeneuve-Loubet as we had done.  Since the motor road was made on the
+other side of the hill, he and his guests can ignore Villeneuve-Loubet.
+
+The Artist was sitting on the wall of the terrace, engrossed in midnight
+labor.  He was willing to stop for a pipe.  Above us the castle,
+dominated by a pentagonal tower, rose toward the moon.  Below us, the
+blanched roofs of Villeneuve-Loubet slanted into the valley.  As long as
+the pipe lasted, I was able to talk to the Artist about the men of the
+north seeking the sun.  But when the bowl ceased to respond to matches,
+he said; "All very well, but I know one man of the north who is going to
+seek his bed."
+
+Before reaching the Hôtel Beau-Site, however, a street on the left
+attracted us.  It seemed to end in a flight of steps that dipped under
+arches, and we could hear the swift rush of water.  We were not so sleepy
+as we thought, for both of us were still willing to explore.  The steps
+led to the flour mill.  We followed the mill-race until we reached the
+Grasse tram road near the river.  By the tram station, a light was
+shining from the open door of a café in a wooden shanty.  We went in, and
+found Villeneuve-Loubet's officer of the Legion of Honor smoking his pipe
+over a cup of _tilleul_.
+
+"There has been an accident in the gorge of the Loup," he said.  "The
+last tram from Grasse was derailed, and two automobiles from Cagnes went
+up an hour ago.  As I am the _maire_, I must wait for news.  There may be
+something for me to do."
+
+Monsieur le Maire told us that he had spent his life in the West African
+coast trade, with headquarters in Marseilles.  If he had stayed there to
+end his days, he would have been one of a hundred thousand in a great
+city, cast aside and ignored by the new generation.  But in his native
+_pays_ he was in the thick of things.  To return to their old home is not
+wholly a question of sentiment with Frenchmen who retire from business in
+the city or the colonies.  Money goes farther, and one can be an
+official, with public duties and honors, and enjoy the privilege of
+writing on notepaper bearing the magic heading, _République Française_.
+Monsieur le Maire told us that the chatelain came often, and never forgot
+to invite him to meet the guests at the castle.  Some years ago I used to
+think that it was a peculiar characteristic of the French to enjoy being
+made much of and exercising authority.  But since I have traveled in my
+own and many other countries I have come to realize that this
+characteristic is not peculiarly French.
+
+When Monsieur le Maire spoke of the chatelain, I had my opening.  Full of
+the idea of the men of the north seeking the sun, I was ready to spread
+to others the impression I had made upon myself of my own erudition and
+cleverness.  At the risk of boring the Artist, I repeated and enlarged
+upon my deductions from the inscription of the March-Tripoly de
+Panisse-Passis.  Monsieur le Maire looked at me with malicious amazement.
+
+"_La-la-la!_" he cried.  "Not so fast.  You haven't got it right at all,
+at all, at all!  The castle of Villeneuve-Loubet is the only one in this
+corner of Provence that belongs to its pre-Revolutionary owners, but
+there are many centuries between feudal days and our time.  Castles
+remain, but history changes.  The March-Tripoly de Panisse-Passis are not
+a feudal family, and they do not come from the north.  The African part
+of the name is due to an unproven claim of descent from a French consular
+official in Tripoli of the sixteenth century.  The château, after a
+succession of proprietors, came to the Panisse family through marriage
+with the daughter of a Marseilles notary, who got the château by
+foreclosing a mortgage.  During the Revolutionary period, the property
+was saved from confiscation by a clever straddle.  The owner stayed in
+France, and supported the Revolution, while the son emigrated with the
+Bourbons.  The peerage was created just a hundred years ago by Louis
+XVIII, in reward for the refusal of the Panisses to follow Napoleon a
+second time after the return from Elba."
+
+Another pervasive idea!
+
+"The Moon got you," was the laughing comment of the Artist.
+
+Historical reminiscences died hard, however.  We discussed the possible
+Saracen origin of the pentagonal tower, and the vicissitudes of the
+castle during the struggles between Mohammedans and Christians, feudal
+lords and kings, Catholics and Protestants, Spaniards and French.
+Monsieur le Maire was a Bonapartist, and he insisted that the chief glory
+of Villeneuve-Loubet was the association with Napoleon.
+
+"When Napoleon was living at Nice," he said, "he used to come out here
+often.  Napoleon thought that the view of sea and mountains from
+Villeneuve-Loubet was the finest on the Riviera.  He could stand up there
+and look out towards his native island, and contemplate the mountains the
+crossing of which was his first great step to fame.  Napoleon (and here
+Monsieur le Maire winked at the Artist) was a man of the sun seeking the
+north--just like Caesar, ho! ho!"
+
+The arrival of the tram, which had recovered its equilibrium, helped me
+to recover mine.  We said good night to Monsieur le Maire, and before
+turning in went out on the iron bridge that spanned the Loup.
+
+The river, swollen by the spring thaw and rains, had overflowed its
+banks, and was swirling around willows and poplars.  It was not deep, and
+the water flashed in the moonlight as it rippled over the stones.  There
+was a smell of fresh-cut logs.  We looked beyond a sawmill into a gorge
+of pines that ended in a transversal white mountain wall.
+
+[Illustration: The river was swirling around willows and poplars.]
+
+"Bully placer ground!" I exclaimed.
+
+The Artist leaned over the bridge, looked down, and sighed just one word,
+"Salmon!"
+
+We sought the Hôtel Beau-Site in silence.
+
+Monuments of men's making create a diversity of atmospheres and call
+forth a diversity of reminiscences.  They cause imagination to run riot
+in history.  But nature is the same the world over, and there would be
+reactions and yearnings if one knew nothing of the past from books.
+There is no conflict.  Nature transcends.  We dreamed that night not of
+crusaders, but of Idaho and the Bitter Root Range.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+VENCE
+
+The most picturesque bit of mountain railway on the Riviera is the
+fourteen miles from Grasse to Vence.  Yielding to a sudden impulse, we
+took it one afternoon.  The train passed from Grasse through olive
+groves and fig orchards and over two viaducts.  A third viaduct of
+eleven arches took us across the Loup.  We were just at the season when
+the melting snows made a roaring torrent of what was most of the year a
+little stream lost in a wide gravel bed.  The view up the gorge gave us
+the feeling of being in the heart of the mountains.  And yet from the
+opposite windows of the train we could see the Mediterranean.  Then we
+circled the little town of Tourettes at the foot of the Puy de
+Tourettes, with high cliffs in the background, and a wild luxurious
+growth of aloes below.  We almost circled the village, crossing the
+ravines on either side on viaducts.  A sixth long viaduct brought us to
+Vence.  We had a rendezvous that evening at Cannes.  There was no time
+to stop.  We kept on to Nice to make the only connection that would get
+us back to Cannes.
+
+Afterwards the Artist and I spoke often of Vence.  Twice we planned to
+go to Vence, but found the fascination of Villeneuve-Loubet and
+Saint-Paul-du-Var justifiable deterrents.
+
+On the terrace of our favorite café in the Allées de la Liberté at
+Cannes on Easter evening we announced the intention of making a special
+trip to Vence the next day.
+
+"Tomorrow is Easter Monday, and the children have no school," said the
+Artist's hostess.  "We shall make a family party of it, train to Cagnes
+where I may have a chance to see your Mademoiselle Simone, a trout
+luncheon at Villeneuve-Loubet with the rest of that bottle of which you
+boys spoke, and Vence in the afternoon."
+
+The orders had been given.  There was an early morning stir at the
+Villa Étoile, a scramble to the Théoule railway station, and before
+nine o'clock we were all aboard for the hour's ride to Cagnes.  When we
+got off the train, there was just one _cocher_ available.  He looked at
+papa and mamma and Uncle Lester and the four babies and their nurse,
+and raised his hands to heaven.  But Villeneuve-Loubet was not far off
+and we were careful to say nothing of the afternoon's program.  Léonie
+and the children were packed into the carriage.  The rest of us
+followed afoot.
+
+Our cheerful host at Villeneuve-Loubet greeted us effusively.  He had
+many holiday guests, but he remembered the Artist and me, and the
+splendid profit accruing from every drink out of the bottle only _les
+Anglais_ called for.  There were plenty of trout, fresh sliced
+cucumbers, and a special soup for the kiddies.  The _cocher_ was so
+amenable to Léonie's charms and to drinks that cost less than ours that
+he consented to further exertion for his horse.  But the climb to Vence
+was out of the question--a physical impossibility, he declared.  And
+we, having seen the horse at rest and in action, could only sorrowfully
+agree.  It was too much of a job to maneuver all the children (the baby
+could not walk) to the tramway halt, nearly a mile away, and on and off
+the cars.  The mother said that she could not be a good sport to the
+point of abandoning all her handicaps for several hours in a place
+where the river flowed fast and deep.  So it was agreed that she would
+have at least the excursion to Saint-Paul-du-Var, and the Artist and I,
+determined this time on Vence, would see her the next evening for
+dinner at Cannes.
+
+So we made our adieux, and hurried off to get the tram at the
+bifurcation below the castle.  Half an hour later our tram passed the
+carriage jogging up the hill.  As luck had it, we turned out just then
+on a switch to let the down car pass.  The temptation of Vence was too
+much for Helen.  The _cocher_ seemed a fatherly sort of a man.  There
+was a quick consultation from tram to carriage.  A reunion with the
+handicaps was set for two hours later in front of the triple gate of
+Saint-Paul-du-Var, and another passenger got on the tram.
+
+Around a curve we waved farewell to our children.  After all, Vence was
+only three miles beyond Saint-Paul.  As we passed the Saint-Paul halt,
+our old friend, the postman, was on the platform to receive the
+mailbag.  We told him that the kiddies were coming, and slipped him ten
+francs to look after them until our return.
+
+"_Soyes tranquilles, M'sieu-dame,_" he reassured us.  "_Moi, je suis
+grand'père._"
+
+Beyond Saint-Paul the tramway left the road and climbed over a viaduct
+to Vence.
+
+Ventium Cassaris was a military base of great importance in the days of
+imperial Rome.  It was the central commissariat depot for the armies in
+Gaul, and had a forum and temples.  During the Middle Ages it was a
+stronghold of the Holy Roman Empire.  It stands on the side of a
+fertile hill more than a thousand feet above the sea.  The site was
+probably chosen because of the wall of rocks on the north which shelter
+it from the mistral, a wind that the Romans found as little to their
+liking as later interlopers.  In peace as in war the outside world has
+never been able to keep away from the Riviera.
+
+The Artist announced his intention of spending a couple of days
+sketching, and left us to seek a hotel.  Helen and I found that there
+was no tram to Saint-Paul-du-Var that would enable us to pick up the
+children in time for the train to Théoule unless we returned without
+seeing Vence.  So we decided to give an hour to the town and walk back
+to Saint-Paul.
+
+As at Grasse a boulevard runs along the line of the old fortifications.
+Some of the houses facing it have used the town wall for foundations or
+are themselves remnants of the wall.  But at Vence the _boulevard de
+l'enceinte_ is circular--a modest _Ringstrasse_, marking without
+interruption the old town from the new.  We dipped in and out of alleys
+under arches, and made a turn of the streets of the old town.  Much of
+the medieval still survives in Vence, as in other hill towns of the
+Riviera.  But only behind the cathedral did we find a remnant of
+imperial Rome.  A granite column supporting an arch, and reliefs and
+inscriptions built in the north wall of the cathedral, are all that we
+saw of Vence's latinity.
+
+The cathedral, however, is the most interesting we found on the
+Riviera.  It is a Romanesque building, built on the site of the
+second-century temple, and its tall battlemented tower harks back to a
+tenth-century _château fort_.  The interior is striking: double aisles,
+simple nave with tiers of arches of the tenth century, a choir with
+richly carved oak stalls, a fourth-century sarcophagus for altar, and a
+font and lectern of the Italian Renaissance.
+
+It was just a glimpse.  But sometimes glimpses make more vivid memories
+than longer acquaintance.  At the end of our hour we left Vence and
+hurried down the broad road of red shale past meadows thick with
+violets.  We went through the deep pine-filled ravine over which we had
+crossed on the viaduct.  Then the climb to Saint-Paul-du-Var.
+
+[Illustration: "Down the broad road of red shale past meadows thick
+with violets."]
+
+We might have taken our time.  Christine and Lloyd and Mimi came
+running to greet us, bringing with them little friends who had probably
+never before played with children from Paris.  We did not need to ask
+what kind of a time they had been having.  Children are the true
+cosmopolitans.  Hope lay under a tree on her blanket playing with her
+pink shoes.  Nearby, at a table in front of the Café de la Porte,
+Léonie was treating the _cocher_ and the postman to a glass of beer.
+
+"I got bread and honey and milk for the children's _goûter_," explained
+Léonie, "and _Monsieur le cocher_ and I are having ours with _Monsieur
+le facteur_."
+
+As the children did not seem to be tired and the _cocher_ was in no
+hurry, Helen and I made a tour of the walls, and took a photograph of
+our handicaps and their faithful attendants in front of the great gate
+built by Francis I, who prized Saint-Paul-du-Var as the best spot to
+guard the fords of the river against Charles V.
+
+A reader of this manuscript declares that the chapter on Vence ought to
+be struck out.
+
+"They [I suppose she means the home folks] will never understand," she
+insists.
+
+I am adamant.
+
+"When they come to the Riviera, they will understand," I answer.
+
+Between Saint-Raphaël and Menton the most sacred responsibilities do
+not weigh one down all the time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MENTON
+
+In architectural parlance the cornice is the horizontal molded
+projection crowning a building, especially the uppermost member of the
+entablature of an order, surmounting the frieze.  The word is also used
+in mountaineering to describe an overhanging mass of hardened snow at
+the edge of a precipice.  In the Maritime Alps it has a striking
+figurative meaning.  There are four _corniches_--the main roads along
+the two sections of the Riviera, Menton to Nice and Théoule to
+Saint-Raphaël, where the mountains come right down to the sea and
+nature affords no natural routes.  The Grande Corniche and the Petite
+Corniche run from Nice to Menton, and the Moyenne Corniche from Nice to
+Monte Carlo.  The Corniche d'Or or Corniche de l'Estérel is the new
+road from Théoule to Saint-Raphaël.  The word is incorrectly used, for
+the most part, concerning the two coast roads, the Petite Corniche and
+the Corniche l'Estérel.  For although these beautiful roads do at many
+points stand high above the sea, they descend as often as possible to
+connect with the coast towns.  But the analogy with the architectural
+term is perfect in so far as the Grande Corniche and the Moyenne
+Corniche are concerned.  At every point these wonderful roads,
+undisturbed by tramways and unbroken by towns (except La Turbie on the
+Grande Corniche and Éze on the Moyenne Corniche), you feel that you are
+traveling along a horizontal molded projection above temples built with
+hands and the activities of humankind.
+
+From Nice to the Italian frontier the railway, darting in and out of
+tunnels, keeps near sea level.  A small branch climbs from Monte Carlo
+to La Turbie.  The tramway from Nice to Menton follows the Petite
+Corniche, with a branch to Saint-Jean on Cap Ferrat.
+
+For tourists, Nice is the center of the Riviera, the place to come back
+to every night after day excursions.  Everything is so near that this
+is possible.  Nice is the terminus of railways and tramways east and
+west.  It is the home of the ubiquitous Cook.  You can buy all sorts of
+excursion tickets, and by watching the bulletin posted in front of the
+Cook office on the Promenade des Anglais, it is possible to "cover" the
+Riviera in a fortnight.  But this means a constant rush, perched on a
+high seat, crowded in with twenty others, on a _char à banes_, and only
+a kaleidoscopic vision of Mediterranean blue, hillside and valley green
+and brown, roof-top red, wall gray and mountain white.  At the end of
+your orgy, instead of distinct pictures, you carry away an impression
+of the Riviera in which the Place Masséna is a concrete image and the
+rest no more than dancing bits of colored glass.  Saint-Raphaël and
+Menton are the luncheon breaks of two days, and the Grande Corniche is
+a beautiful vague mountain road over which you whizzed.
+
+And yet there are those who go to the Riviera every year for a daily
+ride over the Grande Corniche, and who dream during ten months of two
+months at Menton!
+
+Sitting with our legs daggling over the stone coping at the entrance of
+the port in Nice, the Artist and I figured out--on the basis of just
+time for a glimpse and a few sketches--how long it would take us to
+wander through the Riviera.  Reserving March and April each year, we
+discovered that the allotted three score and ten, seeing that we had
+already come to half the span, would be inadequate.  And there were
+other parts of the world!  So we decided to see what we could, eschew
+the "day excursions," draw on the memories of former years, and let it
+go at that.  Grande Corniche and Moyenne Corniche would be explored
+afoot on sunny days and gray; shelter would be sought at Menton; and on
+the return to Nice, Monte Carlo and Villefranche would be the only
+tramway stops for us.
+
+To Ventimiglia, as if he foresaw what part of the Riviera would
+eventually fall to France, Napoleon I was the builder of La Grande
+Corniche.  His engineers, planning for horse-drawn vehicles in an age
+when time was not money, made the ascent easy by striking inland for
+several kilometers up from the valley of the Paillon and circling Mont
+Gros and Mont Vinaigrier.  For the first two miles you have Nice and
+Cimiez below you.  Then the road turns, passes the observatory of
+Bischoffsheim (who won posthumous fame by his having built the house
+where Wilson lost the battle of Paris in 1919), and goes over the Col
+des Quatre Chemins.  Here begins the matchless succession of views of
+the loveliest portion of the Riviera coast.  Below you is the harbor of
+Villefranche, between Montboron, which hides Nice, and Cap Ferrat
+jutting far into the sea with Cap de l'Hospice breaking out to the
+left.  The sea is always on your right as you continue to climb.
+Ancient Éze is on a lower hill midway between you and the
+Mediterranean.  If you have made an early start from Nice, La Turbie
+will come most conveniently in sight a little before noon.
+
+The only town of the Grande Corniche high up from the sea is on the
+line given in ancient maps as the frontier between Gaul and Italy, and
+it is evident that the Roman road followed here the route chosen by
+Napoleon.  For here the Senate raised the _trophaeum Augusti_ to
+commemorate the subjugation of the Gauls and the new era of
+tranquillity from invasion for the Empire.  On its site one of the most
+interesting medieval towers in southern France was the ruin par
+excellence of the Riviera until a few years ago.  It is now "restored"
+so well that it leaves nothing to the imagination--a crime quite in
+keeping with the spirit of the new age of the "movies."  Its architect
+wanted you to see at a glance just what it used to be.  You feel that
+he would have put arms on the Venus de Milo!  As we stood there, a
+guide came up and began to tell us the history of the tower.  We moved
+over to the terrace.  From Montboron to Bordighera the Riviera lay
+below us, a panorama which commanded silence.  Up came the guide
+fellow, and started to name each place.
+
+"I am about to commit murder," I cried.
+
+"I'll save you the bother by telling him to chase himself with this
+franc," said the Artist, pulling out the coin.  "If only the restorer
+of the Tower of Augustus were around, he'd come in for a franc too."
+
+La Turbie is not a town to hurry away from after lunch.  Its old
+gateways and leaning houses brought out the Artist's pencil.  I tried
+to explore the paths up the Tête du Chien.  _Défense de pénétrer_--and
+then selections from the Code about how spies are treated.  The same
+fate met me on the Mont de la Bataille.  France may love Italy just
+now--but she is taking no chances!  As far as I could judge, every high
+slope was fortified.  I had tea at one of the hotels perched above the
+town, counted my money, and suggested to the Artist that we slip down
+to Monte Carlo for the night.
+
+The next morning we took the little railway back to La Turbie and
+continued our walk.  From La Turbie the Grande Corniche makes a gradual
+descent behind the principality of Monaco to Cabbé-Roquebrune, and
+joins the Petite Corniche at Cap Martin.  Three miles farther on the
+Promenade du Midi leads into Menton.  This is the most beautiful
+stretch of the Grande Corniche; and it is paralleled by no other road,
+as the new Moyenne Corniche ends at Monte Carlo.  The view is before
+you as you go down.  The vegetation becomes more tropical.  You are
+nearer the sea, and the feeling of _dolce far niente_ gets into your
+bones as you approach Cap Martin.
+
+Mont Agel's limestone side gives you back the heat of the sun.  It is a
+radiator.  No wonder lemons flower all the year round, and you discover
+on the same tree buds, flowers, green and yellow fruit.  No wonder the
+palms are not out of their setting as at Cannes and Nice.  Locusts,
+flourishing where there is seemingly no ground to take root in, live
+from the air, and give forth pods that almost hide the leaves in their
+profusion.  The undergrowth of myrtle and dwarf ilex above becomes
+aloes and sarsaparilla and wild asparagus as we go down to the sea.  We
+have left the cypresses and cork-trees, and eucalyptus struggles in our
+nostrils with orange and lemon.  Even the ferns are scented!  The
+Artist looks with apathetic eye on the rocks and ruined castle of
+Roquebrune.  When we reach Menton we are willing to sink into
+cane-seated rockers on the Hôtel Bristol porch, call for something in a
+tall glass with ice in it, and let the morning walk count for a day's
+journey.
+
+The tourists who know Menton only as a mid-day luncheon break have
+robbed themselves of an experience that no other Riviera town offers.
+The Promenade des Anglais at Nice is interesting in the sense that the
+Avenue des Champs-Elysées is interesting.  The Mediterranean is
+accidental--an unimportant accessory.  The Promenade du Midi at Menton
+is another world.  And this other world, with its other world climate,
+reveals itself to you with increasingly keen delight, as you ride (you
+do not walk at Menton) around Cap Martin, up the mountain to old
+Sainte-Agnès, in the gorge of Saint-Louis, along the Boulevard du
+Garavan, and out to the Giardino Hanbury.  You say _giardino_ instead
+of _jardin_ because Mortola is just across the Italian frontier.  The
+eccentric Englishman chose this spot, without regard to political
+sovereignty present or future, as the best place to demonstrate the
+catholicity of the Riviera climate to tropical flora.  I simply mention
+these drives; for you do not ride at Menton any more than you walk.
+The man who wants to keep his energy and work on the Riviera must not
+go farther east than Nice.
+
+But why another world?  And another world even from that of the rest of
+the French Riviera?  It is partly the climate and the consequent flora,
+but mostly the light.  The general aridity of the Riviera, with the
+prevalence of everbrowns and evergreens, strikes unpleasantly at first
+the visitor from the North.  Sunshine and riotous colors of flowers and
+blossoming trees do not make up for the absence of water-fed green.
+When it rains, the Northerner's depression cannot be fought off.  The
+chill gets to his soul as well as to his bones.  He prays for the sun
+he has come south to seek.  But when the sun returns, the dust annoys
+him.  The high wind gets on his nerves.
+
+The casual tourist, whose stay is brief, even if he has come in the
+most favorable season, is "not so sure about the Riviera, you know."
+He is impatient with himself because, after the first vivid impression,
+panoramas and landscapes leave him unsatisfied.  There is no
+compensation for the absence of water-fed green in the canvas of nature
+_until one becomes responsive to other colors_.  I do not mean
+particular patches of color in flowers and blossoms.  These are of a
+season.  Often they pass in a week.  The sun that gives rich life kills
+quickly.  The glory of south lands, especially along the sea, is the
+constant changing of colors.  These colors you will drink in only when
+by familiarity you have become sensitive to lights and shadows.
+
+If you stay long enough at a place like Menton you will be ready for
+Southern Italy and Greece.  You will be able to drink in the beauty of
+landscapes without foliage.  And when you have acquired this sense,
+your own country will be a new world to you.  Never again, as long as
+you live, will you tire of any landscape.
+
+The sun veils and unveils itself more often and more quickly and more
+unexpectedly at Menton than at any place on the Riviera.  And the
+setting for watching the changes is perfect.  Menton can say, in the
+words of the old sundial,
+
+  "Son figlia del sole,
+  Eppure son ombre."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MONTE CARLO
+
+San Marino and Andorra have maintained their independence from the Middle
+Ages, but as republics.  The only reigning families who kept their
+domains from being engulfed in the evolution of modern Europe are those
+of Liechtenstein and Monaco.  What will happen to Liechtenstein with the
+disappearance of the Hapsburg Empire is uncertain.  Wedged in between the
+Vorarlberg portion of the Austrian Tyrol and Switzerland, Liechtenstein
+is almost as out of the way, as forgotten, as unimportant, as San Marino
+and Andorra.  Monaco is in a different situation.  The smallest country
+in the world covers only eight square miles, and never was very much
+larger than it is today.  Until half a century ago Monaco was an Italian
+principality and not at all an anomaly.  For Italy had been broken up
+into small political units from the Roman days.  At the time of the
+unification of Italy, the Italians had to part with a portion of the
+Riviera to France.  Monaco lost a bit of her coast line--the Menton
+district--and became an enclave in France.
+
+Because of the traditional friendship of the Grimaldi family for France,
+the principality was saved from extinction when the protectorate of Savoy
+(established by the Congress of Vienna) was withdrawn in 1861.  In fact,
+the male line of the Grimaldi died out just after the War of Spanish
+Succession, and the present house is of French descent.  But whether
+Grimaldi or Matignon, the princes of Monaco have fought for a thousand
+years on the side of France against the British especially, but also
+against the Italians, Spanish and Germans.  As unhesitatingly as his
+predecessors had always done, Prince Albert espoused the cause of France
+in 1914; his son fought through the war in the French army.
+
+And there is another reason for the continued independence of Monaco.
+Republics have no sense of gratitude.  After the fall of Napoleon III
+Monaco would hardly have survived save for the gambling concession.  Four
+years before the Franco-Prussian War, a casino and hotels built on the
+Roche des Spélugues had been named Monte Carlo in honor of the reigning
+prince.  The concession, granted to a Frenchman, François Blanc, was too
+valuable to spoil by having Monaco come under French law!  The Republic
+tolerated Monaco--on condition that no French officer in uniform and no
+inhabitant of the Département des Alpes-Maritimes (which surrounds
+Monaco) be allowed in the gaming rooms of the Casino.  It was also agreed
+that except in petty cases handled in a magistrate's court all crimes
+should be judged by French law and the criminals delivered for punishment
+to France.
+
+The arrangement is admirable from the French point of view.  The Riviera
+has its gambling place of world-wide fame with no opprobrium or
+responsibility attaching to the French Government.  The
+extra-territoriality does not extend to criminals.  The inhabitants of
+the neighboring French towns are not demoralized by the opportunity to
+gamble.  French army officers are protected from corruption.  It is
+presumed that the rest of the world, which can afford a trip to the
+principality, will be able to take care of its own morals!
+
+The Monégasques are similarly protected by their sovereign.  They, too,
+are forbidden to gamble.  They profit from the concession in that there
+are no taxes to pay in the rich little principality and in that several
+hundred thousand foreigners come every year to give big prices for every
+little service.  But they run no risk of being caught by the snare they
+set for others.  Prince and people, the Monégasques are like the wise old
+bartender, who said in a tone of virtuous self-satisfaction, "I never
+drink."
+
+When Tennyson, traveling along the Grande Corniche, saw Monaco, it was of
+the old medieval principality that he could write:
+
+  "How like a gem, beneath, the city
+  Of little Monaco, basking, glow'd."
+
+The old walled town, on its promontory, must indeed have seemed a gem in
+an unsurpassed setting in the time of Tennyson.  For the little Port of
+Hercules and the other promontory, Spélugues, were tree- and shrub- and
+flower-lined.  There was nothing to break the spell of old Monaco.  Now,
+alas, the Casino and hotels of Monte Carlo cover Spélugues, and between
+the promontories La Condamine has sprung up, a town of red-roofed villas,
+larger than either Monaco or Monte Carlo and forming with them an
+unbroken mass of buildings.  Monaco is simply an end of the city,
+distinct from the rest of the agglomeration only because it is high up
+and on a cape jutting out into the sea.
+
+Unless one went up to explore the old town, one would not realize that it
+was more than the palace with its garden and the post-Tennyson cathedral,
+too prominent for the good of the medieval spell.  La Condamine and Monte
+Carlo have reached the limit of expansion.  In front is the sea, behind
+the steep wall of the mountain.  The principality is all city.  But the
+mountains and sea prevent the exclusion of nature from the picture.
+Despite the modern growth of Monaco, from the Grande Corniche the words
+of the poet still hold good.  Monaco is no longer a predominantly
+medieval picture perhaps--but it is still a gem.
+
+The old town is as attractive in walls and buildings as other rock
+villages of the Riviera.  Three main streets, Rue Basse, Rue du Milieu
+and Rue des Briques, run parallel from the Place du Palais out on the
+promontory.  They are crossed by the narrowest of city alleys, _à
+l'Italienne_, and to the right of the Rue des Briques, around the
+Cathedral, is the rest of the town.  Nowhere does the old town extend to
+the sea.
+
+On the sites of the ancient fortifications the present ruler, Prince
+Albert, has made gardens and built museums for his collections of
+prehistoric man and of ocean life.  One ought never to dip into museums.
+If you have lots and lots of time (I mean weeks, not hours), or if you
+have special interest in a definite field of study, museums may be
+profitable.  But "doing" museums is the last word in tourist folly.  Yes,
+I know that skeletons and the cutest little fish are in those museums.  I
+am not ashamed to confess that I never darkened their doors.  Life is
+short, and while the Artist revels in his subjects, I find more interest
+in studying the living Monégasques than their--and our--negroid ancestors.
+
+For there is a separate race, with its own patois, in Monaco.  You would
+never spot it in the somewhat Teutonic cosmopolitanism of the Condamine
+and Monte Carlo tradesmen and hotel servants.  It is not apparent in the
+impassive _croupiers_ of the Casino.  But within a few hundred yards, in
+half a dozen streets and lanes, the physiognomy, the mentality, the
+language of the people make you realize that regarding Monaco as a
+separate country is not wholly a polite fiction to relieve the French
+Government of the responsibility for the Casino.  These people are
+different, children as well as grown-ups.  They are neither French nor
+Italian, Provençal nor Catalan, but as distinct as mountain Basques are
+from French and Spanish.  It is not a racial group distinction, as with
+the Basques.  In blood, the Monégasques are affiliated to their Provençal
+and Italian neighbors.
+
+What one sees in the old town of Monaco is a confirmation of the
+assertion of many historians that nationality, in our modern political
+sense of the word, and patriotism, as a mass instinct shared by millions,
+are phenomena of the nineteenth century.  Steam transportation,
+obligatory primary education, universal military service, are the factors
+that have developed national consciousness, and the exigencies and
+opportunities and advantages of the industrial era have furnished the
+motive for binding people together in great political organisms.  Today
+if there were no outside interests working against the solidarity of
+human beings leading a commonwealth existence in the same country, the
+political organism would soon make the race rather than the race the
+political organism.
+
+San Remo and Menton and Monaco are Riviera towns all within a few miles
+of each other.  People of the same origin have three political
+allegiances.  In half an hour your automobile will traverse the
+territories of three nations.  Italians and French fight under different
+flags and were within an ace of being lined against each other in the
+war.  Monégasques do not fight at all.  Taxes and tariff boundaries,
+schools and military obligations, make the differences between the three
+peoples.  Put them all under the same dispensation and where would be
+your races?
+
+In the old days the _raison d'être_ of the principality was the power to
+prey upon commerce.  From their fortress on the promontory the Grimaldi
+organized the Monégasques to levy tolls on passing ships.  Italy was not
+a united country.  France had not yet extended her frontiers to the
+Riviera.  This little corner of the Mediterranean escaped the Juggernaut
+of developing political unity that crushed the life out of a dozen other
+feudal robber states.  And when the logical moment for disappearance
+arrived, Monte Carlo saved Monaco.  Another means of preying upon others
+was happily discovered.  The Monégasques abandoned pistols and cutlasses
+for little rakes.  The descendants of those who stood on the poops of
+ships now sit at the ends of green tables.  The gold still pours in,
+however, and no law reaches those who take it.
+
+There is this difference: you no longer empty your pockets to the
+Monégasques under compulsion, and the battlements of old Monaco play no
+part in your losses.  The proverb dearest to American hearts says that a
+sucker is born every minute.  It is incomplete, that proverb.  It should
+be rounded out with the axiom that at some minute every person born is a
+sucker.
+
+So I look over to the great white building which is the salvation of the
+Monégasques--their symbol of freedom from taxes and military service--and
+know that the strength of Monaco is the weakness of the world.  I return
+to the Place du Palais.  The Artist is reluctantly strapping up his
+tools.  We glance for a brief moment at the best sunset view on the
+Riviera.  Ships sail by unmolested.  No more have they fear of the Tête
+du Chien and of the huge stone _boulet_ that Fort Antoine used to lance
+if a merchantman dared to be deaf to the call of the galley darting forth
+from the Port of Hercules.  But we?
+
+The Artist's fingers are nimble with the buckle after a day with the
+pencil.  Pipe is filled from pouch with an inimitably deft movement of
+one hand.  Reluctant is generally the right word to use when I speak of
+the Artist leaving his work.  I am not so sure now.  As I hope, he does
+not suggest a west-bound tram at the foot of the Palais or the 6:40
+train; he says,
+
+"If we alternate eighteen and thirty-six this evening, putting by half
+each time we win--"
+
+"Like that English old maid we saw last week," I interrupted, "who
+doubled just once instead of splitting.  I can see the drop of the jaw
+now.  Even without the false teeth, it would have been hideous."
+
+"On the red then as long as we last," conceded the Artist, who knew my
+horror of complicated figure systems, "and there's the sign."
+
+He pointed to the red fringe that lit up fading Cap Martin.
+
+"If we do not get over soon," I answered, "black will be the latest tip
+of nature."  The Riviera towns under the lee of mountains do not have a
+lingering twilight.
+
+But when we had finished dinner an _affiche_ announcing _Aïda_ turned us
+from the Salles de Jeu to the Salle du Théâtre.  To most people gambling
+is a pastime not taken seriously.  Only when it is a passion does one
+find in it the exclusive attraction of Monte Carlo.  This is proved by
+the excellence of Monte Carlo opera.  No metropolis boasts of a better
+orchestra and chorus; and the most famous singers are always eager to
+appear at Monte Carlo.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+VILLEFRANCHE
+
+During the heat of the war, shortly after the intervention of the
+United States, I wrote a magazine article setting forth for American
+readers the claims of France to Alsace-Lorraine and trying to explain
+why the French felt as they did about Alsace-Lorraine.  Of course I
+spoke of Strasbourg and Mulhouse; but a copy-reader, faithfully making
+all spellings conform to the Century Dictionary, changed my MS. reading
+to Strassburg and Mulhaüsen.  Can you imagine my horror when I saw
+those awful German names staring out at me under my own signature--and
+in an article espousing the side of France in the Alsace-Lorraine
+controversy?  Perhaps not--unless you understand the feeling of the
+actual possessor and the aspirant to possession of border and other
+moot territories.  "By their spelling ye shall know them!" is their
+cry.  Later, I happened to be in America when that dear good faithful
+copy-reader changed my Bizerte to the dictionary's Bizerta in an
+article on Tunis, and was able to go to the mat with him.  I explained
+that the spelling was an essential part of the political tenor of the
+article.
+
+All this I repeated to the wife and critic combined in one delightful
+but Ulster-minded person who insisted that in English Menton must be
+spelled Mentone.
+
+"You write Marseilles instead of Marseille and put the 's' on Lyon too:
+I've seen you do it!" she cried.  "And the French call London Londres!"
+
+"But those cities happen not to be in _terre irredente_," I explained.
+"Menton lies too near the Italian frontier for a friend of France to
+call it Mentone, whatever the English usage may be.  If we retain
+Mentone, why have we abandoned Nizza for Nice, Eza for Éze, Roccabruna
+for Roquebrune, Monte Calvo for Mont Chauve, Testa del Can for Tête du
+Chien, Villa Franca for Villefranche?"
+
+"Since you have at last arrived at Villefranche, you had better start
+your chapter," was her woman's answer.
+
+You may have a confused picture, you may even forget many places you
+have visited in your travels, but Villefranche?  Never!  Whether you
+have first seen Villefranche as you came around the corner of Montboron
+from Nice or across the neck of Cap Ferrat from Beaulieu on the Petite
+Corniche, as you came through the Col des Quatre Chemins on the Grande
+Corniche, or as you climbed up behind Fort Montalban on the Moyenne
+Corniche, the memory is equally indelible.  But each _corniche_ gives a
+different impression of the only natural harbor on the Riviera.  The
+Petite Corniche, which mounts rather high around Montboron, is the near
+view.  You see only the _rade_ with Cap Ferrat as a background.
+Approaching in the opposite direction, Montboron is the background.  On
+the Moyenne Corniche the _rade_ comes gradually into your field of
+vision.  You are way above the sea, but the harbor still forms the
+principal part of the water foreground in the picture.  On the Grande
+Corniche, where the Riviera coast from Cap d'Antibes to Cap Martin is
+before you, and the Mediterranean rises to meet the sky, every
+outstanding feature of the picture is a cape or town, fortification or
+lighthouse, except at Villefranche.  Here the land is the setting.  The
+water of the harbor, changing as you look to green and back to blue
+until you are not sure which is the color, is the feature that attracts
+and holds you.  Montboron, the littoral and Cap Ferrat are as secondary
+as the prongs and ring which hold a precious stone.
+
+The water edge of the harbor has become conventionalized to a large
+extent by the artificial stone wall built at the inner end and part-way
+along the Montboron slope, to make possible railway and carriage road,
+and by the quays and breakwaters.  But enough of the unimproved line
+remains to indicate how the harbor must have looked before the masons
+got to work.  The rocks of Villefranche are copper with streaks of
+brown-gray that change in depth of color as the sunlight changes in
+intensity.  Water and rocks are not afraid to compete with flowers and
+trees and mountain shades for the Artist's attention.  Villefranche as
+a maritime picture wins.  And yet foliage and flora are no mean rivals.
+Turning the point of Montboron from Nice has brought you from the
+climate where many southland growths are exotic to the beginning of the
+tropical portion of the Riviera which extends into Italy, with Menton
+and Bordighera as its most typical spots.
+
+Villefranche comes close after Menton--and ahead of Beaulieu and Monte
+Carlo and Condamine--in the claim to a perennial touch of the south.
+From Montboron to the hills east of Oneglia the mountain wall protects
+from the north wind and radiates the sun.  But there is no deep harbor
+like that of Villefranche: and no other place has a Cap Martin to form
+a windshield from strong sea breezes.
+
+Climate as much as the safe anchorage attracted pirates.  From the
+Caliph Omar to the last of the Deys of Algiers, Mohammedan corsairs
+swept the Mediterranean.  Because the Maritime Alps deprived the
+inhabitants of the Riviera of retreat to or succor from the hinterland,
+this coast was the joy of Saracens and Moors, Berbers and Turks.  It is
+hard to believe that up to a hundred years ago the Riverains--the
+inhabitants of all the Mediterranean littoral, in fact, from Gibraltar
+to Messina--were constantly in danger of corsair raids just as our
+American pioneer ancestors were of Indian raids.  The lay of the land
+and the lack of a powerful suzerain state to defend them made the
+Riverains facile prey.  Villefranche afforded the easiest landing.  Try
+to climb up from Villefranche over crags and through stone-paved and
+rock-lined ravines to the Moyenne Corniche, and then on to the higher
+mountain-slopes, and you can imagine how difficult it was to get away
+from raiders, and why the Barbary pirates took a full bag of luckless
+Riverains on every raid.  You comprehend the raison d'être of the
+fortified hill towns, and Éze, perched on her cliff, has a new meaning
+as you look down on Villefranche.  This fastness was held by the
+Saracens long after the crescent yielded elsewhere to the cross--and
+then became a frequent refuge for the descendants of the victors in the
+medieval struggle.
+
+From the moment the French entered Algiers at the beginning of the July
+Monarchy, they felt that their claim to the gratitude of the Riverains
+justified the annexation of a portion of the Riviera.  The treaty that
+extended French sovereignty to beyond Menton was signed at
+Villefranche, and immediately the little harbor was transformed into a
+French naval port.  Until warships became floating fortresses
+Villefranche was useful to France.  Now it sees only torpedo-boats and
+destroyers, and the lack of direct communication with the interior has
+prevented its commercial development.  Better an artificial breakwater
+with no Alps behind than a natural harbor with a Cap Ferrat.
+
+Occasionally a huge ocean liner, chartered by an American tourist
+agency for an Eastern Mediterranean tour, drops into Villefranche
+roadstead.  These chance visits, to give the tourists a day at Nice and
+Monte Carlo, demonstrate that Villefranche could be a port of call for
+the leviathans, commercial and naval, of the twentieth century.  How
+much easier it would be to go to the Riviera directly from London and
+New York, instead of having a wearisome train journey added to the
+ocean voyage!  But freights pay a large part of passenger rates, and
+the routing from great port to great port is as rigid and unalterable
+as the fact that a straight line is not the shortest distance between
+two points on land.  Trains and ships must pass by way of great centers
+of population.
+
+A naval cemetery is the memorial of Villefranche's naval past in the
+last brilliant decade of the Second Empire and the early years of the
+Third Republic.  A little American corner, which our Paris Memorial Day
+Committee never forgets, bears witness to the period when the American
+flag was known everywhere in the Mediterranean.  We used to have the
+lion's share of the carrying trade, and Villefranche was a frequent
+port of call for American warships.  Now we have rarely even single
+warships or freighters in the Mediterranean.  The only American
+passenger line that serves Mediterranean ports is the old Turkish Hadji
+Daoud Line of five small and dirty Levantine ships, which ply along the
+coast of Asia Minor and in and out of the Greek islands, camouflaged
+under our flag.
+
+The old town of Villefranche is on the western side of the harbor
+between the Petite Corniche and the water.  Like all Riviera towns on a
+main road it has grown rapidly and medieval streets and buildings have
+almost disappeared, giving way to the banal architecture of the end of
+the nineteenth century.  The garish brick villas of the head of the
+gulf are excrescences in their lovely garden setting.  But after one
+has reached the eastern side of the harbor and gone through Font Saint
+Jean, the tramway road, with its noise and dust and variegated
+bourgeois fantasies, can be abandoned.
+
+[Illustration: Medieval streets and buildings have almost disappeared.]
+
+If we except Cap Martin, no Riviera walks are lovelier than those of
+Cap Ferrat.  On the Villefranche side, until you have passed through
+Saint Jean, the alternative to the tramway road is an inhospitable
+though tantalizing lane.  For large estates, shut off by walls and
+hedges, are between you and the harbor.  Unless you are lucky enough to
+know one of the owners, you will not see the harbor of Villefranche
+from the best of the lower vantage points.  This side of Villefranche
+is so sheltered that one resident, an American, has been able to
+transform his garden into a bit of old Japan where the cherry trees
+blossom in Nippon profusion and colors.
+
+It is best to pass across the cape, not turning in at the tramway
+bifurcation, until you reach the Promenade Maurice-Rouvier, which
+skirts the Anse des Fourmis along the sea from Beaulieu to Saint Jean.
+After you have reached Saint Jean the peninsula is before you.  A maze
+of superb roads tempt you, circling the fort several hundred feet above
+sea level, crossing the peninsula on the slopes of the fort, and
+following the sea.  Returning to Saint Jean, there is still another
+walk directly ahead of you to the east.  The Cap du Saint Hospice is
+pine-clad, with a sixteenth-century tower at its end.
+
+The Artist and I made a mistake of twelve hours in our visit to Saint
+Hospice.  We should have come in the morning for the sunrise.  To
+remedy the error we decided to spend the night at the Hôtel du Pare
+Saint Jean.  But the sun got up long before we did.
+
+"Our usual luck," said the Artist with a grin that had nothing of
+regret in it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+NICE
+
+Unless the traveler has some special reason for starting at another
+point, he first becomes acquainted with the Riviera at Nice, and
+radiates from Nice in his exploration of the coast and hinterland.  The
+Artist confessed to me that in student days the Riviera meant Nice to
+him, with the inevitable visit to lay a gold piece on the table at
+Monte Carlo.  And it was Nice of the Carnival and Mardi-Gras.  I in
+turn made a similar avowal.  We knew well the Promenade des Anglais,
+the Casino and the Jardin Public opposite, the Place Masséna beyond the
+garden, where you take a tram or a _char à banc_ to almost anywhere,
+and the Avenue de la Gare.  The Artist had the advantage of me in his
+intimate sketching knowledge of the old Italian city back from the Quai
+du Midi, while I knew better than he the Avenue de la Gare.  How many
+times have I pushed a baby carriage up and down that street while my
+wife shopped!
+
+Nice was to us a resort, cosmopolitan like other famous playgrounds of
+the world, and where one strictly on pleasure bent had the same kind of
+a time he would have at Aix-les-Bains or Deauville, Wiesbaden or
+Ostend, Brighton or Atlantic City.  You strolled among crowds, you
+bought things you did not want, you could not get away from music, you
+danced and went to the theater or opera, and you spent much too much of
+your time in hotels and restaurants.  If you went on excursions, you
+enjoyed them, of course.  But you always hurried back to Nice in order
+not to miss doing something of exactly the same kind that you could
+have done any day in the place you came from.
+
+You have to give Nice time, and get out of your rut, before you awaken
+to its unique characteristics.  Then, if you detach yourself from the
+amusement-seekers, the time-killers, the apathetic, the bored, the
+_blasé_ and the conscientious tourists, you begin to realize that the
+metropolis of the Riviera (including its suburbs and Monte Carlo) is a
+world in itself--an inexhaustible reservoir for exploration and
+reflection.  Because it is the only place in Europe where Americans
+(North and South) can honestly say that they feel at home, because it
+was made for and by everybody and caters to everybody, Nice stands the
+test of cosmopolitanism.  Every great capital and every seaport at the
+cross-roads of world trade is cosmopolitan, but in a narrower sense
+than Nice.  Capitals and seaports have the general character, in the
+last analysis the atmosphere, of the country they administer and serve.
+None has the _sans patrie_ stamp of Nice.  If Edward Everett Hale had
+allowed his hero to go to Nice, the man without a country would not
+have felt alone in the world.
+
+I was on the Suez Canal when the Germans heralded the Verdun offensive.
+I hurried back to France, and spent a couple of days with my wife at
+Nice before going on to the front.  They were, perhaps, the most
+critical days of the war, when one watched the _communiqué_ with the
+same intensity as one tried to read hope into serious bulletins from a
+loved one's bedside.  After leaving Nice, I discovered that the pall of
+death did hang over France.  But in Nice there seemed to be no mass
+instinct of national danger, no sickening anxiety.  On the Avenue de la
+Gare I noticed hundreds pass by the newspaper bulletins without
+displaying enough interest to stop and read.
+
+Two years later, at another critical moment when the Germans were once
+more closing in on Paris and bombarding the city with the long-distance
+cannon, I spoke at the Eldorado.  The meeting, organized by the Préfet
+and Maire, drew a large and sympathetic audience.  Among residents and
+visitors are to be found thousands of intense patriots.  But when I
+left the theater and walked back to my hotel, I realized that Nice in
+1918 was like Nice in 1916.  The population as a whole, inhabitants and
+guests, had no French national consciousness.  When I delivered the
+same message in the municipal casino of Grasse the next day, I knew
+that I was again in France.  Frenchmen themselves attribute the lack of
+war spirit in Nice to the general indifference and lesser patriotism of
+the Midi!  But this is because Nice means the Midi to most of them.
+They are unfair to the Midi.  In no way does Nice represent the Midi of
+France except that it basks in the same sun.
+
+The common explanation of the failure of France to assimilate Nice is
+that only sixty years have passed since the annexation and that a large
+portion of the Niçois are Italian in blood and culture and instincts.
+There may be some truth in all this.  But two generations is a long
+time, and France has proved her ability to make six decades count in
+attaching to herself and stamping in her image other border
+populations.  Two factors have worked against the assimilation of Nice:
+the maintenance of the independence of Monaco, with privileges and no
+responsibilities for its inhabitants; and the enormous number of
+foreign residents, who have lost their attachment to their own
+countries and who do not care to give or are incapable of giving
+allegiance to the country in which they live.  Add to these
+demoralizing influences, at work throughout the sixty years, the flood
+of tourists and temporary residents of all nations; and is it to be
+wondered at that the Niçois, native and alien, have so little in common
+with France?
+
+When you stroll along the Promenade des Anglais, with its hotels and
+palm-surrounded villas, the Mediterranean coast line extending
+alluringly from the distant lighthouse of Antibes in the west to the
+Château, set in green, in the foreground to the east, you feel that you
+are in one of the fairy spots of the earth.  The sea, the city climbing
+up the hill to Cimiez, the white-capped mountains beyond, and on the
+handsome promenade the best-gowned of Europe, all in the brilliant
+sunshine of a soft spring day--what could be more charming?  And then,
+suddenly, your unwilling nostrils breathe in a strong whiff of sewage.
+Have you been mistaken?  Surely you are dreaming.  The Casino dances on
+the water.  A bevy of girls come out of the Hôtel Ruhl to join the
+Lenten noon-day throng.  Nothing disagreeable like sewage--but there it
+is again!  Whew!  Where can that sewer empty?  Fault of French
+engineering, an American would say.
+
+But the sea has brought me that smell on the boardwalk in front of the
+Traymore at Atlantic City.  It is difficult to get ahead of nature, and
+the undertow does bring back what you thought you were rid of.
+
+Figuratively speaking, the surprise on the Promenade des Anglais meets
+you every day in your study of Nice.  The city charms: and it repels.
+You have been drinking in its beauty and its fascination.  Suddenly
+something sordid, ugly, disgusting, breaks the spell.  On the Promenade
+des Anglais sewage greets the eye as well as the nose.  Not vicious
+women and poor little dolls alone, but cruel and weak faces, shifty and
+vapid faces, self-centered and morose faces, leech faces, pig faces, of
+well-tailored men--you watch them pass, you remember what you have seen
+at the tables, in near-by Monte Carlo, and the utter depravity of your
+race frightens you.  Except clothes and jewels and the ability to get a
+check cashed, what is the difference between these people and the
+sailors from a hundred ships, making merry with their girls in the
+narrow streets back from the Vieux Port of Marseilles?
+
+The law of compensation often comforts and cheers.  But as often it is
+remorseless.  Broken health and empty purses, desperation, mute
+suffering and madness, we saw at Monte Carlo.  Where the world flocks
+for pleasure, agony of soul reveals itself more readily than elsewhere
+because of its incongruity.  Nice is full of tragedy, and none takes
+the pains to conceal it as at Monte Carlo.  The casual visitor creates
+his own atmosphere in Nice, and he goes away with the most pleasant
+memory, having found what he sought.  But you cannot stroll day after
+day on the Promenade without marking many that do not smile.  You watch
+them and you see unhappiness, unrest, despair, and resignation.  It you
+become acquainted with the life and gossip of the various colonies, you
+will not need a Victor Marguerite to reveal to you the inner life of
+the world's "playground."  More frequently than not it is a case of on
+with the dance.  What a price people do pay to play!
+
+Just one illustration.  The Russians used to be an important factor in
+the social life of Nice.  They had money and they could give an
+American points on spending.  Attracted by the sun, many made their
+homes in Nice.  They lived like the lilies of the field.  They could
+count on a sure thing.  The moujiks of great estates toiled for them,
+and from the days of their great-great-grandfathers the revenues had
+never ceased.  During the first years of the World War, the Russians
+were in high favor at Nice.  They were the powerful allies of France,
+brothers-in-arms, who fought for the common cause.  Then came the
+Revolution.  Cosmopolitan Nice would have forgiven the defection of
+Russia.  But when the revenues from Petrograd and Moscow banks no
+longer came in, that was another matter!  Where the pursuit of pleasure
+is king, there is no pity for the moneyless courtier, whatever the
+cause of his change of fortune.  The Russians sold their jewels and
+their fur coats, the rugs and furniture of their villas, and then the
+villas themselves.  Perhaps they were "accommodated" a little bit at
+first.  But they were soon left to their own resources.
+
+Before the end of the war, the center of the Russian colony was a soup
+kitchen on a side street, presided over by princesses and served by
+beautiful million-heiresses of the old régime.  Good stuff in those
+girls, too, who smiled as gayly as of old and talked to me eagerly
+about becoming governesses or stenographers.  And real _noblesse_ in
+the old men who climbed up the narrow stairs with their pails, coming
+to fetch their one meal of the day.  In one of them I recognized a
+former ambassador to France.  The last time I had seen him he was on
+horseback between Czar Nicholas and President Loubet crossing the Point
+Alexandre III on the opening day of the Paris Exposition of 1900.
+
+Enough of shadows!  None ever went to Nice in search of them, and
+comparatively few stay long enough to find them.  They are in the
+picture, and there would be no true picture without them.  But they
+ought to stay in the background.  They do stay there.  You smell the
+sewage rarely.  The all-pervading sunshine is a tonic.  Speculating
+about why others came here and what they are doing with their lives may
+hold you through the rainy season.  The Carnival puts you in a more
+material frame of mind.  Unless Lent is early, the sun begins to warm
+the cockles of your heart on Mardi-Gras, and by May it will almost
+blind you on the water-front.  One is not in the mood to let the
+misfortunes and unhappiness and evil of others cloud his joy.  After
+all, of the quarter million pleasure-seekers who come to Nice each
+year, the greater part are in as good moral health as yourself, and
+very few of them have any more reason than you to be "in the dumps."
+
+Unless one becomes engrossed in the study of cosmopolitan human nature
+to the point of being sunshine-proof, one soon tires of the foreign
+residential and hotel and shopping quarters of the city.  They lack
+"subjects," as the Artist would put it.  But at the eastern end of
+Nice, the Old Town, home of Garibaldi and many another Red Shirt, takes
+you far from the psychology of cosmopolitanism and the philosophy of
+hedonism.  This is the direction of Grande Corniche, of villa-studded
+winding and mounting roads, of the best views (if we except Cimiez) of
+city and sea.
+
+[Illustration: "The Old Town takes you far from the psychology of
+cosmopolitanism and the philosophy of hedonism."]
+
+A mountain stream of varying volume, but always a river before the end
+of Lent, separates the _ville des étrangers_ from the _vieille ville_.
+The Paillon, as it is called, disappears at the Square Masséna, and
+finds its way to sea through an underground channel.  From the center
+of the city you cross the Paillon by the Pont Garibaldi or the Pont
+Vieux.  Or you can enter the Old Town from the Place Masséna and the
+Rue Saint-François de Paule, which leads into the Cours Saleya.  Here
+is the most wonderful flower market in the world, with vegetables and
+fruit and fowls encroaching upon the Place de la Préfecture.  Behind
+the Préfecture you can lose yourself in a labyrinth of narrow streets
+that indicate the Italian origin of Nice.  If you bear always to the
+right, however, you either make a circle or come out at the foot of the
+Château.
+
+East of the Jardin Public, the Promenade des Anglais becomes the Quai
+du Midi, renamed Quai des Etats-Unis in the short-lived burst of
+enthusiasm of 1918.  At least, the aldermen of Nice were more cautious
+than those of most French cities, and did not call it Quai du
+Président-Wilson _nel dolce tempo de la prima etade_!  Following the
+quay and keeping the Old Town on the left, you come to the castle hill,
+still called the Château, although the great fortress of the Savoyards
+was destroyed by the Duke of Berwick in the siege of 1706.  The hill is
+now a park, surmounted by a terrace, and is well worth the climb to
+look down upon the city and the Baie des Anges, especially at sunset.
+At the end of the Quai du Midi (excuse my diffidence, the Quai des
+Etats-Unis) stands the low Tour Bellanda, the only tower remaining of
+the old fortifications.  The Château is a promontory, and when you take
+the road which skirts it, be sure to hold tight to your hat.  The
+Niçois call the windy corner Rauba Capéu (Hat Robber).
+
+Now you are in still another Nice, the Port, protected by a long jetty,
+on which is perched a lighthouse.  The Niçois, traditionally seafaring
+folk, are proud of their little port, with its clean-cut solid stone
+quays.  Steam-born transportation on land and sea, demanding facilities
+undreamed of in the good old days and tending to concentration of trade
+at Marseilles and Genoa, has prevented the maritime development of
+Nice.  But there is local coast traffic and competition with Cannes and
+Monte Carlo for yachts.  Fishing and pleasure sailing add to the volume
+of tonnage.  And the Niçois do not let you forget that their city is
+the port for Corsica.
+
+Beyond the harbor, the Boulevard de l'Impératrice de Russie leads to
+Villefranche.  Another name to change!  In the midst of what is most
+beautiful we cannot get away from tragedies, from reminders of blasted
+hopes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+ANTIBES
+
+Between Menton and Monte Carlo the coast is broken by Cap Martin,
+between Monte Carlo and Nice by Cap Ferrat, between Nice and Cannes by
+Cap d'Antibes.  The capes are larger and longer as we go west, just as
+the distances between more important towns grow longer.  Although it
+does not seem so to the tourist, it is much farther from Nice to Cannes
+than from Nice to Menton.  The eastern end of the Riviera is so crowded
+with things to see, and town follows town in such rapid succession,
+that you think you have gone a long way from Nice to the Italian
+frontier.  And except for skipping the two larger promontories, railway
+and tramway alike follow right along the coast.  From Nice to Cannes,
+the tramway is inland from the railway.  So is the automobile road.
+You fly along at a rapid rate, with only rare glimpses of the sea, and
+pass through few villages until you reach Antibes.
+
+From Nice, from Saint-Paul-du-Var, and from Cagnes you cannot see the
+Riviera coast beyond Antibes.  The Cape, with its lighthouse and fort,
+is your horizon.  This corresponds with history as well as with
+geography: for the Cap d'Antibes was the old Franco-Italian frontier.
+It is still in a very real sense a boundary line.  The word Riviera,
+which has kept its Italian form, was applied historically to the coast
+lands of the Gulf of Genoa.  From Antibes to Genoa we had the Riviera
+di Ponente, and from Genoa to Spezia the Riviera di Levante.  Only
+after Napoleon III exacted the district of Nice as part payment for
+French intervention in the Italian war of liberation was the term
+"French Riviera" gradually extended to include the coast far west of
+Antibes.
+
+What was added to France under Napoleon III has lost its purely Italian
+character.  But it has not gained the stamp of France.  From Antibes to
+Menton, the Riviera is more remarkably and undeniably international
+than any other bit of the world I have ever seen.  Some of the old
+towns back from the coast are becoming French in the new generation.
+But along the coast you are not in France until you reach Antibes.  You
+may have thought that you were in France at Menton and Beaulieu and
+Nice.  But the contrast of Antibes and Grasse, which are French to the
+core, makes you realize that sixty years is not sufficient to destroy
+the traditions and instincts of centuries.
+
+At Antibes and along the closely built up coast and between Antibes and
+Cannes, the international atmosphere is by no means lost.  It requires
+the contrast of Cannes with Saint-Raphaël to show the difference
+between a cosmopolitan and a genuine French watering place.  But the
+French atmosphere begins to impress one at Antibes.  A knowledge of
+history is not needed to indicate that here was the old frontier.
+
+Since the days of the Greeks Antibes has been a frontier fortress.
+Ruins of fortifications of succeeding centuries show that the town has
+always been on the same site, on the coast east of the Cape, looking
+towards Nice.  Antipolis was a frontier fortress, built by the Phoceans
+of Marseilles to protect them from the aggressive Ligurians of Genoa.
+Nice was an outpost, whose name commemorates a Greek victory over the
+Ligurians.  At the mouth of the Var, from antiquity to modern times,
+races and religions, building against each other political systems for
+the control of Mediterranean commerce, have met in the final throes of
+conflicts the issue of which had been decided elsewhere--and often long
+before the fighting died out here.  Phoenicians and Greeks,
+Carthaginians and Romans, Greeks and Romans, Romans and Gauls, Gauls
+and Teutonic tribes, Franks and Saracens, Spanish and French and
+Italians met at the foot of the Maritime Alps.  There was never a time
+in history when governmental systems or political unities did not have
+as a goal natural boundaries, and, once having reached the goal, did
+not feel that security necessitated going farther.  Invasions thus
+provoked counter-invasions.
+
+On sea it has been as on land.  Something is acquired.  Immediately
+something more must be taken to safeguard the new acquisition.
+
+All this comes to one with peculiar force at Antibes.  You look at Nice
+from your promontory, and your eye follows the coast from promontory to
+promontory, and you can picture how the Phoceans, once established at
+Antibes, were tempted to extend the protective system of Marseilles.
+You have only to turn around and follow the coast beyond the Estérel to
+understand how the Ligurians, if they had captured Antibes, would still
+have felt unsafe.  And then your eye sweeps the range of the white
+Maritime Alps.  Hannibal had to cross them to carry the war into Italy.
+So did Napoleon.  And Caesar, to save the Republic from a recurrence of
+the menace of the Cimbri and Teutoni, brought his armies into Gaul.
+The Saracens were once on this coast.  When they were expelled from it,
+the French went to Africa as the Romans before them had gone to Africa
+after expelling the Carthaginians from Europe.
+
+Of the medieval fortress, erected against the Saracens, two square
+keeps remain.  The strategic importance of Antibes during the heyday of
+the Bourbon Empire is attested by the Vauban fortifications.  The high
+loopholed walls enclosing the harbor have not been maintained intact,
+but the foundation, a pier over five hundred feet long, is still, after
+two centuries and a half, the breakwater.  The view towards Nice from
+Vauban's Fort Carré or from the larger tower, around which the church
+is built, affords the best panorama of the Maritime Alps on the
+Riviera.  Nowhere else on the Mediterranean coast, except from Beirut
+to Alexandretta or on the Silician plain or in the Gulf of Saloniki, do
+you have so provoking a contrast of nearby but unattainable snow with
+sizzling heat.  This may not be always true.  The day of the aeroplane,
+as a common and matter-of-fact means of locomotion, is coming.
+
+Looking towards the Alps from the Fort Carré, the donjon of
+Villeneuve-Loubet and the hill towns of Cagnes and Saint-Paul-du-Var,
+where we had passed happy days, seem as near as Nice.  Farther off on
+the slope of Mont Férion we could distinguish Tourette and Levens side
+by side with their castles, and in the foreground Vence.  To the left
+was Tourrettes.  Back from the Valley of the Loup was exploration and
+sketching ground for another season.  But just a few kilometers ahead
+of us, halfway to Villeneuve-Loubet, Biot tempted us.  We had driven
+through this town not mentioned by Baedeker, and had promised ourselves
+a second visit to the old church of the Knights Templar.  But life
+consists of making choices, and one does not readily turn his back on
+the Cap d'Antibes.  In the town you are just at the beginning of the
+peninsula whose conical form and unshutinness (is that a word: perhaps
+I should have used hyphens?) enables you to walk five miles punctuating
+every step with a new exclamation of delight.
+
+Only we did not walk.  Joseph-Marie, who would have been Giuseppe-Maria
+at Nice, stopped to look over the Artist's shoulder and incidentally to
+suggest that we might have cigarettes.  A veteran of two years at
+twenty, his empty left sleeve told why he was _reformé_.  Glad to get
+out of the mess so easily, he explained to us laconically; and now he
+was eking out his pension by driving a cart for the Vallauris pottery.
+The express train "burned" (as he put it) the pottery station, and he
+had come to put on _grande vitesse_ parcels at Antibes.  Cannes was a
+hopeless place for the potters: baskets of flowers always took
+precedence there over dishes and jugs.  The Artist believed that
+Joseph-Marie's horse could take us around the cape with less effects
+from the heat than we should suffer, and that for ten francs
+Joseph-Marie could submit to his boss's wrath or invent a story of
+unavoidable delay.  I agreed.  So did Joseph-Marie.  If we proved too
+much heavier than pottery, we would take turns walking.  At any rate,
+the Artist's kit had found a porter.
+
+We took the Boulevard du Cap to Les Nielles, were lucky in finding the
+garden of the Villa Thuret open, and then let our horse climb up the
+Boulevard Notre-Dame to the lighthouse on top of La Garoupe, as the
+peninsula's hill is called.  Here the Riviera coast can be seen in both
+directions.  The view is not as extended as that of Cap Roux, for
+Cannes is shut off by the Cap de la Croisette.  But in compensation you
+have Nice and the hill towns of the Var, and while lacking the clear
+detail of Cap Ferrat and Cap Martin you get the background of the
+Maritime Alps which is not visible east of Nice.  And the Iles de
+Lérins look so different from their usual aspect as sentinels to Cannes
+that it is hard to believe they are the same islands.  Near the
+lighthouse and semaphore a paved path, marked with the stations of the
+cross, leads to a chapel.
+
+The Villa Thuret is the property of the state, and is used as a
+botanical nursery for the Jardin des Plantes at Paris.  In variety,
+however, it does not rival the Giardino Hanbury near Menton, and in
+beauty it is surpassed by the private garden of Villa Eilenroc, near
+the end of the Cap d'Antibes.  These two gardens, the most remarkable
+of the Riviera, were made by Englishmen who preferred the sun and
+warmth of the Riviera to their native land.  The most wonderful garden
+on Cap Ferrat is the creation of an American.  Cannes was "made" by
+Lord Brougham.  The other important estate of the Cap d'Antibes,
+Château de la Garoupe, is the property of an Englishman.  As at
+Arcachon and Biarritz and Pau, as at Aix-les-Bains, Anglo-Saxon
+ownership of villas and German ownership of hotels and the prevalence
+of Teutons as shopkeepers and waiters prove the passion of men of the
+north for lands of the south.
+
+Twenty years ago, just after Fashoda, there was a strong current of
+uneasiness among British residents on the Riviera.  The experiences of
+civilians caught by Napoleon and kept prisoners for years had passed
+into English history and literature.  British consuls were surprised to
+find that thousands of their compatriots, of whom they had had no
+previous knowledge, were living all the year round on the Riviera.
+These people came to make inquiry about what would be done to them if
+France did declare war suddenly against Great Britain.  Would they be
+given time to leave the country?  Fifteen years later the calamity of a
+sudden interruption of a peaceful existence, basking in the sun, did
+fall upon foreigners, but statesmen had shuffled the cards around, and
+this time the civilians caught in the net were Germans and Austrians.
+The Napoleonic principle still held.  Italy could be seen with the
+naked eye.  But none were allowed to pass out.  Tourists and residents,
+subjects of the Central Powers, were arrested and imprisoned on the
+Iles de Lérins, where they remained five years, many of them in sight
+of their villas on the coast and the hotels they had built and managed.
+They stayed longer than Marshal Bazaine, who managed to escape, but not
+as long as the mysterious Man with the Iron Mask.
+
+One of the keepers at the Antibes lighthouse had been an auxiliary
+soldier in the fort of Sainte-Marguerite during the early years of the
+war.  He told us that some of the trapped tourists were very restive,
+but that most of the German civilians who were residents of the Riviera
+were far from being discontented with their lot.  Better a prison on
+the Ile Sainte-Marguerite than exile from the Riviera!  This was better
+taste and wiser philosophy than we expected of Germans.  One could go
+far and fare worse than an enforced sojourn on one of the loveliest
+islands of the Mediterranean, whose pine forests are reminiscent of
+Prinkipo.  From 1914 to 1919 life was much harsher beyond those Alps.
+
+Saint-Honorat, the smaller island half a mile from Sainte-Marguerite,
+was a monastic establishment from the fourth century to the French
+Revolution.  It passed into ecclesiastical hands again in the Second
+Empire and became a Cistercian monastery.  Although the restoration was
+accomplished with distressing thoroughness forty years ago, some parts
+of the chapel date back to the seventh century, and a huge double
+donjon--the dominating feature of the island from the coast--remains
+from the twelfth-century fortifications.  A road, on which are ruins of
+four medieval chapels, runs round the island.  We were unable to visit
+Sainte-Marguerite and on Saint-Honorat pencil and paper had to be kept
+out of sight.  But I must not wander to another day.
+
+Joseph-Marie liked our tobacco and the horse did not mind stopping en
+route.  It was six o'clock when we reached Juan-les-Pins, only a mile
+from Antibes on the other side of the cape.  Two miles farther along
+the coast, at Golfe-Juan, where the road turns in to Vallauris, we
+climbed down from the cart, brushed much dust from our clothes, and
+started home along the coast road to Cannes.  Joseph-Marie waved his
+empty sleeve in farewell, happy in our promise to look him up some day
+in Vallauris with a pocketful of cigarettes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+CANNES
+
+Of one-half of Tarascon the prince whom Tartarin met in Algiers
+displayed an astonishingly detailed knowledge.  Concerning the rest of
+the town he was as astonishingly noncommittal.  When it leaked out that
+the prince had been in the Tarascon jail long enough to become familiar
+with what could be seen from one window, Tartarin understood his
+limitation.  My picture of Cannes is as indelible as the prince's
+picture of Tarascon.  For most of my Riviera days were spent in a villa
+across the Golfe de la Napoule from Cannes.  Not infrequently our baby
+Hope gave us the privilege of seeing Cannes by sunrise.  We ate and
+worked on a terrace below our bedroom windows.  Every evening we
+watched Cannes disappear or become fairyland in the moonlight.
+
+What we saw from the Villa Étoile was the Golfe de la Napoule from the
+Pointe de l'Esquillon to the Cap de la Croisette.  The Corniche de
+l'Estérel rounded the Esquillon and came down to sea level at Théoule
+through a forest of pines.  It passed our villa.  The curve of the gulf
+between us and Cannes was only seven miles.  First came La Napoule,
+above whose old tower on the sea rose a hill crowned with the ruins of
+a chapel.  A viaduct with narrow arches carried the railway across the
+last ravine of the Estérel.  In the plain, between two little rivers,
+the Siagne and the Riou, was a grove of umbrella pines.  Here began the
+Boulevard Jean Hibert, protected by a sea-wall in concrete, leading
+into Cannes.  The town of Cannes, flanked on the left by Mont Chevalier
+and on the right by La Croisette, displayed a solid mass of hotels on
+the water front.  Red-roofed villas climbed to Le Cannet and La
+Californie, elbowing each other in the town and scattering in the
+suburbs until the upper villas were almost lost in foliage.  Behind
+were the Maritime Alps.  Not far beyond La Croisette, the Cap d'Antibes
+jutted out into the sea.  At night the lighthouses of Cannes and
+Antibes flashed alternately red and green, and between them Cannes
+sparkled.  Inland to the left of Cannes were Mougins on a hill and
+Grasse above on the mountain side.  Occasional trails of smoke marked
+the main line of the railway along the coast and the branch line from
+Cannes to Grasse.  In the sea lay the Iles de Lérins, Sainte-Marguerite
+almost touching the point of La Croisette.
+
+[Illustration: "La Napoule, above whose tower on the sea rose a hill
+crowned with the ruins of a chapel.  Behind were the Maritime Alps."]
+
+But unlike the Prince, we did have a chance to see Cannes at other
+angles.  Cannes was the metropolis to which we went hopefully to hire
+cooks, find amusement, and buy food and drink.  Théoule had neither
+stores nor cafés, and after the Artist came we were glad to vary the
+monotony of suburban life.  It is always that way with city folk.  How
+wonderful the quiet, how delightful the seclusion of the "real
+country"!  But after a few weeks, while you may hate yourself for
+wanting noise and lights, while you may still affect to despise the
+herding instinct, you find yourself quite willing to commune with
+nature a little less intimately than in the first enthusiastic days of
+your escape from the whirl and the turmoil of your accustomed
+atmosphere.  Not that Cannes is ever exactly "whirl and turmoil;" but
+you could have tea at Rumpelmayer's, you could dance and listen to
+music and see shows at the Casino, and you could look in shop windows.
+On the terrace of the Villa Étoile we thanked God that we were out in
+the country, and we loved our walks on the Corniche road and back into
+the Estérel.  But it was a comfort to have Cannes so near!  We were not
+dependent upon the twice-a-day _omnibus_ train, which made all the
+stops between Marseilles and Nice.  An hour and a half of brisker
+walking than one would have cared to indulge in farther east on the
+Riviera took us to Cannes, and the _cochers_ were always reasonable
+about driving out to Théoule in the evening.
+
+From our villa to La Napoule we were still in the Estérel.  Then we
+crossed the mouth of the Siagne by a bridge, and came down to the sea
+on the Boulevard Jean Hibert.  Between the mouth of the Siagne and Mont
+Chevalier are the original villas of Cannes and the hotels of the
+Second Empire.  Here Lord Brougham built the Villa Eleonore Louise in
+1834, when Cannes was a fishing village, not better known than any
+other hamlet along the coast.  Here are the Château Vallombrosa (now
+the Hôtel du Pare), the Villa Larochefoucauld and the Villa Rothschild,
+whose unrivaled gardens are shut off by high walls and shrubbery.  They
+are well worth a visit: but you must know when and how to get into
+them.  As you near Mont Chevalier, the sea wall, no longer needed to
+protect the railway (which for a couple of miles had to run right on
+the sea to avoid the grounds and villas laid out before it was dreamed
+of), recedes for a few hundred feet and leaves a beach.
+
+On Mont Chevalier is the Old Town, grouped around a ruined castle and
+an eleventh-century tower.  The parish church is of the thirteenth
+century.  The buildings on the quay below, facing the port, are of the
+middle of the nineteenth century.  But they look much older.  For they
+were built by townspeople, and serve the needs of the small portion of
+the population which would be living in Cannes if it were not a
+fashionable watering place.  Despite its marvelous growth, Nice has
+always maintained a life and industries apart from tourists and
+residents of the leisure class.  Cannes, on the other hand, with the
+exception of the little Quartier du Suquet, is a watering place.  It
+needs Mont Chevalier, as Monte Carlo needs Monaco, to make us realize
+that Cannes existed before this spot was taken up and developed by
+French and British nobility.  The square tower and the cluster of
+buildings around it, the hotels and restaurants of fishermen on the
+Quai Saint Pierre, dominate the port.  This bit out of the past, and of
+another world in the present, is at the end of the vista as one walks
+along the Promenade de la Croisette: and the Boulevard Jean Hibert runs
+right into it.  The touch of antiquity would otherwise be lacking, and
+the Artist would scarcely have considered it worth his while to take
+his kit when we went to Cannes.
+
+The port is formed by a breakwater extending out from the point of Mont
+Chevalier, with a jetty opposite.  Except for the fishermen, who are
+strong individualists and sell their catch right from their boat, the
+harbor's business is in keeping with the city's business.  Its shipping
+consists of pleasure craft.  Among the yachts whose home is Cannes one
+used to see the _Lysistrata_ of Commodore James Gordon Bennett.  How
+many times have I received irate messages and the other kind, too, both
+alike for my own good, sent from that vessel!  In the garden of his
+beautiful home at Beaulieu, between Villefranche and Monaco, the
+Commodore told me of the offer he had received from the Russian
+Government for this famous yacht.  Not many months after the
+_Lysistrata_ disappeared from its anchorage at Cannes, the man who had
+been the reason--and means--of Riviera visits to more journalists than
+myself died at Beaulieu.
+
+Only on the side of Mont Chevalier has the harbor a quay.  The inner
+side is bordered by the Allées de la Liberté, a huge rectangle with
+rows of old trees under which the flower market is held every morning.
+At the Old Town end is the Hôtel de Ville and at the east end the
+Casino.  Running out seaward from beside the Casino is the Jetée Albert
+Edouard.  To its very end the jetty is paved, and when a stiff sea wind
+is blowing you can drink in the spray to your heart's content.  Behind
+the Casino is a generous beach.  This is one great advantage of Cannes
+over Nice, where instead of sand you have gravel and pebbles.  The
+Riviera is largely deserted before the bathing season sets in, but one
+does miss the sand.  At Cannes kiddies are not deprived of pails and
+shovels and grownups can stretch out their blankets and plant their
+umbrellas.
+
+The Promenade de la Croisette runs along the sea from the Casino to the
+Restaurant de la Réserve on La Croisette.  The difference between the
+Promenade de la Croisette and the Promenade des Anglais was summed up
+by an English friend of mine in five words.  "More go-carts and less
+dogs," he said.  "More wives and less _cocottes_," the Artist put it.
+Of course there are some children at Nice and some _cocottes_ at
+Cannes.  And where fashion reigns the difference between _mondaine_ and
+_demi-mondaine_ is unfortunately not always apparent.  Gold frequently
+glitters.  But Cannes is less garish than Nice in buildings and in
+people.
+
+Doubling the Cap de la Croisette, we are in the Golfe Juan, with the
+Cap d'Antibes beyond.  Here Napoleon, fearing his possible reception at
+Saint-Raphaël, landed on his return from Elba.  A column marks the
+spot.  Bound for the final test of arms at Waterloo, Napoleon little
+dreamed that twenty years later his English foes would begin to make a
+peaceable conquest of this coast, and that within a hundred years
+French and English would be fighting side by side on French soil
+against the Germans.  How much did the Englishman's love of the Riviera
+have to do with the Entente Cordiale?  What part did the Riviera play
+in the Franco-Russian Alliance?  British and Russian sovereigns always
+showed as passionate a fondness for this corner of France as their
+subjects.  There were even English and Russian churches at Cannes and
+Nice.  Men who played a vital part in forming political alliances were
+regular visitors to the Riviera.  At the beginning of the Promenade de
+la Croisette, only three miles from the Napoleon column, stands Puech's
+remarkable statue of Edward VII, who spoke French with a German accent,
+but who never concealed his preference for France over the land of his
+ancestors.
+
+One charm of Cannes is the feeling one has of not being crowded.  At
+Nice and along the eastern Riviera hotels and villas jostle each other.
+Around Cannes the gardens are more important than the buildings.
+Striking straight inland from the Casino past the railway station, the
+broad Boulevard Carnot gradually ascends to Le Cannet.  This is the
+only straight road out of Cannes.  All the other roads wind and turn,
+bringing you constantly around unexpected corners until you have lost
+your sense of direction.  Branches of trees stick out over garden walls
+overhung with vines.  Many of the largest hotels can be reached only by
+these _chemins_.  You realize that the city has grown haphazard, and
+that no methodical city architect was allowed to make boulevards and
+streets that would disturb the seclusion of the villa-builders, who
+plotted out their grounds with never a thought of those who might later
+build higher up.  So roads skirted properties.  The result does not
+commend itself to those who are in a hurry.  But it gives suburban
+Cannes an aspect unique on the Riviera.  Many of the hotels thus hidden
+away are built on private estates, and if you want to get to them you
+have to follow all the curves.
+
+The labyrinthine approach adds greatly to the delight of a climb to La
+Californie.  If you go by carriage, unless you have a map, you are
+tempted to feel that the _cocher_ is taking a roundabout route to
+justify the high price he asked you.  But if you go afoot--and without
+a map--you may find yourself back at the point of departure before you
+know it.  But however extended your wanderings, the beauty of the roads
+is ample compensation, and when you reach at last the Square du
+Splendide-Panorama, nearly eight hundred feet above the city, you are
+rewarded by a view of mountains and sea, from Nice to Cap Roux, which
+makes you say once more--as you have so often done in Riviera
+explorations--"This is the best!"
+
+After lunch at the observatory we decided to walk on to Vallauris and
+look up our friend of Antibes at the pottery.  A _cocher_ without a
+fare persuaded us to visit the aqueduct at Clausonne en route to
+Vallauris.  He painted the glories of the scenery and of Roman masonry.
+"You will never regret listening to me," he urged.  We followed the
+wave of his hand, and climbed meekly aboard, although at lunch we had
+been carrying on an antiphonal hymn of praise to the pleasure and
+benefit of shanks' mare.
+
+We did not regret abandoning our walk.  I managed to get the Artist by
+the Chapelle de Saint-Antoine on the Col de Vallauris and to limit him
+to a hasty _croquis_ of the Clausonne Aqueduct.  We were out for
+pleasure, with no thought of articles.  When you feel that you are
+going to have to turn your adventures to a practical use, it does take
+away from the sense of relaxation that a writer like anyone else craves
+for on his day off.  On the road to Vallauris we were more struck by
+the heather than any other form of vegetation.  The mountains and hills
+were covered with it, and whatever else we saw, heather was always in
+the picture on the hills and mimosa along the roadside.  From the roots
+of transplanted Mediterranean heather--and not from briar--are made
+what we call briarwood pipes.  When a salesman assures you that the
+pipe he offers is "genuine briar," if it really was briar, you would
+think it wasn't.  When names have become trademarks, we have to persist
+in their misuse.
+
+Vallauris was called the golden valley (_vallis aurea_) because of the
+pottery the Romans discovered the natives making from the fine clay of
+the banks of the little stream that runs into the Golfe Juan.  For
+twenty centuries the inhabitants of Vallauris have found no reason to
+change their _métier_.  They are still making dishes and vases and
+statuettes, and there is still plenty of clay.  Moreover, modern
+methods have not found a substitute either for the potter at his wheel
+or for the little ovens of limited capacity when it comes to turning
+out work that is flawless and bears the stamp of individuality.  We can
+manufacture almost everything en masse and in series except pottery.
+Joseph-Marie was not in evidence at Vallauris: but we found the potters
+glad to show us their work, seemingly for the pride they had in it.  Of
+course you did have a chance to buy: but salesmanship was not obtrusive.
+
+The great industry of Cannes is fresh cut flowers.  The flower market
+of a morning in the Allées de la Liberté is richer in variety than that
+of Nice.  There is less charm, however, in the sellers.  In Nice you
+simply cannot help buying what is offered you.  Pretty faces and soft
+pleading voices draw the money from your pocket.  You look from the
+flowers to those who offer them: and then you buy the flowers.  At
+Cannes, on the other hand, you ask yourself first what in the world you
+are going to do with them after you have them.  Perhaps this difference
+in your mood is the reason of the enormous industry that has been
+developed in Cannes.  You are not asked to buy flowers because a seller
+wants you to and is able to lure you with a smile.  You are told that
+here is the unique chance to send your friends in Paris and London a
+bit of the springtime fragrance of the Riviera.
+
+"Three francs, five francs, ten francs, _monsieur_, and tomorrow
+morning in Paris or tomorrow evening in London the postman will deliver
+the flowers to your friend."
+
+Pen and ink, cards, gummed labels or tags are put under your nose.  You
+are shown the little reed baskets, in rectangular form, that will carry
+your gift.  If your Paris or London friend knows Latin, and thinks a
+minute, he will realize that Cannes is living up to her name in thus
+utilizing her reeds to send out over Europe an Easter greeting,
+jonquils, carnations, roses, geraniums with the smell of lemons, orange
+blossoms, cassia, jessamine, lilacs, violets and mimosa.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+MOUGINS
+
+We were about to enter the Casino at Cannes.  The coin had been flipped
+to decide which of us should pay, and we were starting up the steps
+when a yell and a clatter of horses' hoofs made us look around.  A
+victoria was bearing down upon us.  The _cocher_ was waving his whip in
+our direction.  We recognized the man who had driven us to Grasse.
+
+"A superb afternoon," he explained, "and Mougins is only twelve
+kilometers away.  With Mougins at twelve kilometers, it is incredible
+to think that you would be spending an afternoon like this in the
+Casino.  I would surely be lacking in my duty--"
+
+"What is Mougins?" I interrupted.
+
+"All that is beautiful," explained the _cocher_ enthusiastically.  "A
+city on a hill.  A glorious view."
+
+"That settles it," said the Artist, turning away.  "Every city is on a
+hill, and all views are glorious."
+
+"But Mougins is different," insisted the _cocher_, "and the view is
+different.  Besides, the wine is unique.  It is sparkling, and can be
+taken at five o'clock with little cakes.  There are roads you have not
+seen, and pretty girls at work in the rose fields.  We shall drive
+slowly."
+
+There had been much wandering during the past fortnight and we were
+ready for a quiet afternoon at the Casino.  But we allowed ourselves to
+be persuaded.  The Casino was always there, and we had never heard of
+_vin mousseux_ on the Riviera.  Baedeker, as if in duty bound to miss
+nothing, records the existence of Mougins, three kilometers east of the
+Cannes-Grasse road after you pass the ten-kilometer stone on the way to
+Grasse--then gives the next town.  Mougins is not starred, and nothing
+around Mougins is starred.  Was not that a reason for going there?
+
+English royalty used to come to Cannes, and every season more middle
+class Britishers woke up to the fact that it would be pleasant to write
+home to one's friends from Cannes.  Hôtels and villas increased
+rapidly.  When English royalty went elsewhere, Russian Grand Dukes and
+Balkan princelings saved the day for the snobs.  Consequently, the town
+has spread annoyingly into the country.  A row of hotels faces the sea,
+and on side streets are less pretentious hotels, invariably advertised
+as a minute's walk from the sea.  A mile inland is another quarter of
+fashionable hotels for those whom the splashing of the waves makes
+nervous.  Then the interminable suburbs of villas and _pensions_
+commence.
+
+When city people seek a change of climate, they do not always want a
+change of environment.  They are intent upon living the same life as at
+home, upon following the same round of amusements.  They cannot be
+happy without their comforts and conveniences, and this means the
+impossibility of getting away from streets and buildings and noises and
+crowds.  The class that has monopolized the Riviera has tried to
+recreate Paris in the Midi.  If one wants to find the country right on
+the sea coast, one must get off the train before reaching Cannes.
+Between Cannes and the Italian frontier, one does not have the sea
+without the city.  Only by going inland can one find the country
+without missing the sight and feel of the sea.  For everywhere the land
+rises.  The valleys rise.  Roads keep mounting and curving to avoid
+heavy grades, and foothills do not hide the Alps and the Mediterranean.
+After escaping from Cannet, the outermost suburb, the road to Mougins
+goes through a valley of oranges and roses.  There are stone farmhouses
+with thatched roofs and barns that give forth the smell of hay.  There
+are cows and chickens.
+
+We were congratulating ourselves upon having given up the casino long
+before we reached Mougins.  We forgave the _cocher_ his exaggeration
+about the workers in the rose fields.  When one sees in paintings and
+in the cinematograph pretty girls engaged in agricultural pursuits, it
+is more than even money that they are models and actresses in disguise.
+I am enthusiastic in my cult of the country, but I have never carried
+it to the point of becoming ecstatic over country maidens.  There must
+be, of course, as many good-looking girls in the country as in the
+city.  But could a chorus of milkmaids to satisfy New York or Paris be
+recruited outside New York or Paris?
+
+When we reached the uncompromising stretch of road that led up to
+Mougins, we took mercy upon the horses.  The _cocher_ had not driven
+them as slowly as he had promised.  We walked a mile through olive
+orchards, and were in the town before we realized it.  Unlike other
+hill cities of the Riviera that we had visited, Mougins has no castle
+and no walls.  Few traces remain of outside fortifications.  All around
+Mougins the land is cultivated.  One does not realize the abruptness of
+the hilltop, for the city rises from fields and vineyards and orchards.
+Saint-Paul-du-Var and Villeneuve-Loubet remind one of the days when
+self-defense was a constant preoccupation.  Mougins long ago forgot
+feudal quarrels, foreign invasions and raids of Saracens and Barbary
+pirates.  The peasants still live together on a hilltop, going forth in
+the morning and coming back in the evening.  But they have taken the
+stone of their walls for fences, and of their towers for barns.  They
+have brought their tilled land up the hillside to the city.
+
+On the main street, we had the impression that the medieval character
+of Mougins was lost by rebuilding.  Ailanthus trees and whitewashed
+walls and red-tiled roofs greeted us.  The church and the market-place
+were of the Third Republic.  Sleepy cafés displayed enameled tin
+advertisements of Paris drinks.  The signs in front of the notions shop
+declared the merits of rival Paris newspapers.  But when we were
+hunting out a vantage point from which to get the view of Cannes and
+the Mediterranean, the Artist saw much to tempt his pencil.  Back from
+the main street, old Mougins survived, none the less charming from the
+constant contrasts of old and new.
+
+The arch of a city gate, perfectly preserved on one side, lost itself
+in a modern building across the street.  A woman, leaning out of a
+window, wanted to know what the Artist was doing.  I explained our
+interest in the arch.  Had there been a gate in her grandmother's time?
+Why, when so much of a former age had disappeared, did this half-arch
+remain?  The woman was puzzled.  It was incomprehensible that anyone
+should be interested in the arch, which had always been there.  I
+thought I would try her on other subjects.
+
+"Did many travelers come to Mougins from America?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, yes.  And you are an American, aren't you?"
+
+Obviously America was a more interesting subject than archaeology.
+
+While the Artist was finishing his sketch she chatted pleasantly with
+me.  Yes, she had often talked with American visitors.  She revealed,
+however, the French provincial's customary ignorance of our life and
+asked the usual questions about our wealth and our skyscrapers.  I am
+not altogether sure that I set her right about her fabulous
+misconception when the Artist's drawing was completed.
+
+Mougins lives in medieval fashion, if not wholly in medieval houses.
+Dependent upon occasional water from the heavens for carrying sewage
+down the hillside, Mougins has no use for gutters and drains.  Rubbish
+is thrown from windows, and tramped down into last year's layer of
+pavement.  Goats enjoy the rich pasturage of old boots and cans and
+papers and rags and vegetables that had lived beyond their day.
+Although, as we walked through the alleys, we saw no one, heard no one,
+the houses were inhabited: for much of the garbage was painfully
+recent, and clothes flapped on lines from window to window over our
+heads.  The Artist suggested that the townspeople might be taking a
+siesta.  But it was late in the afternoon for that.  Then we remembered
+that Mougins was an agricultural community, and that the work of the
+town was in the fields.  This explained also why we saw no shops and no
+evidences of trade.  Olives, flowers, wine, fruit and vegetables are
+taken to the markets of Cannes and Grasse, and the people of Mougins
+buy what they need where they sell.  Mougins has only bakeries and
+cafés.  Bread and alcohol alone are indispensable where people dwell
+together.
+
+We circled the city, and came out on the promenade across which we had
+entered Mougins.  Every French town has an illustrious son, for whom a
+street is named, on whose birthplace a tablet is put, and to whom a
+monument is raised.  Our tour had taken us through the Rue du
+Commandant Lamy.  We had read the inscription on his home, and were now
+before his monument, a bust on a slender pedestal, with the glorious
+sweep of La Napoule for a background.  The peasants of Mougins, as they
+go out to and return from the labor of vineyard, orchard and field,
+pass by the Lamy memorial.  Even when they are of one's own blood, is
+there inspiration in the daily reminder of heroes?  How many from
+Mougins have followed Lamy's example?  I have often wondered whether
+monuments mean anything except to tourists.
+
+As I had recently been writing upon French colonial history, Lamy's
+daring and fruitful journeys in Central Africa were fresh in my mind,
+and I remembered his tragic death in the Wadai fifteen years ago.  An
+old man had just come up the hill, and was dragging weary legs encased
+in clay-stained trousers across the promenade.  A conical basket of
+lettuce heads was on his back, and he used the handle of his hoe as a
+cane.
+
+"Did you know Lamy?" I inquired.
+
+"Lamy was a boy in this town when I was a grown man going to my work.
+I used to pass him playing on this very spot," he answered.
+
+As we walked along toward the main street, we asked whether there were
+others from Mougins who, like Lamy, had played a part in the history of
+France abroad.  No, the people of Mougins liked to stay at home.
+Fortunately for the prosperity of the country, the young men returned
+after their military service, and the attractions and opportunities of
+city life rarely took them and held them farther away than Cannes and
+Grasse.  The Artist had his eye on the lettuce basket and the hoe, and
+I wanted to hear more of life in Mougins.  We asked the old man to
+share a bottle with us.
+
+The _cocher_ was waiting in front of a café, and corroborated the
+statement on a huge painted sign, that here was to be found the true
+_vin mousseux_ of Mougins.  It was evident that we were not the first
+tourists to come from Cannes.  The _cocher_ was a friend of the
+proprietress, who made us welcome in the way tourists are greeted.
+Little cakes and a dusty bottle were produced promptly, and in the
+stream of words that greeted us we could gather that this was a
+red-letter occasion for us, and that it was possible to have the _vin
+mousseux_ of Mougins shipped to Paris by the dozen or the hundred.
+This annoyed us and dampened our ardor for the treat.  The Artist and I
+share a foolish feeling of wanting to be pioneers.  We like to believe
+that our travels take us out of the beaten path, and that we are
+constantly discovering delectable places.  After us the tourists--but
+not before!
+
+The corkscrew of the proprietress, however, consoled us.  A corkscrew
+through whose handle the beaded pressure of gas escapes before the cork
+is drawn may be common enough.  But the fact remains that neither of us
+had seen one.  We expressed our delight and wonder, and the Artist
+naïvely told the proprietress, before he tasted the wine, that he felt
+rewarded for the trip to Mougins just for the discovery of the
+corkscrew.  After the first sip, I added that now we knew why we had
+walked up the long hill.  The proprietress and the _cocher_ beamed.
+Our enthusiasm meant money to them.  The old man twisted his mouth
+contemptuously.
+
+"Tell me, then," he said, "what was your thought of me when you saw me
+coming up the hill to the promenade with my burden of lettuce heads?
+And when I told you that I had seen Lamy playing as a boy on the spot
+where his statue stands?  Sorry for me, were you not?  Lamy had the
+good sense, you think, to quit Mougins, and go out to glory.  I and the
+rest of Mougins, you think, have stayed here because we do not know any
+better.  It is all in the point of view.  One of you is enthusiastic
+over a patent corkscrew, and the other over the wine.  You tourists
+from the city cannot understand us.  It is because you carry your
+limitations with you.  You think you lead a large, broad, varied life.
+You do not.  Finding the greatest interest of Mougins in a patent
+corkscrew and sparkling wine betrays you."
+
+"_Ces messieurs_ have a passion for the country and for towns away from
+the railroad," remonstrated the _cocher_.  "This afternoon I tempted
+them from the Casino at Cannes.  They are a thousand times enthusiastic
+about Mougins, your homes, your streets, your views, and all they have
+seen in the valley coming here.  If they had limitations, would they
+have wanted to come?  It is senseless to think that they make the
+effort, that they spend the money, just to be pleased with what they
+see from their own world or what reminds them of their own world.  I
+spend my life with tourists, and they always appreciate, I have never
+known them to fail to thank me for having brought them to Mougins."
+
+Our critic--and, indeed, our judge--turned on the _cocher_.
+
+"Tell me," he said sharply, raising his voice witheringly, "would you
+risk bringing tourists to Mougins if there were not this café and the
+_vin mousseux_?"
+
+The _cocher_ puffed his cigar vigorously.  The Artist, highly
+delighted, broke an almost invariable rule to prove that the greatest
+interest of Mougins was not the corkscrew.  He opened his sketch-book.
+While the old man was fingering the sketches, I ordered another bottle.
+
+Our guest had been the vanguard of the homeward procession.  All
+Mougins was now passing before us.
+
+"Now you see," continued our mentor, "what it is to live.  A score of
+men who knew Lamy have passed before you.  They did not go to Africa to
+hunt negroes and to put our flag on the map at the same time as the
+names of unknown towns.  They are here, and will eat a good dinner
+tonight.  Lamy is dead.  Now I do not say that we are heroes, and that
+our point of view is heroic.  But I do say that we are not to be
+pitied.  And I say, moreover, that we do as much for France as Lamy
+did.  If we had all gone to Africa, there might be more names on the
+map, but there would be less food in the markets of Grasse and Cannes."
+
+"Oh, for the ghost of Gray," commented the Artist "He would be face to
+face with the 'unseen flower'--but not blushing!"
+
+"A case of _auream quisquis mediocritatem diligit_," I answered.
+
+We were getting classical as well as philosophical, and it was time to
+go.  To whom was the mediocrity?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FRÉJUS
+
+The ride from Théoule to St. Raphaël, by the Corniche de l'Estérel, gives
+a feeling of satiety.  The road along the sea is a succession of curves,
+each one leading around a rocky promontory into a bay that causes you to
+exclaim, "This is the best!"  For thirty-five kilometers there is
+constantly a new adjustment of values, until you find yourself at the
+point where comparatives and superlatives are exhausted.  The vehicle of
+language has broken down.  Recurrent adjectives become trite.  When the
+search for new ones is an effort, you realize that nature has imposed,
+through the prodigal display of herself, a limit of capacity to enjoy.
+Of copper rocks and azure sea; of mountain streams hurrying through
+profusely wooded valleys; of cliffs with changing profiles; of conifers;
+of enclosed parks, whose charm of undergrowth run wild and of sunlit
+green tree-trunks successfully hides the controlling hand of man to the
+uninitiated in forestry; of hedges and pergolas and ramblers and villas
+and lighthouses and islets and yachts, we had our fill.
+
+But at La Napoule a Roman milestone announced that we were on the road to
+Forum Julii: and the very first thing that attracted us when we reached
+St. Raphaël was a bit of aqueduct on the promenade.  It looked singularly
+out of place right by the sea, and surrounded by an iron fence quite in
+keeping with those of the hotels across the street.  The inscription
+(Third Republic, not Roman) told us that this portion of the aqueduct
+from the River Siagne to Fréjus was removed from its original emplacement
+and set up here under the prefectship of Monsieur X, the subprefectship
+of Monsieur Y, and the mayorship of Monsieur Z.  The fishing village that
+has rapidly grown into one of the most important "resorts" of the Riviera
+claims distinction on historical grounds.  Napoleon landed at St. Raphaël
+on his return from Elba.  Gounod composed Romeo and Juliet here.  General
+Galliéni was cultivating his vineyard here when the war of 1914 broke
+out, and the call to arms sent him from his seclusion to become the
+savior of Paris.  But when ruins became fashionable in the last decade of
+Queen Victoria, it was necessary for St. Raphaël to have an ancient
+monument.  An arch of the aqueduct was imported to the beach with as
+little regard for congruous setting as Mr. Croesus-in-Ten-Years shows in
+importing an English lawn to his front yard at Long Branch and a gallery
+of ancestral portraits to his dining-room on Fifth Avenue.
+
+The Artist looked at the ruins in silence.  He tried to gnaw the ends of
+his mustache.  His eyes changed from amusement to contempt, and then to
+interest.  I was ready for his question.
+
+"Say, where is this town Fréjus?"
+
+The _cocher_ protested.  He had bargained to take us to St. Raphaël, the
+horses were tired, and anyway there was no good hotel, no food, nothing
+to do at Fréjus.
+
+"Where is Fréjus?" repeated the Artist.  The _cocher_ pointed his whip
+unwillingly westward along the shore.  The Artist turned to me with his
+famous nose-and-eyes-and-chin-up expression.
+
+"What do you say, _mon vieux_?"
+
+"Decidedly Fréjus," I answered.
+
+Accustomed to American queerness, the _cocher_ resigned himself to the
+reins for another five kilometers.
+
+Since the River Argens began to flow, it has been depositing silt against
+the eastern shore of the Gulf of Fréjus, at the point of which stands St
+Raphaël.  Consequently the road, sentineled by linden trees, crosses a
+rich plain, and is more than a mile from the sea when it reaches the city
+of Julius Caesar.  The upper ends of the mole of the ancient port, high
+and dry like ships at low tide, join the walls of the canal.  You have to
+look closely to distinguish the canal and the depression of the basin
+into which it widens near the town.  For where land has encroached upon
+sea, vegetable gardens and orchards have been planted.  Inland, the
+arches from the aqueduct of the Siagne shed their bricks in wheat fields
+and protrude from clumps of hazels.  As it enters the city, the road
+turns back on itself and mounts to the market-place.  The sharp outward
+bend of the elevation above the narrow stretch of lowland suggest that
+there was a time, long before Roman days, when Fréjus, like the towns of
+the Corniche de l'Estérel, was built on a promontory.
+
+Fréjus belongs to no definite period.  It is not Roman, medieval, modern.
+It is not a watering-place fashionable or unfashionable, a manufacturing
+town prosperous or struggling, a port bustling or sleepy, a
+fishing-village or a flower-gathering center.  Fréjus suggests no marked
+racial characteristics in architecture or inhabitants.  It is neither
+distinctly Midi nor distinctly Italian--as those terms are understood by
+travelers.  Fréjus is unique among the cities of the Cote d'Azur because
+it has no unmistakable _cachet_.  Fréjus suggests Rome, the Middle Ages,
+the twentieth century.  Fréjus embraces pleasure-seeking, industries,
+fish, flowers, and soldiering.  Mermaids, delightfully reminiscent of the
+Lido and Abbazia in garb, dive from the end of the mole into a safe
+swimming-pool; children of the proletariat in coarse black _tabliers_,
+who have not left sandals and white socks on the beach behind them, fish
+for crabs; naval aviators start hydroplanes from an aerodrome beside the
+Roman amphitheater; fishermen, of olive Mediterranean complexion, dry
+copper-tinted nets on the beach, laying them, despite the scolding of the
+Senegalese guards, upon piles of granite and cement blocks with which
+laborers are building a new pier.
+
+We had come to the beach for an after-luncheon smoke, and when we were
+not looking at the Senegalese and workmen, our eyes wandered from
+hydroplanes and machine-gun-armed motor-boats to the mermaids on the
+Roman mole.  Not till we ran out of tobacco and the mole ran out of
+mermaids did we realize that Fréjus was still unexplored and unsketched.
+We gave ourselves a six o'clock rendezvous on the beach.  The Artist
+started to seek Roman ruins, while I turned towards the market-place,
+cathedral bound.  Sea-level villas came first, and then a quarter of
+sixteenth-century houses, many of which showed on the ground floor
+medieval foundations.  In two places I got back to the Romans.  A cross
+section of thin flat bricks with generous interstices of cement in the
+front wall of a greengrocer's opposite, indicated the line of the Roman
+fortification.  Walking around the next parallel street, I managed to get
+into a garden where a long piece of the wall remained.
+
+I came out to the St. Raphaël carriage road at a corner where arose a
+huge square tower of the Norman period.  Almost to its crumbling top,
+houses had been built against it on two sides.  The angle formed by the
+alley through which I came and the main street had fortunately kept the
+other two sides clear.  The tower was the home of a wine and coal
+merchant, who had laid in a supply of cut wood on his roof to the height
+of several feet above the irregular parapet.  Outside one of the narrow
+vertical slits, which in ages past had served as vantage point for a
+vizored knight fitting arrow to bow, hung a parrot cage.  "Coco" was
+chattering Marseilles sailor French.
+
+A single gargoyle remained.  It was a panther, elongated like a
+dachshund.  He was desecrated and humiliated by having tied around his
+middle the end of the clothesline that stretched across the alley.  This
+proved, however, that he still held firmly his place.  The panther,
+ignoring change of fortune, looked down as of yore, snarling, and with
+whiskers stiffened to indicate that if he had been given hind legs, they
+would be ready for a spring.  So worn was the gargoyle that ears and chin
+and part of forehead had disappeared.  But you can see the snarl just as
+you can see the Sphinx's smile.  When a thing is well done, it is done
+for all time.  If a poor workman had fashioned that gargoyle, there would
+have been no panther and no snarl when it was put up there.  But a master
+worked the stone, and what he wrought is ineradicable.  It will disappear
+only with the stone itself.  When we speak of ruins, we mean that a part
+of the material used in expressing a conception has not resisted climate
+and age and earthquake and vandalism.  Armless, Venus de Milo is still
+the perfect woman.  Headless, Nike of Samothrace is still symbolic of the
+glory of prevailing.
+
+In the morning, before reaching St. Raphaël, we passed an African soldier
+limping along the dusty road.  He was dispirited even to the crumpled
+look of his red fez, and the sun, shining mercilessly, glinted from his
+rifle-barrel to the beads of perspiration on the back of his neck.  We
+were going fast, and had just time to wave gayly to cheer him up.  He did
+not return our salute.  This struck us as strange.  Fearing that he might
+be ill, we made the _cocher_ turn round, and went back to pick him up.
+He declared that a sprained ankle made it impossible for him to keep up
+with his regiment, which had been marching since early morning.  He was
+grateful for the lift, and beamed when we assured him that we could take
+him as far as St. Raphaël.  At that time we were not thinking of going to
+Fréjus, the garrison town of the African troops.  When we overtook the
+regiment and reached his company, we tried to intercede with the French
+sergeant.  The sergeant was adamant and positive.
+
+"A thousand thanks, but the man is shamming.  He is lazy.  He must get
+out."
+
+We had to give up our soldier.  The sergeant knew his men, and justice is
+the basic doctrine which guides the discipline of the French colonial
+army.  The regiment of Algerians must have stopped for lunch or
+maneuvers.  For they were just coming through the Place du Marché when I
+reached there.  Only the colonel was on horse.  At the turn of the road,
+the captains stood out of rank to watch their companies wheel.  Our
+soldier of the morning passed.  He had forgotten his limp.  The sergeant
+recognized me, and pointed to the soldier.  His left upper eyelid came
+down with a wink, as if to say, "Don't I know them!"
+
+There is a spirit of _camaraderie_ between officers and men in Fréjus
+that one never sees in native regiments of the British army.  The French
+have none of our Anglo-Saxon feeling of caste and race prejudice, which
+makes discipline depend upon aloofness.  French officers can be severe
+without being stern: and they know the difference between poise and pose.
+We Anglo-Saxons need to revise radically our judgment of the French in
+regard to certain traits that are the _sine qua non_ of military
+efficiency.  Energy, resourcefulness, coolness, persistence, endurance,
+pluck--where have these pet virtues of ours been more strikingly tested,
+where have they been more abundantly found, than in the French army?
+
+The sign of the French colonial army is an anchor, and Fréjus is full of
+officers who wear it.  They are mostly men of the Midi, Roman Gauls every
+inch of them.  The Lamys, the Galliénis, the Joffres, the Fochs, the
+Lyauteys were born with a genius for leadership in war.  Their aptitude
+for African conquest and their joy in African colonization are the
+heritage of their native land.  The fortunes of southern France and
+northern Africa were inseparable through the ten centuries of the spread
+of civilization and the Latin and Teutonic invasions in the Western
+Mediterranean.  The connection was unbroken from the time that Hannibal
+marched his African troops through Fréjus to Italy until the Omayyads
+conquered Tunis, Algeria and Morocco.  It is the most natural thing in
+the world to see African troops in Fréjus.  They belong here now, because
+since men began to sail in ships, they have always been at home here as
+friends or enemies.  Mediterranean Africa and Mediterranean France
+received simultaneously political, social and religious institutions, and
+from the same source.  As the Crescent wanes, Gaul is coming back into
+her own.
+
+Fréjus shopkeepers suffer from the proximity of the upstart St. Raphaël.
+Fréjus keeps the bishop, but St. Raphaël has taken the trade.  There is
+now only one business street.  It runs from the Place du Marché through
+the center of the city to the Place du Dôme.  You can get from one
+_place_ to the other in about five minutes.  Few people were on this
+street in mid-afternoon.  None were going into the shops.  I chose the
+department store, and asked the only saleswoman in sight for a collar.
+She brought down two styles, both of which were bucolic.  Matched with a
+beflowered tie, either would have gone perfectly around the neck of a
+Polish immigrant in New York on his wedding day.  I suggested that I be
+shown some other styles.  The saleswoman gazed at me stonily.
+
+"A bus leaves the corner below here for St. Raphaël every hour.  You are
+there in twenty minutes.  Or you can go by train in six minutes."
+
+Up went the boxes to their shelf.  There was nothing for me to do but get
+out.
+
+One says Place du Dôme or Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, depending upon
+whether sympathies are ultramontane or anti-clerical.  For cathedral and
+city hall touch each other at right angles.  LIBERTÉ-ÉGALITÉ-FRATERNITÉ
+is the legend in large letters on the cathedral wall: the one notice
+posted on the Hôtel de Ville is a warning of the last day to pay taxes.
+Two beggars stand guard at the cathedral portal: Senegalese with fixed
+bayonets flank the archway leading to the municipal courtyard.  The Hôtel
+de Ville is a modern building, typical of French official taste of the
+present day: the cathedral is an edifice of several epochs, with a brick
+facade reminiscent of Bologna.  The episcopal palace, adjacent to the
+cathedral, is part of the same structure.  But it is used for government
+offices, and the entrance to its upper floor is by a staircase from the
+vestibule of the cathedral.  The _Service de Santé Municipale_ occupies
+the rooms along the portico that faces the cloister.  The cure of souls
+has been banished to a private house across the street.
+
+The cathedral quarter is wholly Louis XVI and First Empire.  If I had
+begun my ramble there, I should have found much to admire.  But I had
+been spoiled by the Louis XIII quarter nearer the sea.  Travel
+impressions are largely dependent upon itinerary.  I am often able to
+surprise a compatriot whose knowledge of Europe is limited to one
+"bang-up trip, and there wasn't much we missed, y'know," by being able to
+tell him the order in which he visited places.  It is an easy thing to
+do.  You simply have to notice how the tourist compares cities and other
+"sights."  He is blissfully ignorant of the fact that his positive
+judgments, his unhesitating preferences are accidental.  They do not
+express at all his real tastes and his real appreciation of values.
+However cultivated and intelligent an observer he may be, unless he has
+carefully weighed and made proper allowance for the influence of
+itinerary, his judgments and preferences are not to be taken seriously.
+For years I honestly believed that the Rue de la Porte Rosette was one of
+the finest streets in the world.  I told my friends of it.  But when
+Alexandria was revisited, the Rue de la Porte Rosette was a shabby
+thoroughfare.  After a year in the interior of Asia Minor, the Rue de la
+Porte Rosette was the first street through which I drove in coming back
+to European civilization.  The next time I saw it I was fresh from years
+of constant residence in Paris.  In my memory, Sofia is a gem of an
+up-to-date city, while Bucharest is a poor imitation of the occidental
+municipality.  The chances are more than even that my comparative
+estimate of the two Balkan capitals is wholly wrong.  For each time I
+have visited Sofia, it was in coming from Turkey, while stops at
+Bucharest have followed immediately after Buda-Pest and Odessa.
+
+I wandered through the cathedral quarter with less enthusiasm than was
+its due, and soon decided to rejoin the Artist.  He was not in the
+neighborhood of any of the Roman ruins.  He was not sitting behind an
+_apéritif_ on a café terrace.  He was not watching soldiers play football
+in the courtyard of the barracks.  He was not sketching the Norman tower.
+He was not exploring alleys of the medieval quarter.  He was not looking
+at hydroplanes over the fence of the aerodrome.  My quest had led me
+unconsciously back to the beach.  There was still an hour before our
+rendezvous.  But where we had stretched in the sand after lunch was a
+delightful spot, and I had remembered to have my pouch filled at a tabac.
+I was not going to feel bored waiting for him.  Where the laborers were
+working on the pier, the black soldier guards called out to me to beware
+of danger.  Not being skilled in dodging construction machinery I gave it
+a wide berth.  The place of our siesta had to be reached by going through
+ruins and climbing over a dune.  The Artist was there.
+
+"You know," he explained, ignoring with the sweep of his hand the Roman
+mole where a new bevy of mermaids had appeared, "the progress of aviation
+has fascinated me ever since that July day at Rheims when Wright went up
+and stayed up.  Just look what those fellows are doing!"
+
+Hydroplanes were appearing from the aerodrome.  When they struck the
+water there was a hiss, which grew in volume and acuity as they skimmed
+the waves.  After a few hundred yards, the machines rose as easily as
+from land, circled up to the clouds and into them.  Coming down, the
+aviators practiced dipping and swerving by following and avoiding the
+purposely irregular course of motor-boats.  An officer, who spoke to us
+to find out, I suppose, who we were and why we were there, remarked that
+the aviators were beginners.  We were astonished.  If this was learning
+to fly, what was flying?
+
+"Our boys need little teaching to learn to fly," he explained.  "That
+comes naturally.  What they are learning is how to use their machines for
+fighting.  Science and training and practice come in there.  A world-old
+game is before you.  It is only the medium that is new."
+
+Words of wisdom.  A bit of aqueduct led us to Fréjus in the hope of
+tasting the charm of a more ancient past than we had found in other
+Riviera cities.  We were not disappointed.  The charm was there.  But we
+would not have found it, had we tried to dissociate it from the present,
+had we ignored or deplored its setting.  Nothing that lives assimilates
+what is foreign to its nature: nothing that lives survives dissection.
+We took Fréjus as Fréjus was, and not as we wanted it to be or thought it
+must be.  We took the aerodrome with the hippodrome, the coal merchant
+with the Norman tower, the parrot with the gargoyle, the Hôtel de Ville
+with the cathedral, and the mermaids with the mole.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+SAINT-RAPHAEL
+
+On the terrace of our little home at Théoule, a lover of the Riviera
+read what I had written about Fréjus.
+
+"If you have any idea of making a book out of your Riviera articles,"
+she said positively, "do not think you can dismiss the Estérel and
+Saint-Raphaël in so cavalier a fashion.  That may be all right for
+Lester Hornby and you and serve as a good introduction to a story on
+Fréjus, but in your project of a book on Riviera towns--"
+
+There is no need to say more.  I looked over to the hills of the
+Estérel and felt sorry I had neglected them.  I thought of past
+experiences, and agreed that there was something more to write about
+the French end of the Riviera.  And then we put our heads together over
+a time table, planned to go to Agay by train, and walk on the rest of
+the way to Saint-Raphaël.  If the weather was good, we should climb
+Mont Vinaigre, and see the Estérel from its highest point.
+
+"I don't care whether it affords good subjects for Lester or not,"
+declared my boss.  "I've done the trip, and I know it will be fun--and
+remember what Horatio was told!"
+
+Humankind and human habitation had occupied the Artist and myself on
+almost every day afield from, Théoule.  Of course we had taken in the
+scenery, sketched it and spoken about it, but only as a background or
+accompaniment.  From Cannes to Menton it is the human side of the
+Riviera that gets you.  Nature is a sort of musical accompaniment to
+the song of human activity.  Between Cannes and the Italian frontier,
+where the railway does not skirt the coast, you have the tramway.  It
+is with you always, night and day, and makes itself heard at every
+curve.  (The road is all curves!)  As a result of the tramway, or
+perhaps as its cause, the Cannes-Menton stretch of the Riviera is
+solidly built up.  Where the towns do not run into each other, an
+unbroken line of villas links them up.  It is all the city--you cannot
+get away from that.
+
+The road we follow to Fréjus was opened in 1903, a gift to the nation
+from the initiative and enterprise of the Touring-Club de France.  The
+building of a tram line was fortunately forbidden.  But with the
+railway and rapidly-developing use of the automobile, the little
+villages of the Estérel coast are being rapidly built up.  Around the
+cape from Théoule, Le Trayas will soon rival Saint-Raphaël as a center
+for Estérel excursions.  Then we have Anthéor, Agay, and Boulouris
+before reaching the long and charming villa-covered approach to
+Saint-Raphaël.
+
+But we do not need to worry yet about what is going to happen.  The
+blessed fact remains that the Estérel, between Théoule and
+Saint-Raphaël, is not yet closely populated like the rest of the
+Riviera.  The tramway has not come.  The railway frequently goes out of
+sight, if not out of hearing, for a mile or two.  You have nature all
+by herself, with no houses, no human beings, no human inventions.  The
+interior of the Estérel is as refreshingly different from the
+hinterland of the rest of the Riviera as most of the coast.  There are
+no cities and towns back on the hills, no railways and tramways, no
+fine motor roads to make the pedestrian's progress a disagreeable and
+almost continuous passage through clouds of dust.  The Estérel is hills
+and valleys, streams and forests and birds.  You do not even have poles
+and wires to remind you of the world you have left for the moment.
+
+The only way one comes to know this country is to have a villa on its
+fringe, as we did, and get lost in it every time you try to explore it.
+But such good fortune does not fall to everyone--nor the time--so it is
+comforting to point out that much of interest in the Estérel can be
+visited by motorists from the Corniche.  Between La Napoule and Agay,
+the Touring-Club de France has put sign-posts at every little path
+leading from the Corniche back into the interior.  Some paths, also,
+where the road mounts on Cap Roux, lead down to grottoes on the water's
+edge or out to cliffs.  Each sign gives the attraction and the
+distance.  In our walks from Théoule we explored most of these, but
+discovered that one must not have an objective for lunch.  For there is
+no connection between the number of kilometers and the time you must
+take.  A map and compass are wise precautions.  Some paths are scarcely
+marked at all, and when you have to slide down the side of a volcanic
+hill into a ravine and try to guess where you are supposed to go next,
+a woodsman's instinct is needed.  The excursions are surer because more
+frequented, but none the less charming, after you have rounded the cape
+and crossed the little River Agay.
+
+Agay, the Agathon of Ptolemy, boasts of the only harbor on the Estérel.
+On one side is the Pointe d'Anthéor and on the other Cap Dramont.
+Right behind the harbor rises the Rastel d'Agay, a jagged mass of
+copper rock a thousand feet high, climbing which is an excellent
+preparation for and indication of what one may expect in Estérel
+exploration.  The way is not made easy for you as it is in the eastern
+end of the Riviera.  But unless you strike an exceptionally warm day
+you have the will for pushing on afoot that is completely lacking at
+Monte Carlo and Menton.
+
+The most ambitious and most interesting excursion into the Estérel that
+can be made in a day's walk is to go to Saint-Raphaël from Agay by way
+of Mont Vinaigre.  You must make an early start and be ready to put in
+from five to six hours if you want to eat your lunch on the highest
+peak of the Estérel.  It took us from seven o'clock to noon, and we
+kept going steadily.  Crossing the railway, we struck out to the right
+of the Agay through forests of pine and cork to Le Gratadis, then along
+the Ravin du Pertus, pushing through the underbrush in blossom and
+skirting the many walls of rock that served to indicate where the path
+was not.  It would have been easier to have made the round trip from
+Saint-Raphaël.  But we should not have the full realization of the wild
+beauty of the Estérel nor that joyful feeling of reaching _astra per
+aspera_.  The way down to Saint-Raphaël, after descending to Le Malpey,
+less than an hour from the summit, is by a carriage road.
+
+We wished we could have seen the stars from Mont Vinaigre.  There was a
+belvedere, and if we had only brought our blankets!  But however warm
+the day, the nights are cool, especially two thousand feet up.  Only
+those who have slept out at night in Mediterranean countries know how
+cold it can get.  The top of Mont Vinaigre, almost in the center of the
+Estérel, affords a view of the ensemble of volcanic hills crowded
+together by themselves that makes you realize why it is so easy to get
+lost in the valleys between them.  The forests are thick and the
+ravines go every which way.  Inland the Estérel is separated from the
+foothills of the Maritime Alps by the valleys of the Riou Blanc and
+Siagne through which runs the main road to Grasse, with a branch down
+the Siagne to Mandelieu.  On the northern slope of the mountain is the
+road from Fréjus to Cannes, which leaves the Estérel at Mandelieu.  It
+is one of the oldest roads in France.  Several Roman milestones have
+recently been unearthed here.  In these hills the Romans found coal and
+copper, and from the quarries along the coast at Boulouris and on Cap
+Dramont the quarries of blue porphyry are still worked.
+
+In mining possibilities the whole region is as rich as it was twenty
+centuries ago; but, as in many other parts of France, little has been
+done to take advantage of them.  Some years ago an American friend of
+mine, motoring with his wife from Fréjus to Cannes, discovered coal
+fields, formed a company, and is now drawing a revenue from hills whose
+former owners knew them only as preserves for shooting wild boar and
+other wild game.  Within her own boundaries France has coal enough for
+all her needs if only she would mine it.  But the French love to put
+their money into safe bonds of their own and foreign governments.  The
+woolen stocking does not give up its hoarded coins for such enterprises
+as mines and domestic industries.  Daughter's _dot_ must be in a form
+acceptable to the prospective bridegroom's family.  And then the French
+do not breed the new generation sufficiently large to furnish laborers
+for developing the natural resources of the country.  They are hostile
+to immigration.  When the war came Asia and Africa were called upon to
+man munition plants.
+
+After the lesson of the war the French have tried to make their own
+country give up more of its wealth.  However, though they are now more
+skeptical than ever of investing abroad, they still pursue an
+aggressive foreign policy to open up and protect fields of capital far
+from home.  On the edge of the Estérel, a dozen miles away, at Fréjus,
+Saint-Raphaël and Cannes, the people have lost much money in Russian
+and Turkish bonds, Brazilian railways and coffee plantations.  Their
+sons go to Algeria and Morocco to seek a fortune.  Is this why only the
+coming of tourists and residents from a less hospitable clime has
+wrought any change in the country during the nineteenth century?  From
+the standpoint of natural production the Riviera is relatively less
+important, less self-supporting than before the railway came.
+
+By the forester's house of Le Malpey, after an hour's descent, we
+strike the carriage road.  An hour and a half brings us to Valescure,
+an English colony built in pine woods.  Another half hour and we are at
+Saint-Raphaël.
+
+The next morning we discovered that Saint-Raphaël had its Old Town,
+which escaped us on our trip to Fréjus.  Only the new name of the main
+street--Rue Gambetta--indicated that we were in France of the Third
+Republic.  But, as in Grasse, we felt that we were really in France of
+all the centuries.  There was none of that unmistakably Italian
+atmosphere that still makes itself felt in Nice, once you wander into
+quarters east of the Place Masséna.  The thick walls of the old
+church--far too massive for its size--bear witness to the period when
+Mediterranean coast town church was sanctuary more than in name.  To
+the church the people fled when the Saracen pirates came, and while the
+priests prayed they acted on the adage that God helps those who help
+themselves, pouring molten lead from the roof and shooting arbalests
+through _meurtrières_ that can still be distinguished despite bricks
+and plaster.  This is the Saint-Raphaël that Napoleon knew when he
+returned from Egypt and, fifteen years later, sailed for his first
+exile at Elba.
+
+But we found much that was attractive in the new Saint-Raphaël, which
+is as French as the old.  The English keep themselves mostly at
+Valescure.  Tourists come on _chars-à-bancs_ for lunch, and hurry back
+to Nice.  Saint-Raphaël has developed as a French watering place.  It
+does not have the protection of the high wall of the Maritime Alps.
+When the mistral, bane of the Midi, is not blowing, however, you wonder
+whether the native-born have not picked out for a seashore resort a
+more delightful bit of the Riviera coast than foreigners.  A Frenchman
+once told me that Saint-Raphaël was the logical Riviera town for the
+French simply because the night train from Paris landed a traveler
+there in time for noon lunch.
+
+"This fact alone," he declared to me, "would induce me to choose
+Saint-Raphaël in preference to Cannes and Nice.  You know that when
+twelve o'clock has struck the day is ruined for a Frenchman if he is
+not reasonably sure of being able to sit down pretty soon to a good hot
+meal.  The P.-L.-M. put Cannes and Nice just a little bit beyond our
+limit."
+
+As you emerge from the Old Town, at the harbor, you pass by a large
+modern church in Byzantine style, whose portal shows to excellent
+advantage six porphyry columns from the nearby Boulouris quarries.
+Along the sea is the Boulevard Felix-Martin, which runs into the
+Corniche de l'Estérel.  For several miles you feel that there is
+nothing to detract from the spell of the sea.  Elsewhere on the Riviera
+you have promenades embellished by great buildings and monuments and
+forts and exotic trees.  You have coves and capes and villa-clad hills
+with the Alpine background.  You climb cliffs and see the Mediterranean
+at bends, through trees and across luxurious gardens.  Panorama after
+panorama with distractions galore react on you like a picture gallery.
+But at Saint-Raphaël the sea dominates.  The Mediterranean alone holds
+you.
+
+This is why you cannot endorse the bald statement flung at you by the
+famous sundial of the Rue de France at Nice:
+
+  "Io vado e vengo ogni giorno,
+  Ma tu andrai senza ritorno."
+
+
+It may be true enough of Nice that you will not go back.  One has the
+confusion of human activities everywhere and tires of it everywhere.
+But just the sea alone is always new.  Of course in the end the
+immortal sun has the better of you.  But as long as life does last the
+effort will be made to get back to the Boulevard Felix-Martin at
+Saint-Raphaël.  For there, better than anywhere else on the Riviera,
+one can look at the sea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THÉOULE
+
+From Cannes to Menton the Riviera is cursed with electric tram lines.
+We were led beyond Cannes to the Corniche de l'Estérel by the absence
+of a tram line.  We could not get away from the railway, however,
+without abandoning the coast.  Is there any place desirable for living
+purposes in which the railway does not obtrude?  When choosing a
+country residence, men with families, unless they have several motors
+and several chauffeurs, must stick close to the railway.  Monsieur
+l'Adjoint was showing us the salon of his villa when a whistle
+announced the Vintimille express.  He hastened to anticipate the train
+by reassuring us that there was a deep cut back of the villa and that
+the road-bed veered away from us just at the corner of the garden.  It
+was in the neighboring villa that trains were really heard.  We were to
+believe him--at that moment chandeliers and windows and two vases of
+dried grasses on the mantelpiece danced a passing greeting to the
+train.  Monsieur l'Adjoint thought that he had failed to carry the day.
+But we live on a Paris boulevard, and know that noises are comparative.
+Vintimille expresses were not going to pass all the time.
+
+We were glad that the railway had not deterred us.  It was good to be
+right above the water.  Some people do not like the glare of sun
+reflected from the sea.  But they are late risers.  Parents of small
+children are accustomed to waking with the sun.  On the first morning
+in the Villa Étoile the baby chuckled early.  Sun spots were dancing on
+the ceiling, and she was watching them.  The breakfast on the terrace
+was no hurried swallowing of a cup of coffee with eyes fixed upon a
+newspaper propped against a sugar bowl.  The agreement of the day
+before had been tripartite.  The proprietor was easily satisfied with
+bank notes.  But the wife had not consented to leave the freedom of the
+hotel until it had been solemnly agreed that newspapers were to be
+refused entrance into the Villa Étoile, and that watches were not to be
+drawn out (even furtively) from waistcoat pockets.
+
+Unless agreements are fortified by favorable circumstances and
+constantly recurring interest, they are seldom lived up to.  When
+promises are difficult to keep, where are the men of their word?  Doing
+what one does not want to do is a sad business.  That is why Puritanism
+is associated with gloom.  On the terrace of the Villa Étoile no man
+could want to look at a newspaper or a watch.  Across the Gulf of La
+Napoule lies Cannes.  Beyond Cannes is the Cap d'Antibes.  Mountains,
+covered with snow and coming down to the sea in successive chains, form
+the eastern horizon.  Inland, Grasse is nestled close under them.
+Seaward, the Iles de Lérins seem to float upon the water.  For on
+Sainte-Marguerite the line of demarcation between Mediterranean blue
+and forest green is sharp, and Saint-Honorat, dominated by the soft
+gray of the castle and abbey, is like a reflected cloud.  Between
+Théoule and Cannes the railway crosses the viaduct of the Siagne.
+Through the arches one can see the golf course on which an English
+statesman thought out the later phases of British Imperialism.  To the
+west, the Gulf of La Napoule ends in the pine-covered promontory of the
+Esquillon.  Except for a very small beach in front of the Théoule
+hotel, the coast is rocky.  From February to May our terrace outlook
+competed successfully with duties elsewhere.
+
+Young and old in Théoule have to make a daily effort to enjoy
+educational and religious privileges.  We wondered at first why the
+school and church were placed on the promontory, a good mile and a half
+from the town.  But later we came to realize that this was a salutary
+measure.  The climate is insidious.  A daily antidote against laziness
+is needed.  I was glad that I volunteered to take the children to
+school at eight and two, and go after them at eleven and four, and that
+they held me to it.  In order to reach a passable route on the steep
+wall of rock and pine, the road built by the Touring-Club de France
+makes a bend of two kilometers in the valley behind Théoule.  By taking
+a footpath from the hotel, the pedestrian eliminates the bend in five
+minutes.  In spite of curves, the road is continuously steep and keeps
+a heavy grade until it reaches the Pointe de l'Esquillon.
+
+I never tired of the four times a day.  Between the Villa Étoile and
+the town was the castle, built on the water's edge.  After Louis XIV it
+became a soap factory, and was restored to its ancient dignity only
+recently.  I ought not to say "dignity," for the restorer was a baron
+of industry, and his improvements are distressing.  The entrance to the
+park created on the inner side of the road opposite the château is the
+result of landscape dentistry.  The creator did not find that the
+natural rock lent itself to his fancies, and filled in the hollows with
+stones of volcanic origin.  On the side of the hill, fountains and
+pools and a truly massive flight of steps have been made.  Scrawny firs
+are trying to grow where they ought not to.  Quasi-natural urns
+overflow with captive flowers, geraniums and nasturtiums predominating.
+Ferns hang as gracefully as shirtings displayed in a department store
+window.  Stone lions defy, and terra cotta stags run away from,
+porcelain dogs.  There are bowers and benches of imitation petrified
+wood.
+
+American money may be responsible for the château garden, but the
+villas of Théoule are all French.  Modern French artistic genius runs
+to painting and clothes.  There is none left for building or
+house-furnishing.  French taste, as expressed in homes, inside and
+outside, is as bad as Prussian.  We may admire mildly the monotonous
+symmetry of post-Haussmann Paris.  When we get to the suburbs and to
+the provincial towns and to summer and winter resorts, we have to
+confess that architecture is a lost art in France.  In America,
+especially in our cities, we have regrettable traces of
+mid-Victorianism, and we have to contend with Irish politicians and
+German contractors.  In the suburbs, and in the country, however, where
+Americans build their own homes, we have become accustomed to ideas of
+beauty that make the results of the last sixty years of European growth
+painful to us.  Our taste in line, color, decoration, and interior
+furnishing is at hopeless variance with that of twentieth-century
+Europe.  We admire and we buy in Europe that which our European
+ancestors created.  Our admiration--and our buying--is confined
+strictly to Europe of the past.  Present-day Europe displays German
+_Schmuck_ from one end to the other, and France is no exception.
+
+On the walk to school you soon get beyond the château and the villas.
+But even on the promontory there is more than the dodging of
+automobiles to remind one that this is the twentieth century.  The
+Corniche de l'Estérel has been singled out by the moving-picture men
+for playing out-of-door scenarios.  When the sun is shining, a day
+rarely passes without film-making.  The man with a camera has the
+rising road and bends around which the action can enter into the scene,
+the forest up and the forest down, the Mediterranean and mountain and
+island and Cannes backgrounds.  Automobile hold-ups with pistols
+barking, the man and the maid in the woods and on the terrace, the
+villain assaulting and the hero rescuing the defenseless woman, the
+heroine jumping from a rock into the sea, and clinging to an upturned
+boat--these are commonplace events on the Corniche de l'Estérel.
+
+The world of cinemas and motors does not rise early.  On the morning
+walk, children and squirrels and birds were all one met.  Children go
+slowly, and squirrels and birds belong to nature.  There was always
+time to breathe in the forest and the sea and to look across to the
+mountains.  When _cartables_ and _goûters_ were handed over at the
+school gate, parental responsibility ceased for three hours.  One had
+the choice of going on around the point towards Trayas or down to the
+sea.
+
+The people of Théoule say that Corsica, sixty miles away, can be seen
+from the Esquillon.  All one has to do is to keep going day after day
+until "atmospheric conditions are favorable."  The Touring-Club de
+France has built a Belvedere at the extremity of the Esquillon.  Arrows
+on a dial indicate the direction of important places from Leghorn to
+Marseilles.  The Apennines behind Florence, as well as Corsica, are
+marked as within the range of visibility.  The Apennines had not been
+seen for years, but Corsica was liable to appear at any time.  The
+first day the Artist went with me to the Esquillon, an Oldest
+Inhabitant said that we had a Corsica day.  A milkwoman _en route_
+reported Corsica in sight, and told us to hurry.  Towards nine o'clock
+the sun raises a mist from the sea, she explained.  In the belvedere we
+found a girl without a guide book who had evidently come over from
+Trayas.  She was crouched down to dial level, and her eyes were
+following the Corsica arrow.  She did not look up or move when we
+entered.  Minutes passed.  There was no offer to give us a chance.  We
+coughed and shuffled, and the Artist sang "The Little Gray Home in the
+West."  I informed the Artist--in French--that a specialist had once
+remarked upon my hyperopic powers, and that if Corsica were really in
+sight I could not fail to see it.
+
+Not until she had to shake the cramp out of her back did the girl
+straighten up.
+
+"Corsica is invisible today," she announced.
+
+"Yes," I answered sadly.  "Ten minutes ago the mist began to come up.
+You know, sun upon the water--"
+
+A look in her eyes made me hesitate.  "And all that sort of thing," I
+ended lamely.
+
+"Nonsense," she said briskly.  She surveyed the Artist from mustache to
+cane point and turned back to me.  "You, at least," she declared, "are
+American, but of the unpractical sort.  And you are as unresourceful as
+you are ungallant, Monsieur.  How do I know?  Well, you were
+complaining about my monopolizing the dial.  There is a map on the
+tiles under your feet, and a compass dangles uselessly from your
+watch-chain.  I wonder, too, if you _are_ hyperopic.  You know which is
+the Carlton Hôtel over there in Cannes.  Tell me how many windows there
+are across a floor."
+
+The atmosphere was wonderfully clear, and the Carlton stood out
+plainly.  But I failed the test.
+
+The girl laughed.  I did not mind that.  When the Artist started in, I
+turned on him savagely.
+
+"Well, you count the Carlton windows," I said.
+
+"No specialist ever told me I was hyperopic," he came back.
+
+I had to save the day by answering that I was glad to be myopic just
+now.  Who wanted to see Corsica any longer?  The girl knew interesting
+upper paths on the western side of the promontory.  She had as much
+time as we, or rather, I must say regretfully, she and the Artist had
+more time than I.  For eleven o'clock came quickly, and I hurried off
+to fulfill my parental duty.  The Artist told me afterwards that there
+was a fine _cuisine_ at the Trayas restaurant.
+
+I did think of my compass one day: for I had sore need of it.  But, as
+generally happens in such cases, I was not wearing it.  Between Théoule
+and La Napoule, the nearest town on the way to Cannes, a tempting
+forest road leads back into the valley.  A sign states that a curious
+view of a mountain peak, named after Marcus Aurelius, could be had by
+following the road for half a dozen kilometers.  It was one of the
+things tourists did when they were visiting the Corniche for a day.
+Consequently, when one was staying on the Corniche, it was always an
+excursion of the morrow.  During the Artist's first week, we were
+walking over to Mandelieu to take the tram to Cannes one morning, and
+suddenly decided that the last thing in the world for sensible folks to
+do was to go to Cannes on a day when the country was calling
+insistently.  We turned in at the sign.  After we had seen the view, we
+thought that it would be possible to take a short cut back to Théoule.
+The wall of the valley that shut us off from the sea must certainly be
+the big hill just behind the Villa Étoile.  If, instead of retracing
+our steps towards La Napoule, we kept ahead, and remembered to take the
+left at every cross path, we would come out at the place where the
+Corniche road made its big bend before mounting to the promontory.  It
+was all so simple that it could not be otherwise.  We were sure of the
+direction, and fairly sure of the distance, since we had left the motor
+road between Théoule and La Napoule.
+
+There was an hour and a half before lunch.  A lumber road followed the
+brook, and the brook skirted the hill beyond which was Théoule and the
+Villa Étoile.  It was a day to swear by, and April flowers were in full
+bloom.  It was delightful until we had to confess that the hill showed
+no signs of coming down to a valley on the left.  Finally, at a point
+where a path went up abruptly from the stream, we decided that it would
+be best to cut over the summit of the hill and not wait until the
+Corniche road appeared before us.  In this way we would avoid the walk
+back from the hotel to our villa, and come out in our own garden.  But
+on the Riviera nature has shown no care in placing her hills where they
+ought to be and in symmetrizing and limiting them.  They go on
+indefinitely.  So did we, until we came to feel that we would be like
+the soldiers of Xenophon once we spied the sea.  But the cry "Thalassa"
+was denied us.  Eventually we turned back, and tried keeping the hill
+on the right.  This was as perplexing as keeping it on the left had
+been.  A pair of famished explorers, hungry enough to eat canned
+tuna-fish and crackers with relish, reached a little town inland from
+Mandelieu about seven o'clock that night with no clear knowledge of
+from where or how they had come.
+
+Between the town of Théoule and the belvedere of the Esquillon, down
+along the water's edge, one never tires of exploring the caves.  Paths
+lead through the pines and around the cliffs.  The Artist was attracted
+to the caves by the hope of finding vantage points from which to sketch
+Grasse and Cannes and Antibes and the Alps and the castle on
+Saint-Honorat.  But he soon came to love the copper rocks, which pine
+needles had dyed, and deserted black and white for colors.  When the
+climate got him, he was not loath to join in my hunt for octopi.  The
+inhabitants tell thrilling stories of the monsters that lurk under the
+rocks at the Pointe de l'Esquillon and forage right up to the town.
+One is warned to be on his guard against long tentacles reaching out
+swiftly and silently.  One is told that slipping might mean more than a
+ducking.  Owners of villas on the rocks make light of octopi stories,
+and as local boomers are trying to make Théoule a summer resort, it is
+explained that the octopi never come near the beach.  Even if they did,
+they would not be dangerous there.  How could they get a hold on the
+sand with some tentacles while others were grabbing you?
+
+I have never wanted to see anything quite so badly as I wanted to see
+an octopus at Théoule.  Octopus hunting surpasses gathering four-leaf
+clovers and fishing as an occupation in which hope eternal plays the
+principle role.  I gradually abandoned other pursuits, and sat smoking
+on rocks by the half day, excusing indolence on the ground of the
+thrilling story I was going to get.  I learned over again painfully the
+boyhood way of drinking from a brook, and lay face downward on island
+stones.  With the enthusiastic help of my children, I made a dummy
+stuffed with pine cones, and let him float at the end of a rope.  Never
+a tentacle, let alone octopus, appeared.  I had to rest content with
+Victor Hugo's stirring picture in "The Toilers of the Sea."
+
+A plotting wife encouraged the octopus hunts by taking part in them,
+and expressing frequently her belief in the imminent appearance of the
+octopi.  She declared that sooner or later my reward would come.  She
+threw off the mask on the first day of May, when she thought it was
+time to return to work.  She announced to the Artist and me that the
+octopi had gone over to the African coast to keep cool until next
+winter, and that we had better all go to Paris to do the same.  We were
+ready.  Théoule was still lovely, and the terrace breakfasts had lost
+none of their charm.  But one does not linger indefinitely on the
+Riviera unless _dolce far niente_ has become the principal thing in
+life.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RIVIERA TOWNS***
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