property of the Vento family of Genoa. Later it came under the rule of
the Counts of Provence and in 1346 was purchased by Carlo Grimaldi of
Monaco for sixteen thousand gold florins. It remained a part of the
principality of Monaco for some hundreds of years. It was but slightly
disturbed by the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
because it was so little worth fighting about. In 1848 the whole
population of Mentone, under the leadership of the Chevalier Trenca,
rose against the oppression of the Grimaldi and the town became, with
Roquebrune, a republic. Finally it was sold by Monaco to France in 1861
for the sum of four million francs and there its story ends.
[Illustration: MENTONE: THE EAST BAY.]
The best general view of Mentone is to be obtained from the pier.
Between the East Bay and the West stands the old town, a heap of drab
houses and red roofs, piled up in the form of a mound on the summit of
which are St. Michael’s Church and the plume-like cypresses of the old
cemetery. Behind this drab town are two green hills, round and low—St.
Vincent and Les Chappes; and beyond again—shutting out the world—are
the ash-grey slopes of the Maritime Alps. To the west is the _massif_ of
Mont Agel and the crag of St. Agnes; while to the east is the towering
height of the Berceau.
The old town is small, but it has the merit—rare in these parts—of
being clean and free from “the evil smell” of which Mr. Hare has
complained. It is Italian in character and, owing to its place on a
hill, is made up of steep lanes and many stairs, of headlong passages
and vaulted ways. The numerous arches that cross the streets are the
outcome of an experience of earthquakes painfully acquired in years gone
by. At the foot of the town is the Place du Cap out of which certain
undecided old lanes ramble to the sea, with the rolling gait of unsteady
mariners. Among these the Ruelle Giapetta and the Rue du Bastion are
notable by their picturesqueness.
The way up to the old town is by the steps of the Rue des Logettes. The
first street encountered is the Rue de Bréa. It is a mean street, but it
is occupied by houses which have been, at one time, among the most
pretentious in Mentone. At No. 3 Napoleon lodged during the Italian
campaign. It is a large building of four stories with a fine doorway in
white stone. It is now given up to poor tenants who hang their washing
out of the windows. At No. 2, a private house in comfortable state,
General Bréa was born in 1790. He was one of Napoleon’s generals, was at
Leipzig and Waterloo and was assassinated in Paris on June 24th, 1848.
On the wall of a garden in the Rue Bréa is a marble tablet to
commemorate the visit of Pius VII in 1814. The Pope was returning to
Rome after his long exile in France and it was from the terrace of this
garden that he blessed the people crowding in the street. While dealing
with famous people it may be noted that in the Rue St. Michel (No. 19)
is the house in which the Chevalier Carlo Trenca was born, the president
of the short-lived Republic of Mentone.
The most important and most interesting street of old Mentone is the Rue
Longue. It runs athwart the east side of the hill, mounting very easily
to the St. Julien Gate which is just below the old cemetery. The street
is paved, is some twelve feet in width and is entered from the Logettes
by a dim passage. The street is a little dark, because the houses on
both sides of it are tall. This Rue Longue follows the route of the old
Roman road. Until 1810 it was the only carriageable street between the
East and the West Bays and the only coast road between Italy and
Provence.
It was the Park Lane of Mentone, the fashionable street in which were
the palaces of the nobles and the houses of the rich. The humbler
dweller in Mentone would hardly dare put foot in it, because it was so
grand and so exclusive. Here “before the great Revolution, the ladies of
Mentone used to sit out and work in the open air, just as the peasants
do now, before the doors of the houses or (one is expected to say)
palaces. A letter of the last century describes the animated appearance
which this gave to the place in those days, the gentlemen stopping to
chat with each group as they passed . . . while the nights were
enlivened by frequent serenades, which were given under the windows of
pretty girls by their admirers.”[53]
This picture is very difficult to realise for the Rue Longue is now a
humble street that the fastidious would probably call a slum. There are
one or two little shops in it, but the houses are, for the most part
turned into tenements for a very densely packed population. The
buildings are of stone covered unhappily with plaster; but they nearly
all show traces of an exalted past. There are many fine entries of stone
with either a pointed or a rounded arch and a few windows which recall
better days. The typical house has an arched doorway from which ascends
a stone stair whose summit is lost in darkness. It leads obviously to
the door of the dwelling, the ground floor being devoted, in old days,
to stables or offices. There is in the Rue Longue a shop of the mediæval
type, such as has been described in the account of St. Paul du Var (page
101). Over the portal of one house is the date 1542 and over another
that of 1543. The house No. 123 was the palace of the princes of Monaco.
It bears the initials of Honorius II and the date 1650. Within is a fine
stone stair with a vaulted ceiling. Among the more picturesque streets
of the town may be mentioned the Rue du Vieux Château, the Rue de la
Côte and the Rue Lampedouze.
The Rue Longue ends at the main gate of the town—the Porte St. Julien.
The gate itself has been modernised and is represented only by an
archway of a quite unassuming type. Leading up from this portal to the
old cemetery is a wall in which are traces of the _enceinte_ of the old
fortress. The stronghold, built (Dr. Müller states) between 1492 and
1505, occupied the summit of the hill on which the old cemetery now
stands. Here can be seen portions of the castle wall which have become
incorporated with the structure of this strangely placed burial ground.
A flight of steps from the Rue Longue leads to St. Michael’s Church. The
original church was built in 1619, but was almost entirely destroyed by
the great earthquake of 1887, after which date the present church was
constructed. It is an ambitious building in an indefinite “classic”
style and presents no features of interest. The same may be said of the
two other churches in the old town—those of the Pénitents Blancs and of
the Pénitents Noirs.
The gallant old fort that, in the seventeenth century, guarded Mentone
on the side of the sea has been almost engulfed in the building of the
new pier. It is now merely a grey, patched-up ruin, standing on the
rocks by the water’s edge and ignominiously held up behind by the
officious pier. Its little barred windows are curious, while on its
summit can still be seen some traces of its sentry towers.
-----
[52] “The Rivieras,” London, 1897, p. 82.
[53] “A Winter at Mentone.”
[Illustration: MENTONE: RUE LONGUE.]
XXXVII
THE FIRST VISITORS TO THE RIVIERA
THERE is great fascination about a very ancient human dwelling-place. It
stands out among the blank shadows of the past as a warm reality, a
lingering spark still aglow among the ashes of things that once had
been. There is about it the charm of a memory that is partly real and
partly only dreamed about. Strange as the venerable place may be it
comes quite naturally into the story of our common ancestry. It seems,
in some indefinite way, to be a family possession which we can regard
with a personal interest and a legitimate curiosity. Amidst the changes
and upheavals of everyday life there is about the old house a
comfortable assurance of the continuity of human existence and of our
individual claim upon those who have trod before us the great highway.
Such an ancient abode of men is to be found at Mentone, at a spot
called, in the local speech, the Baoussé-Roussé. The English would term
the place the Red Cliff. The Red Cliff is just beyond the tragical
looking chasm, with its babyish stream, that marks the frontier of
France. It stands, therefore, in Italy. It is a formidable cliff of
great height, as erect as a wall, as defiant as a Titanic bastion. It
rises sheer from the rugged beach and is as old as the sea. It has been
scraped smooth by the wind of a million years, and may have been once
scoured clean by the rain of Noah’s deluge. It is bare of vegetation,
except that, here and there, a pitying weed, lavish with yellow
blossoms, clings tenderly to its scarred surface. About its foot are a
few palms, a tall aloe, and some bushes with scarlet flowers. The colour
of the cliff is a tawny grey, stained with red of the tint of ancient
rust. There are long seams, too, on its surface which suggest the
wrinkles of extreme old age.
At the bottom of the precipice are certain caverns which were once the
abodes of men. These caves are about nine in number; so that at one time
the Red Cliff must have been quite a little town, for the caverns are
capacious. The entrances to the caves are, for the most part, in the
form of huge clefts in the rock from twenty feet to sixty feet high.
They face towards the south, so that at noon a streak of light can
penetrate into the vast stone hall and illumine its floor. When the sun
has passed each portal becomes no more than a black gap in the
precipice, very mysterious to look upon.
The people who inhabited these caves belong to our earliest known
ancestors. They stand at the root of the family tree. They represent the
Adam and Eve of human history. Behind these people stretches the void of
the unknown. It is in their likeness that the first human being steps
out of the everlasting darkness into the light of the present world.
[Illustration: MENTONE: A DOORWAY IN THE RUE LONGUE.]
They are known as the Palæolithic folk—the cavern people, the men and
women of the rough Stone Age. Their finest implements and most cunning
weapons were of unpolished flint. They had a knowledge of fire. These
two possessions express the meagre progress they had made in the march
of civilisation.
There are certain skeletons of these cliff-folk in the Museum at Monaco.
It is a memorable moment when one first has sight of men who were alive
some 50,000 years ago, and who, after interminable centuries, have just
come again into the light of day and the company of their kind. It is at
least—in the records of the human family—a curious meeting, a meeting
rendered almost dramatic when one sees a dainty French lady in the mode
of 1920 peering through a glass case into the face of an ancestor who
walked the shores of France in an age so remote as to be almost
mythical.
There is an impression with some that these people of long ago were
brutish creatures, ape-like and uncouth, being little more, in fact,
than gorillas with a leaven of human craft. The Red Cliff skeletons,
however, are not the skeletons of brutes. They show, on the contrary,
the characteristic features of the bones of the man and woman of modern
times. Such differences as exist are slight. There are the same straight
back, the broad shoulders, the well-balanced head, the finely
proportioned limbs, the delicate feet and hands. This skeleton of a Red
Cliff man might have been that of a modern athlete, but with a muscular
development that the modern would envy; while this shapely woman, from
the depths of a cave, might have graced in life the enclosure at Ascot.
There are some peculiarities in the shinbone, but I doubt if they would
be noticeable even through a silk stocking. The skull is different, the
face is flat, the nose broad, the forehead low, the jaws prominent. From
the Ascot standpoint it must be allowed that the cave folk had ugly
faces, coarse and unintellectual no doubt, but not the aspect of the
gorilla.
Among the skeletons from the colony at Mentone is one of especial
interest. It is that of an old woman whose body was found in the deepest
part of the cavern, and who, therefore, may be assumed to have belonged
to the earliest or most ancient of the inhabitants. She is perfectly
and, indeed, finely formed. Her age would be about seventy. It is to be
noted incidentally that the bones show no evidences of gross rheumatic
changes nor of other disabling trouble. That an old lady could live for
seventy years in a damp cave, in a chilly climate, and escape such
inconveniences is a sign of her time and of ours.
It is not known at what age Eve died, but if she reached the term of
three score years and ten these perfect and undisturbed bones may be
imagined to be those of the Mother of Men. Eve is generally depicted by
the sculptor as an elegant lady with a noble Greek face, in which is
realised the extreme of refinement. It would probably be more exact if
our first mother were shown in the form of a stalwart woman with the
countenance of the Australian aborigines or of a Hottentot.
[Illustration: A SIDE STREET IN MENTONE.]
The lady of Mentone has around her forearm two bracelets. They are made
of sea shells and are just such as an ingenious child might make while
sitting on the beach in an idle summer. One might suppose that the
wearer was proud of them, and it may be that vanity in woman and love of
dress—or, at least, of jewellery—are born with her. If this be so, it
is a pity that the wearer of the bracelets could not have known, in her
lifetime, that her cherished ornaments would still be on her arm and
would still be gazed upon by men 50,000 years after she had ceased to
be.
It is a matter of interest and indeed of present envy to note how
perfect are the teeth of these early folk, how strong they are, how
solidly they are ground down. They must have gnawed the bones of the
mammoth, of the cave bear, and of the woolly rhinoceros, for the remains
of such animals are abundant in the dust heaps of these caverns. The
standard of comfort in the commune of Red Cliff was low, for it has to
be recognised that not only did whole families occupy one apartment, but
in that apartment they cooked their food, deposited their refuse, and
buried their dead.
In looking at these very venerable ancestors it is the face that
naturally attracts the greater attention. There is some expression in a
skull, an expression of melancholy and surprise, with a suggestion of
ferocity. Conspicuous, especially, is the look of wonder, the open
mouth, the staring teeth, the solemn, hollow eye sockets. What images
must have been formed within those sunken orbits! Upon what a world must
the vanished eyes once have gazed, upon what strange beasts, upon what
fantastic glades and woods!
When the Red Cliff was inhabited the sea was probably at some distance.
From the entry to the cave one would have looked, at one age, over a
luxurious subtropical country, glaring with heat, and at another era
over a land chilled with ice and deep in snow. During the lifetime of
the old lady of the bracelets the climate is assumed to have been cold
and damp, the climate, indeed, of England at its worst. There must be,
therefore, a bond of sympathy between the aged dame and the present day
migrant, who has fled to the Riviera to escape a British winter.
The dwelling places of these very early Riviera visitors are still
practically unchanged. We enter by the same portal as they did; we tread
the floor they trod, and, looking up, we see the very roof of rock that
sheltered them and that they knew so well.
The great cave—the Barma-Grande—has a fine entry, sixty-five feet in
height and some thirteen feet in breadth. The cave is still deep,
although its length has been curtailed by the callous quarryman, who has
cut away much of the outer face of the cliff to find stone for villas,
railway bridges, and motor garages. The cave narrows down to a
smooth-sided cleft a few feet wide. This must have been a favourite
spot, a cosy corner, an easy lounge after a day’s hunting.
The sun passes over the cavern wall as over the face of a dial, moving
inch by inch just as it has moved, day by day, for unknown thousands of
years. The creeping light serves to record on the rock the passing of
time. The cave-wife, busy with flint scraper and unwieldy lumps of
mammoth flesh, would note, perhaps with concern, that the sun had
already reached a certain grey boss on the wall which told that the
height of the day was near and yet that the daily meal was not ready.
The sun still falls on the same spot on the wall at the same moment of
time, for neither the sun nor the cave has changed.
[Illustration: A SIDE STREET IN MENTONE.]
[Illustration: MENTONE: RUE MATTONI.]
Just in front of the caves of the Baoussé-Roussé, between their entries
and the sea, runs the old Roman road. Compared with the colony of Red
Cliff it is a modern affair, for it is only a little more than two
thousand years old. It ran from the Forum of Rome to Arles, a distance,
it is said, of 797 miles. It carried the Roman legions into Gaul. It
carried the merchant adventurers from the East, together with as
miscellaneous a crowd of wanderers as any road in Europe bears witness
of. Many a Roman centurion must have rested in these caves, many an
Oriental pedlar laden with strange wares, many a man of arms seeking his
fortune in the West, with perhaps a troubadour or two, a jester bound to
other Courts, or the aimless man who followed the Wandering Jew. Pirates
have used these caves for their tragic affairs, as well as wreckers and
honest fishermen. In more recent times smugglers found hereabout
convenient depots from which to run their goods across the border; while
frontier guards have been posted in these shadows with flintlocks to
watch for the unwary buccaneer. Still nearer to the present day one can
imagine that the dolorous lover has carved his lady’s name upon the wall
of the cave by means of a flint implement which his uneasy foot had
unearthed from among the ancient dust of the deserted dwelling-place.
Could the life and times of the occupants of the Red Cliff be written,
from the days of the first inhabitant to the period of to-day, a history
of Europe would be provided which could never be excelled for
picturesqueness nor for vivid detail.
The environment of the old colony is at the moment singularly
incongruous. The entrance to the principal cave is walled up and
admission thereto can only be obtained by the payment of 2f. per person.
A small museum, full of precious bones, stands on the Roman road; a
railway tunnel penetrates the very heart of the cliff, so that the
rumble of express trains disturbs the peace of the dead who still lie on
the very spot where their bodies were laid long centuries ago. There is
a fashionable hotel on the summit of the cliff, and at its foot a
popular restaurant. From the depths of the cave the sound of music can
be heard when the restaurant is very exuberant and is offering especial
cheer.
If the old lady with the bracelets were now to stand at the door of her
cave on a starry night she could see, beyond Mentone, a strange glow in
the sky, the glow from the thousand lights of the gaming-rooms of Monte
Carlo.
[Illustration: CASTILLON (IN THE SNOW).]
[Illustration: CASTILLON: THE ENTRY TO THE TOWN.]
XXXVIII
CASTILLON
AMONG the mountains behind Mentone is a saddle of rock wedged in between
two heights and named the Col de la Garde. If a Colossus sat astride of
this saddle one leg would be in the Valley of the Careï, leading towards
Mentone, and the other in the Merlanson Valley which descends to Sospel.
The col or ridge of the saddle is 2,527 feet above the level of the sea.
On a cone of rock in the centre of this ridge is the ghostly town of
Castillon. The distance from Mentone to Castillon is four miles, if
measured by the flight of a bird, and nine and a half miles if reckoned
by the ingenious road. From Castillon to Sospel by road is four and a
half miles, but the descent is not great for Sospel is still 1,148 feet
above the Mediterranean.
The Valley of the Careï is picturesque and of no little grandeur. It is
a prodigious V-shaped gash in the earth, some half a mile wide where it
opens to the heavens, some few feet wide at its deepest depth where the
torrent cuts its way. The colouring of its walls is beautiful in its
simplicity. Below the blue of the sky is a cinder-grey slope of bare
cliff that dips into the faded green of the olive belt and the
sprightlier green of the pines; then comes a strip of claret-red tinged
with yellow, which marks the terrace of the autumn vines, and at the
very foot are the deep shadows by the banks of the stream.
The Careï follows the valley all the way. It begins among the vast
silence of the everlasting hills and ends by running under the tramlines
and the bandstand at Mentone. The road mounts up the west bank of the
valley by spasmodic turns and twists. These are so repeated and so
abrupt as to render any who live where paths are straight dazed and
despairing.
As the col is approached Castillon stands up against the sky line like a
piece of dead bone sticking out of the mound of a grave. Few habitations
of man occupy a position quite so surprising as this silent and deserted
village. It is the village of a nightmare, of a fairy story, of the
country of the impossible. “The town,” writes the author of “A Winter at
Mentone”, “is as unlike a town as possible . . . so that we should
scarcely believe it to be a town at all.” It stands on the summit of a
pinnacle of stone which is, in turn, balanced on the knife edge of a
dizzy col. From this isolated crag a horrible ridge of rock trails down
the valley towards Sospel like the backbone of some awful reptile.
It is a very ancient place for it was occupied in the time of the
Romans. People have lived in Castillon for over 2,000 years and yet on a
certain day not long ago it was suddenly deserted and not a human being
has ever returned to make a home in it since that dire occasion.
[Illustration: CASTILLON: THE MAIN STREET.]
On February 23rd, 1887, Castillon was shaken by an earthquake and
reduced in great part to ruin. No one appears to have been killed in the
crash, but such was the terror of the inhabitants that they fled down
the cliff side and never came back to the town again. It has remained
ever since as empty as a skull.
In the Middle Ages Castillon was maintained as a fortified place by the
governor of Sospel. It guarded the pass that led to the town and stood
in the way of Sospel’s most restless enemy, the Count of Ventimiglia.
During the wars of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines the fortress of
Castillon suffered much. It was a woeful day when Charles of Anjou
obtained possession of it in 1261 and a still more dismal day when he
sold it to that detested ruffian, Pierre Balbo of Ventimiglia, since, in
the eyes of Sospel, Castillon was the keeper of the pass, the angel with
the flaming sword that stood in the way. For no vain reason did the
ridge gain the name of the Col de la Garde.
Castillon did not remain long in the hands of Ventimiglia. It shared in
the vicissitudes of endless conflicts, was in due course taken by the
Genoese and then retaken by the redoubtable seneschal of Provence.
Castillon was ever a sturdy little place; for even in its earliest days,
when it was captured by the Saracens, the hardy natives turned upon the
invaders, cast them out and threw them headlong down the hill. It was
not always so very little, since there was a time when it could boast of
no fewer than seventy-five houses and five churches. Where these
buildings found a foothold it is hard to say. They must have clung to
one another with linked arms, like a crowd of men caught by a rising
tide on a steep and very meagre rock.
The old Castillon is approached from the present village by a steep
cart-road which winds round the rock, or by a still steeper mule-path
which labours up with many zigzags. Both road and path are overgrown
with grass. They lead to a flight of wide steps which ascends to the
town. It forms quite a ceremonial entry. There is but a single street.
It is a sorrowful street, because it is so forlorn and so still. It is
as green with grass as a lane in a wood and around the doorsteps of the
houses and in every court and alley nettles and brambles flourish with
heartless luxuriance.