past but also a future. She lives and will live. In the middle of the past
century, indeed, it might almost have seemed to a careless observer as if
the Mediterranean were "played out." And so in part, no doubt, it really
is; the tracks of commerce and of international intercourse have shifted
to wider seas and vaster waterways. We shall never again find that inland
basin ringed round by a girdle of the great merchant cities that do the
carrying trade and finance of the world. Our area has widened, so that New
York, Rio, San Francisco, Yokohama, Shanghai, Calcutta, Bombay, and
Melbourne have taken the place of Syracuse, Alexandria, Tyre, and
Carthage, of Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Constantinople. But in spite of
this cramping change, this degradation of the Mediterranean from the
center of the world into a mere auxiliary or side-avenue of the Atlantic,
a certain number of Mediterranean ports have lived on uninterruptedly by
force of position from one epoch into the other. Venice has had its faint
revival of recent years; Trieste has had its rise; Barcelona, Algiers,
Smyrna, Odessa, have grown into great harbors for cosmopolitan traffic. Of
this new and rejuvenescent Mediterranean, girt round by the fresh young
nationalities of Italy and the Orient, and itself no longer an inland sea,
but linked by the Suez Canal with the Indian Ocean and so turned into the
main highway of the nations between East and West, Marseilles is still the
key and the capital. That proud position the Phocæan city is not likely to
lose. And as the world is wider now than ever, the new Marseilles is
perforce a greater and a wealthier town than even the old one in its
proudest days. Where tribute came once from the North African, Levantine,
and Italian coasts alone, it comes now from every shore of Europe, Asia,
Africa, and America, with Australia and the Pacific Isles thrown in as an
afterthought. Regions Cæsar never knew enrich the good Greeks of the Quai
de la Fraternité: brown, black, and yellow men whom his legions never saw
send tea and silk, cotton, corn, and tobacco to the crowded warehouses of
the Cannebière and the Rue de la République.
VI
NICE
The Queen of the Riviera--The Port of Limpia--Castle Hill--Promenade
des Anglais--The Carnival and Battle of Flowers--Place Masséna, the
center of business--Beauty of the suburbs--The road to Monte
Carlo--The quaintly picturesque town of Villefranche--Aspects of Nice
and its environs.
Who loves not Nice, knows it not. Who knows it, loves it. I admit it is
windy, dusty, gusty. I allow it is meretricious, fashionable, vulgar. I
grant its Carnival is a noisy orgy, its Promenade a meeting place for all
the wealthiest idlers of Europe or America, and its clubs more desperate
than Monte Carlo itself in their excessive devotion to games of hazard.
And yet, with all its faults, I love it still. Yes, deliberately love it;
for nothing that man has done or may ever do to mar its native beauty can
possibly deface that beauty itself as God made it. Nay, more, just because
it is Nice, we can readily pardon it these obvious faults and minor
blemishes. The Queen of the Riviera, with all her coquettish little airs
and graces, pleases none the less, like some proud and haughty girl in
court costume, partly by reason of that very finery of silks and feathers
which we half-heartedly deprecate. If she were not herself, she would be
other than she is. Nice is Nice, and that is enough for us.
Was ever town more graciously set, indeed, in more gracious surroundings?
Was ever pearl girt round with purer emeralds? On every side a vast
semicircle of mountains hems it in, among which the bald and naked summit
of the Mont Cau d'Aspremont towers highest and most conspicuous above its
darkling compeers. In front the blue Mediterranean, that treacherous
Mediterranean all guile and loveliness, smiles with myriad dimples to the
clear-cut horizon. Eastward, the rocky promontories of the Mont Boron and
the Cap Ferrat jut boldly out into the sea with their fringe of white
dashing breakers. Westward, the longer and lower spit of the point of
Antibes bounds the distant view, with the famous pilgrimage chapel of
Notre Dame de la Garoupe just dimly visible on its highest knoll against
the serrated ridge of the glorious Esterel in the background. In the midst
of all nestles Nice itself, the central gem in that coronet of mountains.
There are warmer and more sheltered nooks on the Riviera, I will allow:
there can be none more beautiful. Mentone may surpass it in the charm of
its mountain paths and innumerable excursions; Cannes in the rich variety
of its nearer walks and drives; but for mingled glories of land and sea,
art and nature, antiquity and novelty, picturesqueness and magnificence,
Nice still stands without a single rival on all that enchanted coast that
stretches its long array of cities and bays between Marseilles and Genoa.
There are those, I know, who run down Nice as commonplace and vulgarized.
But then they can never have strayed one inch, I feel sure, from the
palm-shaded _trottoir_ of the Promenade des Anglais. If you want Italian
mediævalism, go to the Old Town; if you want quaint marine life, go to the
good Greek port of Limpia; if you want a grand view of sea and land and
snow mountains in the distance, go to the Castle Hill; if you want the
most magnificent panorama in the whole of Europe, go to the summit of the
Corniche Road. No, no; these brawlers disturb our pure worship. We have
only one Nice, let us make the most of it.
It is so easy to acquire a character for superiority by affecting to
criticize what others admire. It is so easy to pronounce a place vulgar
and uninteresting by taking care to see only the most vulgar and
uninteresting parts of it. But the old Rivieran who knows his Nice well,
and loves it dearly, is troubled rather by the opposite difficulty. Where
there is so much to look at and so much to describe, where to begin? what
to omit? how much to glide over? how much to insist upon? Language fails
him to give a conception of this complex and polychromatic city in a few
short pages to anyone who knows it by name alone as the cosmopolitan
winter capital of fashionable seekers after health and pleasure. It is
that, indeed, but it is so much more that one can never tell it.
For there are at least three distinct Nices, Greek, Italian, French; each
of them beautiful in its own way, and each of them interesting for its own
special features. To the extreme east, huddled in between the Mont Boron
and the Castle Hill, lies the seafaring Greek town, the most primitive and
original Nice of all; the home of the fisher-folk and the petty coasting
sailors; the Nicæa of the old undaunted Phocæan colonists; the Nizza di
Mare of modern Italians; the mediæval city; the birthplace of Garibaldi.
Divided from this earliest Nice by the scarped rock on whose summit stood
the château of the Middle Ages, the eighteenth century Italian town (the
Old Town as tourists nowadays usually call it, the central town of the
three) occupies the space between the Castle Hill and the half dry bed of
the Paillon torrent. Finally, west of the Paillon, again, the modern
fashionable pleasure resort extends its long line of villas, hotels, and
palaces in front of the sea to the little stream of the Magnan on the road
to Cannes, and stretches back in endless boulevards and avenues and
gardens to the smiling heights of Cimiez and Carabacel. Every one of these
three towns, "in three different ages born," has its own special history
and its own points of interest. Every one of them teems with natural
beauty, with picturesque elements, and with varieties of life, hard indeed
to discover elsewhere.
The usual guide-book way to attack Nice is, of course, the topsy-turvey
one, to begin at the Haussmannised white façades of the Promenade des
Anglais and work backwards gradually through the Old Town to the Port of
Limpia and the original nucleus that surrounds its quays. I will venture,
however, to disregard this time-honored but grossly unhistorical practice,
and allow the reader and myself, for once in our lives, to "begin at the
beginning." The Port of Limpia, then, is, of course, the natural starting
point and prime original of the very oldest Nice. Hither, in the fifth
century before the Christian era, the bold Phocæan settlers of Marseilles
sent out a little colony, which landed in the tiny land-locked harbor and
called the spot Nicæa (that is to say, the town of victory) in gratitude
for their success against its rude Ligurian owners. For twenty-two
centuries it has retained that name almost unchanged, now perhaps, the
only memento still remaining of its Greek origin. During its flourishing
days as a Hellenic city Nicæa ranked among the chief commercial entrepôts
of the Ligurian coast; but when "the Province" fell at last into the
hands of the Romans, and the dictator Cæsar favored rather the pretensions
of Cemenelum or Cimiez on the hill-top in the rear, the town that
clustered round the harbor of Limpia became for a time merely the port of
its more successful inland rival. Cimiez still possesses its fine ruined
Roman amphitheater and baths, besides relics of temples and some other
remains of the imperial period; but the "Quartier du Port," the ancient
town of Nice itself, is almost destitute of any architectural signs of its
antique greatness.
Nevertheless, the quaint little seafaring village that clusters round the
harbor, entirely cut off as it is by the ramping crags of the Castle Hill
from its later representative, the Italianized Nice of the last century,
may fairly claim to be the true Nice of history, the only spot that bore
that name till the days of the Bourbons. Its annals are far too long and
far too eventful to be narrated here in full. Goths, Burgundians,
Lombards, and Franks disputed for it in turn, as the border fortress
between Gaul and Italy; and that familiar round white bastion on the
eastern face of the Castle Hill, now known to visitors as the Tour
Bellanda, and included (such is fate!) as a modern belvedere in the
grounds of the comfortable Pension Suisse, was originally erected in the
fifth century after Christ to protect the town from the attacks of these
insatiable invaders. But Nice had its consolations, too, in these evil
days, for when the Lombards at last reduced the hill fortress of Cimiez,
the Roman town, its survivors took refuge from their conquerors in the
city by the port, which thus became once more, by the fall of its rival,
unquestioned mistress of the surrounding littoral.
The after story of Nice is confused and confusing. Now a vassal of the
Frankish kings; now again a member of the Genoese league; now engaged in a
desperate conflict with the piratical Saracens; and now constituted into a
little independent republic on the Italian model; Nizza struggled on
against an adverse fate as a fighting-ground of the races, till it fell
finally into the hands of the Counts of Savoy, to whom it owes whatever
little still remains of the mediæval castle. Continually changing hands
between France and the kingdom of Sardinia in later days, it was
ultimately made over to Napoleon III. by the Treaty of Villafranca, and is
now completely and entirely Gallicized. The native dialect, however,
remains even to the present day an intermediate form between Provençal and
Italian, and is freely spoken (with more force than elegance) in the Old
Town and around the enlarged modern basins of the Port of Limpia. Indeed,
for frankness of expression and perfect absence of any false delicacy, the
ladies of the real old Greek Nice surpass even their London compeers at
Billingsgate.
One of the most beautiful and unique features of Nice at the present day
is the Castle Hill a mass of solid rearing rock, not unlike its namesake
at Edinburgh in position, intervening between the Port and the eighteenth
century town, to which latter I will in future allude as the Italian city.
It is a wonderful place, that Castle Hill--wonderful alike by nature, art,
and history, and I fear I must also add at the same time "uglification."
In earlier days it bore on its summit or slopes the _château fort_ of the
Counts of Provence with the old cathedral and archbishop's palace (now
wholly destroyed), and the famous deep well, long ranked among the wonders
of the world in the way of engineering. But military necessity knows no
law; the cathedral gave place in the fifteenth century to the bastions of
the Duke of Savoy's new-fangled castle; the castle itself in turn was
mainly battered down in 1706 by the Duke of Berwick; and of all its
antiquities none now remain save the Tour Bellanda, in its degraded
condition of belvedere, and the scanty ground-plan of the mediæval
buildings.
Nevertheless, the Castle Hill is still one of the loveliest and greenest
spots in Nice. A good carriage road ascends it to the top by leafy
gradients, and leads to an open platform on the summit, now converted into
charming gardens, rich with palms and aloes and cactuses and bright
southern flowers. On one side, alas! a painfully artificial cataract, fed
from the overflow of the waterworks, falls in stiff cascades among
hand-built rockwork; but even that impertinent addition to the handicraft
of nature can hardly offend the visitor for long among such glorious
surroundings. For the view from the summit is one of the grandest in all
France. The eye ranges right and left over a mingled panorama of sea and
mountains, scarcely to be equaled anywhere round the lovely Mediterranean,
save on the Ligurian coast and the neighborhood of Sorrento. Southward
lies the blue expanse of water itself, bounded only in very clear and
cloudless weather by the distant peaks of Corsica on the doubtful horizon.
Westward, the coast-line includes the promontory of Antibes, basking low
on the sea, the Iles Lérins near Cannes, the mouth of the Var, and the
dim-jagged ridge of the purple Esterel. Eastward, the bluff headland of
the Mont Boron, grim and brown, blocks the view towards Italy. Close below
the spectator's feet the three distinct towns of Nice gather round the
Port and the two banks of the Paillon, spreading their garden suburbs,
draped in roses and lemon groves, high up the spurs of the neighboring
mountains. But northward a tumultuous sea of Alps rises billow-like to the
sky, the nearer peaks frowning bare and rocky, while the more distant
domes gleam white with virgin snow. It is a sight, once seen, never to be
forgotten. One glances around entranced, and murmurs to oneself slowly,
"It is good to be here." Below, the carriages are rolling like black
specks along the crowded Promenade, and the band is playing gaily in the
Public Garden; but up there you look across to the eternal hills, and feel
yourself face to face for one moment with the Eternities behind them.
One may descend from the summit either by the ancient cemetery or by the
Place Garibaldi, through bosky gardens of date-palm, fan-palm, and agave.
Cool winding alleys now replace the demolished ramparts, and lovely views
open out on every side as we proceed over the immediate foreground.
At the foot of the Castle Hill, a modern road, hewn in the solid rock
round the base of the seaward escarpment, connects the Greek with the
Italian town. The angle where it turns the corner, bears on native lips
the quaint Provençal or rather Niçois name of Raüba Capeu or Rob-hat
Point, from the common occurrence of sudden gusts of wind, which remove
the unsuspecting Parisian headgear with effective rapidity, to the great
joy of the observant _gamins_. Indeed, windiness is altogether the weak
point of Nice, viewed as a health-resort; the town lies exposed in the
open valley of the Paillon, down whose baking bed the _mistral_, that
scourge of Provence, sweeps with violent force from the cold mountain-tops
in the rear; and so it cannot for a moment compete in point of climate
with Cannes, Monte Carlo, Mentone or San Remo, backed up close behind by
their guardian barrier of sheltering hills. But not even the _mistral_ can
make those who love Nice love her one atom the less. Her virtues are so
many that a little wholesome bluster once in a while may surely be
forgiven her. And yet the dust does certainly rise in clouds at times from
the Promenade des Anglais.
The Italian city, which succeeds next in order, is picturesque and
old-fashioned, but is being daily transformed and Gallicized out of all
knowledge by its modern French masters. It dates back mainly to the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the population became too dense
for the narrow limits of the small Greek town, and began to overflow,
behind the Castle Hill, on to the eastern banks of the Paillon torrent.
The sea-front in this quarter, now known as the Promenade du Midi, has
been modernized into a mere eastward prolongation of the Promenade des
Anglais, of which "more anon;" but the remainder of the little triangular
space between the Castle Hill and the river-bed still consists of funny
narrow Italian lanes, dark, dense, and dingy, from whose midst rises the
odd and tile-covered dome of the cathedral of St. Réparate. That was the
whole of Nice as it lived and moved till the beginning of this century;
the real Nice of to-day, the Nice of the tourist, the invalid, and the
fashionable world, the Nice that we all visit or talk about, is a purely
modern accretion of some half-dozen decades.
This wonderful modern town, with its stately sea-front, its noble quays,
its dainty white villas, its magnificent hotels, and its Casino, owes its
existence entirely to the vogue which the coast has acquired in our own
times as a health-resort for consumptives. As long ago as Smollett's time,
the author of "Roderick Random" remarks complacently that an
acquaintance, "understanding I intended to winter in the South of France,
strongly recommended the climate of Nice in Provence, which indeed I had
often heard extolled," as well he might have done. But in those days
visitors had to live in the narrow and dirty streets of the Italian town,
whose picturesqueness itself can hardly atone for their unwholesome air
and their unsavory odors. It was not till the hard winters of 1822-23-24
that a few kind-hearted English residents, anxious to find work for the
starving poor, began the construction of a sea-road beyond the Paillon,
which still bears the name of the Promenade des Anglais. Nice may well
commemorate their deed to this day, for to them she owes as a
watering-place her very existence.
[Illustration]
The western suburb, thus pushed beyond the bed of the boundary torrent,
has gradually grown in wealth and prosperity till it now represents the
actual living Nice of the tourist and the winter resident. But how to
describe that gay and beautiful city; that vast agglomeration of villas,
_pensions_, hotels, and clubs; that endless array of sun-worshipers
gathered together to this temple of the sun from all the four quarters of
the habitable globe? The sea-front consists of the Promenade des Anglais
itself, which stretches in an unbroken line of white and glittering
houses, most of them tasteless, but all splendid and all opulent, from the
old bank of the Paillon to its sister torrent, the Magnan, some two miles
away. On one side the villas front the shore with their fantastic façades;
on the other side a walk, overshadowed with date-palms and
purple-flowering judas-trees, lines the steep shingle beach of the
tideless sea.
There is one marked peculiarity of the Promenade des Anglais, however,
which at once distinguishes it from any similar group of private houses
to be found anywhere in England. There the British love of privacy, which
has, of course, its good points, but has also its compensating
disadvantages, leads almost every owner of beautiful grounds or gardens to
enclose them with a high fence or with the hideous monstrosity known to
suburban Londoners as "park paling." This plan, while it ensures complete
seclusion for the fortunate few within, shuts out the deserving many
outside from all participation in the beauty of the grounds or the natural
scenery. On the Promenade des Anglais, on the contrary, a certain generous
spirit of emulation in contributing to the public enjoyment and the
general effectiveness of the scene as a whole has prompted the owners of
the villas along the sea-front to enclose their gardens only with low
ornamental balustrades or with a slight and unobtrusive iron fence, so
that the passers-by can see freely into every one of them, and feast their
eyes on the beautiful shrubs and flowers. The houses and grounds thus form
a long line of delightful though undoubtedly garish and ornate
decorations, in full face of the sea. The same plan has been adopted in
the noble residential street known as Euclid Avenue at Cleveland, Ohio,
and in many other American cities. It is to be regretted that English
tastes and habits do not oftener thus permit their wealthier classes to
contribute, at no expense or trouble to themselves, to the general
pleasure of less fortunate humanity.
The Promenade is, of course, during the season the focus and center of
fashionable life at Nice. Here carriages roll, and amazons ride and
flâneurs lounge in the warm sunshine during the livelong afternoon. In
front are the baths, bathing being practicable at Nice from the beginning
of March; behind are the endless hotels and clubs of this city of
strangers. For the English are not alone on the Promenade des Anglais; the
American tongue is heard there quite as often as the British dialect,
while Germans, Russians, Poles, and Austrians cluster thick upon the shady
seats beneath the planes and carob-trees. During the Carnival especially
Nice resolves itself into one long orgy of frivolous amusement. Battles of
flowers, battles of _confetti_, open-air masquerades, and universal
tom-foolery pervade the place. Everybody vies with everybody else in
making himself ridiculous; and even the staid Briton, released from the
restraints of home or the City, abandons himself contentedly for a week at
a time to a sort of prolonged and glorified sunny southern Derby Day. Mr.
Bultitude disguises himself as a French clown; Mr. Dombey, in domino,
flings roses at his friends on the seats of the tribune. Everywhere is
laughter, noise, bustle, and turmoil; everywhere the manifold forms of
antique saturnalian freedom, decked out with gay flowers or travestied in
quaint clothing, but imported most incongruously for a week in the year
into the midst of our modern work-a-day twentieth-century Europe.