entirely of the Promenade des Anglais, with a few slight tags and
appendages in either direction. At its eastern end stood (and still
stands) the Jardin Public, that paradise of children and of be-ribboned
French nursemaids, where the band discourses lively music every afternoon
at four, and all the world sits round on two-sou chairs to let all the
rest of the world see for itself it is still in evidence. These, and the
stately quays along the Paillon bank, lined with shops where female human
nature can buy all the tastiest and most expensive gewgaws in Europe,
constituted the real Nice of the early eighties. But with the rapid
growth of that general taste for more sumptuous architecture which marks
our age, the Phocæan city woke up a few years since with electric energy
to find itself in danger of being left behind by its younger competitors.
So the Niçois conscript fathers put their wise heads together, in conclave
assembled, and resolved on a general transmogrification of the center of
their town. By continuously bridging and vaulting across the almost dry
bed of the Paillon torrent they obtained a broad and central site for a
new large garden, which now forms the natural focus of the transformed
city. On the upper end of this important site they erected a large and
handsome casino in the gorgeous style of the Third Republic, all glorious
without and within, as the modern Frenchman understands such glory, and
provided with a theater, a winter garden, restaurants, cafés, ball-rooms,
_petits chevaux_, and all the other most pressing requirements of an
advanced civilization. But in doing this they sacrificed by the way the
beautiful view towards the mountains behind, which can now only be
obtained from the Square Masséna or the Pont Vieux farther up the river.
Most visitors to Nice, however, care little for views, and a great deal
for the fitful and fearsome joys embodied to their minds in the outward
and visible form of a casino.
This wholesale bridging over of the lower end of the Paillon has united
the French and Italian towns and abolished the well-marked boundary line
which once cut them off so conspicuously from one another. The inevitable
result has been that the Italian town too has undergone a considerable
modernization along the sea-front, so that the Promenade des Anglais and
the Promenade du Midi now practically merge into one continuous parade,
and are lined along all their length with the same clipped palm-trees and
the same magnificent white palatial buildings. When the old theater in the
Italian town was burnt down in the famous and fatal conflagration some
years since the municipality erected a new one on the same site in the
most approved style of Parisian luxury. A little behind lie the Préfecture
and the beautiful flower market, which no visitor to Nice should ever
miss; for Nice is above all things, even more than Florence, a city of
flowers. The sheltered quarter of the Ponchettes, lying close under the
lee of the Castle Hill, has become of late, owing to these changes, a
favorite resort for invalids, who find here protection from the cutting
winds which sweep with full force down the bare and open valley of the
Paillon over the French town.
I am loth to quit that beloved sea-front, on the whole the most charming
marine parade in Europe, with the Villefranche point and the
pseudo-Gothic, pseudo-Oriental monstrosity of Smith's Folly on one side
and the delicious bay towards Antibes on the other. But there are yet
various aspects of Nice which remain to be described: the interior is
almost as lovely in its way as the coast that fringes it. For this inner
Nice, the Place Masséna, called (like the Place Garibaldi) after another
distinguished native, forms the starting point and center. Here the trams
from all quarters run together at last; hence the principal roads radiate
in all directions. The Place Masséna is the center of business, as the
Jardin Public and the Casino are the centers of pleasure. Also (_verbum
sap._) it contains an excellent _pâtisserie_, where you can enjoy an ice
or a little French pastry with less permanent harm to your constitution
and morals than anywhere in Europe. Moreover, it forms the approach to
the Avenue de la Gare, which divides with the Quays the honor of being the
best shopping street in the most fashionable watering-place of the
Mediterranean. If these delights thy soul may move, why, the Place Masséna
is the exact spot to find them in.
Other great boulevards, like the Boulevard Victor Hugo and the Boulevard
Dubouchage, have been opened out of late years to let the surplus wealth
that flows into Nice in one constant stream find room to build upon.
Châteaux and gardens are springing up merrily on every side; the slopes of
the hills gleam gay with villas; Cimiez and Carabacel, once separate
villages, have now been united by continuous dwellings to the main town;
and before long the city where Garibaldi was born and where Gambetta lies
buried will swallow up in itself the entire space of the valley, and its
border spurs from mountain to mountain. The suburbs, indeed, are almost
more lovely in their way than the town itself; and as one wanders at will
among the olive-clad hills to westward, looking down upon the green
lemon-groves that encircle the villas, and the wealth of roses that drape
their sides, one cannot wonder that Joseph de Maistre, another Niçois of
distinction, in the long dark evenings he spent at St. Petersburg, should
time and again have recalled with a sigh "ce doux vallon de Magnan." Nor
have the Russians themselves failed to appreciate the advantages of the
change, for they flock by thousands to the Orthodox Quarter on the heights
of Saint Philippe, which rings round the Greek chapel erected in memory of
the Czarewitch Nicholas Alexandrowitch, who died at Nice in 1865.
After all, however, to the lover of the picturesque Nice town itself is
but the threshold and starting point for that lovely country which
spreads on all sides its endless objects of interest and scenic beauty
from Antibes to Mentone. The excursions to be made from it in every
direction are simply endless. Close by lie the monastery and amphitheater
of Cimiez; the Italianesque cloisters and campanile of St. Pons; the
conspicuous observatory on the Mont Gros, with its grand Alpine views; the
hillside promenades of Le Ray and Les Fontaines. Farther afield the
carriage-road up the Paillon valley leads direct to St. André through a
romantic limestone gorge, which terminates at last in a grotto and natural
bridge, overhung by the moldering remains of a most southern château. A
little higher up, the steep mountain track takes one on to Falicon,
perched "like an eagle's nest" on its panoramic hill-top, one of the most
famous points of view among the Maritime Alps. The boundary hills of the
Magnan, covered in spring with the purple flowers of the wild gladiolus;
the vine-clad heights of Le Bellet, looking down on the abrupt and
rock-girt basin of the Var; the Valley of Hepaticas, carpeted in March
with innumerable spring blossoms; the longer drive to Contes in the very
heart of the mountains: all alike are lovely, and all alike tempt one to
linger in their precincts among the shadow of the cypress trees or under
the cool grottos green and lush with spreading fronds of wild maidenhair.
Among so many delicious excursions it were invidious to single out any for
special praise; yet there can be little doubt that the most popular, at
least with the general throng of tourists, is the magnificent coast-road
by Villefranche (or Villafranca) to Monte Carlo and Monaco. This
particular part of the coast, between Nice and Mentone, is the one where
the main range of the Maritime Alps, abutting at last on the sea, tumbles
over sheer with a precipitous descent from four thousand feet high to the
level of the Mediterranean. Formerly, the barrier ridge could only be
surmounted by the steep but glorious Corniche route; of late years,
however, the French engineers, most famous of road-makers, have hewn an
admirable carriage-drive out of the naked rock, often through covered
galleries or tunnels in the cliff itself, the whole way from Nice to Monte
Carlo and Mentone. The older portion of this road, between Nice and
Villefranche, falls well within the scope of our present subject.
You leave modern Nice by the quays and the Pont Garibaldi, dash rapidly
through the new broad streets that now intersect the Italian city, skirt
the square basins lately added to the more shapeless ancient Greek port of
Limpia, and begin to mount the first spurs of the Mont Boron among the
villas and gardens of the Quartier du Lazaret. Banksia roses fall in
cataracts over the walls as you go; looking back, the lovely panorama of
Nice opens out before your eyes. In the foreground, the rocky islets of La
Réserve foam white with the perpetual plashing of that summer sea. In the
middle distance, the old Greek harbor, with its mole and lighthouse,
stands out against the steep rocks of the Castle Hill. The background
rises up in chain on chain of Alps, allowing just a glimpse at their base
of that gay and fickle promenade and all the Parisian prettinesses of the
new French town. The whole forms a wonderful picture of the varied
Mediterranean world, Greek, Roman, Italian, French, with the vine-clad
hills and orange-groves behind merging slowly upward into the snow-bound
Alps.
Turning the corner of the Mont Boron by the grotesque vulgarisms of the
Château Smith (a curious semi-oriental specimen of the shell-grotto order
of architecture on a gigantic scale) a totally fresh view bursts upon our
eyes of the Rade de Villefranche, that exquisite land-locked bay bounded
on one side by the scarped crags of the Mont Boron itself, and on the
other by the long and rocky peninsula of St. Jean, which terminates in the
Cap Ferrat and the Villefranche light. The long deep bay forms a favorite
roadstead and rendezvous for the French Mediterranean squadron, whose huge
ironclad monsters may often be seen ploughing their way in single file
from seaward round the projecting headlands, or basking at ease on the
calm surface of that glassy pond. The surrounding heights, of course,
bristle with fortifications, which, in these suspicious days of armed
European tension, the tourist and the sketcher are strictly prohibited
from inspecting with too attentive an eye. The quaintly picturesque town
of Villefranche itself, Italian and dirty, but amply redeemed by its
slender bell-tower and its olive-clad terraces, nestles snugly at the very
bottom of its pocket-like bay. The new road to Monte Carlo leaves it far
below, with true modern contempt for mere old-world beauty; the artist and
the lover of nature will know better than to follow the example of those
ruthless engineers; they will find many subjects for a sketch among those
whitewashed walls, and many a rare sea-flower tucked away unseen among
those crannied crags.
And now, when all is said and done, I, who have known and loved Nice for
so many bright winters, feel only too acutely how utterly I have failed to
set before those of my readers who know it not the infinite charms of that
gay and rose-wreathed queen of the smiling Riviera. For what words can
paint the life and movement of the sparkling sea-front? the manifold
humors of the Jardin Public? the southern vivacity of the washer-women
who pound their clothes with big stones in the dry bed of the pebbly
Paillon? the luxuriant festoons of honeysuckle and mimosa that drape the
trellis-work arcades of Carabacel and Cimiez? Who shall describe aright
with one pen the gnarled olives of Beaulieu and the palace-like front of
the Cercle de la Méditerranée? Who shall write with equal truth of the
jewelers' shops on the quays, of the oriental bazaars of the Avenue, and
of the dome after dome of bare mountain tops that rise ever in long
perspective to the brilliant white summits of the great Alpine backbone?
Who shall tell in one breath of the carmagnoles of the Carnival, or the
dust-begrimed bouquets of the Battle of Flowers, and of the silent summits
of the Mont Cau and the Cime de Vinaigrier, or the vast and varied
sea-view that bursts on the soul unawares from the Corniche near Eza?
There are aspects of Nice and its environs which recall Bartholomew Fair,
or the Champs Élysées after a Sunday review; and there are aspects which
recall the prospect from some solemn summit of the Bernese Oberland, mixed
with some heather-clad hill overlooking the green Atlantic among the
Western Highlands. Yet all is so graciously touched and lighted with
Mediterranean color and Mediterranean sunshine, that even in the midst of
her wildest frolics you can seldom be seriously angry with Nice. The works
of God's hand are never far off. You look up from the crowd of carriages
and loungers on the Promenade des Anglais, and the Cap Ferrat rises bold
and bluff before your eyes above the dashing white waves of the sky-blue
sea: you cross the bridge behind the Casino amid the murmur of the quays,
and the great bald mountains soar aloft to heaven above the brawling
valley of the snow-fed Paillon. It is a desecration, perhaps, but a
desecration that leaves you still face to face with all that is purest and
most beautiful in nature.
And then, the flowers, the waves, the soft air, the sunshine! On the
beach, between the bathing places, men are drying scented orange peel to
manufacture perfumes: in the dusty high roads you catch whiffs as you pass
of lemon blossom and gardenia: the very trade of the town is an expert
trade in golden acacia and crimson anemones: the very _gamins_ pelt you in
the rough horse-play of the Carnival with sweet-smelling bunches of
syringa and lilac. Luxury that elsewhere would move one to righteous wrath
is here so democratic in its display that one almost condones it. The
gleaming white villas, with carved caryatides or sculptured porches of
freestone nymphs, let the wayfarer revel as he goes in the riches of their
shrubberies or their sunlit fountains and in the breezes that blow over
their perfumed parterres. Nice vulgar! Pah, my friend, if you say so, I
know well why. You have a vulgar soul that sees only the gewgaws and the
painted ladies. You have never strolled up by yourself from the noise and
dust of the crowded town to the free heights of the Mont Alban or the
flowery olive-grounds of the Magnan valley. You have never hunted for
purple hellebore among the gorges of the Paillon or picked orchids and
irises in big handfuls upon the slopes of Saint André. I doubt even
whether you have once turned aside for a moment from the gay crowd of the
Casino and the Place Masséna into the narrow streets of the Italian town;
communed in their own delicious dialect with the free fisherfolk of the
Limpia quarter; or looked out with joy upon the tumbled plain of mountain
heights from the breezy level of the Castle platform. Probably you have
only sat for days in the balcony of your hotel, rolled at your ease down
the afternoon Promenade, worn a false nose at the evening parade of the
Carnival, or returned late at night by the last train from Monte Carlo
with your pocket much lighter and your heart much heavier than when you
left by the morning express in search of fortune. And then you say Nice is
vulgar! You have no eyes, it seems, for sea, or shore, or sky, or
mountain; but you look down curiously at the dust in the street, and you
mutter to yourself that you find it uninteresting. When you go to Nice
again, walk alone up the hills to Falicon, returning by Le Ray, and then
say, if you dare, Nice is anything on earth but gloriously beautiful.
VII
THE RIVIERA
In the days of the Doges--Origin of the name--The blue bay of
Cannes--Ste. Marguerite and St. Honorat--Historical associations--The
Rue L'Antibes--The rock of Monaco--"Notre Dame de la Roulette"--From
Monte Carlo to Mentone--San Remo--A romantic railway.
"Oh, Land of Roses, what bulbul shall sing of thee?" In plain prose, how
describe the garden of Europe? The Riviera! Who knows, save he who has
been there, the vague sense of delight which the very name recalls to the
poor winter exile, banished by frost and cold from the fogs and bronchitis
of more northern climes? What visions of gray olives, shimmering silvery
in the breeze on terraced mountain slopes! What cataracts of Marshal
Niels, falling in rich profusion over gray limestone walls! What aloes and
cactuses on what sun-smitten rocks! What picnics in December beneath what
cloudless blue skies! But to those who know and appreciate it best, the
Riviera is something more than mere scenery and sunshine. It is life, it
is health, it is strength, it is rejuvenescence. The return to it in
autumn is as the renewal of youth. Its very faults are dear to us, for
they are the defects of its virtues. We can put up with its dust when we
remember that dust means sun and dry air; we can forgive its staring
white roads when we reflect to ourselves that they depend upon almost
unfailing fine weather and bright, clear skies, when northern Europe is
wrapped in fog and cold and wretchedness.
And what is this Riviera that we feeble folk who "winter in the south"
know and adore so well? Has everybody been there, or may one venture even
now to paint it in words once more for the twentieth time? Well, after
all, how narrow is our conception of "everybody!" I suppose one out of
every thousand at a moderate estimate, has visited that smiling coast that
spreads its entrancing bays between Marseilles and Genoa; my description
is, therefore, primarily for the nine hundred and ninety-nine who have not
been there. And even the thousandth himself, if he knows his Cannes and
his Mentone well, will not grudge me a reminiscence of those delicious
gulfs and those charming headlands that must be indelibly photographed on
his memory.
The name Riviera is now practically English. But in origin it is Genoese.
To those seafaring folk, in the days of the Doges, the coasts to east and
west of their own princely city were known, naturally enough, as the
Riviera di Levante and the Riviera di Ponente respectively, the shores of
the rising and the setting sun. But on English lips the qualifying clause
"di Ponente" has gradually in usage dropped out altogether, and we speak
nowadays of this favored winter resort, by a somewhat illogical clipping,
simply as "the Riviera." In our modern and specially English sense, then,
the Riviera means the long and fertile strip of coast between the arid
mountains and the Ligurian Sea, beginning at St. Raphael and ending at
Genoa. Hyères, it is true, is commonly reckoned of late among Riviera
towns, but by courtesy only. It lies, strictly speaking, outside the
charmed circle. One may say that the Riviera, properly so called, has its
origin where the Estérel abuts upon the Gulf of Fréjus, and extends as far
as the outliers of the Alps skirt the Italian shore of the Mediterranean.
Now, the Riviera is just the point where the greatest central mountain
system of all Europe topples over most directly into the warmest sea. And
its best-known resorts, Nice, Monte Carlo, Mentone, occupy the precise
place where the very axis of the ridge abuts at last on the shallow and
basking Mediterranean. They are therefore as favorably situated with
regard to the mountain wall as Pallanza or Riva, with the further
advantage of a more southern position and of a neighboring extent of sunny
sea to warm them. The Maritime Alps cut off all northerly winds; while the
hot air of the desert, tempered by passing over a wide expanse of
Mediterranean waves, arrives on the coast as a delicious breeze, no longer
dry and relaxing, but at once genial and refreshing. Add to these varied
advantages the dryness of climate due to an essentially continental
position (for the Mediterranean is after all a mere inland salt lake), and
it is no wonder we all swear by the Riviera as the fairest and most
pleasant of winter resorts. My own opinion remains always unshaken, that
Antibes, for climate, may fairly claim to rank as the best spot in Europe
or round the shores of the Mediterranean.
Not that I am by any means a bigoted Antipolitan. I have tried every other
nook and cranny along that delightful coast, from Carqueyranne to
Cornigliano, and I will allow that every one of them has for certain
purposes its own special advantages. All, all are charming. Indeed, the
Riviera is to my mind one long feast of delights. From the moment the
railway strikes the sea near Fréjus the traveller feels he can only do
justice to the scenery on either side by looking both ways at once, and so
"contracting a squint," like a sausage-seller in Aristophanes. Those
glorious peaks of the Estérel alone would encourage the most prosaic to
"drop into poetry," as readily as Mr. Silas Wegg himself in the mansion of
the Boffins. How am I to describe them, those rearing masses of rock, huge
tors of red porphyry, rising sheer into the air with their roseate crags
from a deep green base of Mediterranean pinewood? When the sun strikes
their sides, they glow like fire. There they lie in their beauty, like a
huge rock pushed out into the sea, the advance-guard of the Alps, unbroken
save by the one high-road that runs boldly through their unpeopled midst,
and by the timider railway that, fearing to tunnel their solid porphyry
depths, winds cautiously round their base by the craggy sea-shore, and so
gives us as we pass endless lovely glimpses into sapphire bays with red
cliffs and rocky lighthouse-crowned islets. On the whole, I consider the
Estérel, as scenery alone, the loveliest "bit" on the whole Riviera;
though wanting in human additions, as nature it is the best, the most
varied in outline, the most vivid in coloring.
Turning the corner by Agay, you come suddenly, all unawares, on the blue
bay of Cannes, or rather on the Golfe de la Napoule, whose very name
betrays unintentionally the intense newness and unexpectedness of all this
populous coast, this "little England beyond France" that has grown up
apace round Lord Brougham's villa on the shore by the mouth of the Siagne.
For when the bay beside the Estérel received its present name, La Napoule,
not Cannes, was still the principal village on its bank. Nowadays, people
drive over on a spare afternoon from the crowded fashionable town to the
slumbrous little hamlet; but in older days La Napoule was a busy local
market when Cannes was nothing more than a petty hamlet of Provençal
fishermen.
The Golfe de la Napoule ends at the Croisette of Cannes, a long, low
promontory carried out into the sea by a submarine bank, whose farthest
points re-emerge as the two Iles Lérins, Ste. Marguerite and St. Honorat.
Their names are famous in history. A little steamer plies from Cannes to
"the Islands," as everybody calls them locally; and the trip, in calm
weather, if the Alps are pleased to shine out, is a pleasant and
instructive one. Ste. Marguerite lies somewhat the nearer of the two, a
pretty little islet, covered with a thick growth of maritime pines, and
celebrated as the prison of that mysterious being, the Man with the Iron
Mask, who has given rise to so much foolish and fruitless speculation.
Near the landing-place stands the Fort, perched on a high cliff and
looking across to the Croisette. Uninteresting in itself, this old
fortification is much visited by wonder-loving tourists for the sake of
its famous prisoner, whose memory still haunts the narrow terrace
corridor, where he paced up and down for seventeen years of unrelieved
captivity.
St. Honorat stands farther out to sea than its sister island, and, though
lower and flatter, is in some ways more picturesque, in virtue of its
massive mediæval monastery and its historical associations. In the early
middle ages, when communications were still largely carried on by water,
the convent of the Iles Lérins enjoyed much reputation as a favorite
stopping-place, one might almost say hotel, for pilgrims to or from Rome;
and most of the early British Christians in their continental wanderings
found shelter at one time or another under its hospitable roof. St.
Augustine stopped here on his way to Canterbury; St. Patrick took the
convent on his road from Ireland; Salvian wrote within its walls his
dismal jeremiad; Vincent de Lérins composed in it his "Pilgrim's Guide."
The somber vaults of the ancient cloister still bear witness by their
astonishingly thick and solid masonry to their double use as monastery and
as place of refuge from the "Saracens," the Barbary corsairs of the ninth,
tenth, and eleventh centuries. Indeed, Paynim fleets plundered the place
more than once, and massacred the monks in cold blood.