ST. TROPEZ AND ITS “GOLFE”
From Bormes the route runs close to the shore-line up to the Baie de
Cavalaire, where it cuts across a ten-kilometre inland stretch and comes
to the sea again at St. Tropez.
The blue restless waves, the jutting capes, and the inlet bays and
_calanques_ make charming combinations of land and sea and sky, and
repeat the story already told. The route crosses many vine-planted hills
and valleys, through short tunnels and around precipitous promontories,
but always under the eyes is that divinely beautiful view of the waters
of the Mediterranean. The traveller finds no villages, only little
hamlets here and there, and innumerable scattered country residences.
At Cavalaire the mountains of the Maures become less abrupt, and
surround the bay in a low semicircle of foot-hills, quite different from
the precipitous “_corniches_” of the Estérel or the mountains beyond
Nice.
The Baie de Cavalaire has nearly a league of fine sands; not so
extensive that they are as yet in demand as an automobile race-track,
but fine enough to rank as quite the best of their kind on the whole
Mediterranean shore of France. There will never be a resort here which
will rival Nice or Cannes; these latter have too great a start; but
whatever does grow up here in the way of a watering-place--a railway
station and a Café-Restaurant famous for its _bouillabaisse_ have
already arrived--will surpass them in many respects.
The place has, moreover, according to medical reports, the least
contrasting day and night temperature in winter of any of the
Mediterranean stations. This would seem cause enough for the founding
here of a great resort, but there is nothing of the kind nearer than the
little village of Le Lavandou, passed on the road from Bormes, a hamlet
whose inhabitants are too few for the makers of guide-books to number,
but which already boasts of a Grand Hotel and a Hôtel des Étrangers.
At La Croix, just north of the Baie de Cavalaire, has grown up a little
winter colony, consisting almost entirely of people from Lyons. It is
here that formerly existed some of the most celebrated vineyards in
Provence, the plants, it is supposed, being originally brought hither
by the Saracens.
The sudden breaking upon one’s vision of the ravishing Golfe de St.
Tropez, with its bordering fringe of palms, agavas, and rose-laurels,
and its wonderful parasol-pines, which nowhere along the Riviera are as
beautiful as here, is an experience long to be remembered.
The lovely little town of St. Tropez sleeps its life away on the shores
of this beautiful bay, quite in idyllic fashion, though it does boast of
a Tribunal de Pêche and of a few small craft floating in the gentle
ripples of the _darse_, the little harbour enclosed by moles of masonry
from the open gulf.
Up and down this basin are groups of fine parti-coloured houses, all
with a certain well-kept and prosperous air, with nothing of the sordid
or base aspect about them, such as one sees on so many watersides. A
little square, or _place_, forms an unusual note of life and colour with
its central statue of the great sailor, Suffren.
Only on this square and on the quays are there any of the modern
attributes of twentieth-century life; the narrow but cleanly streets
away from the waterside are as calm and somnolent as they were before
the advent of electricity and automobiles; indeed, an automobile would
have a hard time of it in some of these narrow _ruelles_.
The near-by panorama seen from the quays, or the end of the stone
pier-head, is superb. The whole contour of the Golfe is a marvel of
graceful curves, backed up with sloping, well-wooded hills and, still
farther away, by the massive black of the Maures, the hill of St.
Raphaël, and the red and brown tints of the Estérel, while still more
distant to the northward, hanging in a soft film of vapour, are the
peaks of the snowy Alps.
By following the old side streets, crowded with overhanging porches and
projecting buttresses, with here and there a garden wall half-hiding
broad-leafed fig-trees and palms, one reaches the Promenade des Lices, a
remarkably well-placed and appointed promenade, shaded with great
plane-trees, in strong contrast to the occasional pines and laurels.
St. Tropez’s history is ancient enough to please the most blasé delver
in the things of antiquity. It may have been the Gallo-Grec Athenopolis,
or it may have been the Phœnician Heraclea Caccabaria; but, at all
events, its present growth came from a foundation which followed close
upon the death of the martyr St. Tropez in the second century.
St. Tropez, in the days when sailing-ships had the seas to themselves,
was possessed of a traffic and a commerce which, with the advent of the
building of great steamships, lapsed into inconsequential proportions.
The yards where the wooden ships were built and fitted out are deserted,
and a part of the population has gone back to the land or taken to
fishing; others--the young men--becoming _garçons de café_ or _valets de
chambre_ in the great tourist hotels of the coast; or, rather, they did
look upon these occupations as a bright and rosy future, until the
coming of the automobile, since when the peasant youth of France aspires
to be a chauffeur or _mécanicien_.
A new industry has recently sprung up at St. Tropez, the manufacture of
electric cables, but it has not the picturesqueness, nor has it as yet
reached anything like the proportions, of the old hempen cordage
industry.
[Illustration: _Ruined Chapel near St. Tropez_]
St. Tropez possesses its wonderful Golfe, its gardens, and its “_Petite
Afrique_,” and is more and more visited by Riviera tourists; but it
still awaits that great tide of traffic which has made more famous and
rich many other less favoured Mediterranean coast towns. There is a
reason for all this; principally that it faces the mistral’s icy breath,
for the coast-line has here taken a bend and the Golfe runs inland in a
westerly direction, which makes the town face directly north. As an
offset to this the inhabitant points out to you that you may regard the
sea without being troubled by the sun shining in your eyes.
At the head of the Golfe is La Foux. It sits in the midst of a sandy
plain, surrounded by a border of superb umbrella-pines. The chief
attraction for the visitor is the remarkable specimens of the little
horses of Les Maures to be seen here. They are known as “_les Eygues_,”
and have preserved all the purity of the type first brought from the
Orient by the Saracens. Six centuries and more have not wiped out the
Arab strain to anything like the extent that might be supposed, and
accordingly the little horses of Les Maures are vastly more docile and
agreeable playmates than the “_petits chevaux_” of the Casinos of Monte
Carlo and Nice.
The umbrella or parasol pines of La Foux are famous throughout the whole
Riviera. Elsewhere there are isolated examples, but here there are
groves of them, all branching with a wide-spreading luxuriance which is
quite at its best. It might seem as though they were planted by the
hand of man, so decorative are they to the landscape from any point of
view, but most of them are of an age that precludes all thought of this.
The giant of its race is directly on the bank of the Golfe, near the
Château de Berteaux. Its branches extend out in every direction, like
the ribs of a parasol or umbrella, and its trunk is thirty feet or more
in circumference, while the shadow from its overhanging branches makes a
great round oasis of shade in the brilliant Mediterranean sunlight. The
tree and its position cannot be mistaken by travellers by road or rail,
for the railway itself has a “_halte_” almost beneath its branches. All
around these parasol-pines push themselves up through the sand which has
been carried down into the headwaters of the Golfe by the Mole and the
Giscle, torrents which at certain seasons bring down a vast alluvial
deposit from the upper valleys of Les Maures.
It is not far from La Foux to the plain of Cogolin. A league or more
behind one of the first buttresses of Les Maures, one enters the rich
alluvial prairie of Cogolin. Sheep, goats, and cows, and the
Arabian-blooded horses, which are so much admired at the _courses_ at
La Foux, find welcome pasture here in these verdant fields.
Cogolin is not the capital of the Golfe country, that honour belonging
to Grimaud, of which St. Tropez is virtually the port; still, Cogolin is
quite a little metropolis, and is the centre of the liveliest happenings
of all the region between Hyères and Fréjus. The town has two different
aspects, one banal and modern, and the other picturesque and feudal,
recalling the thirteenth-century days of the Grimaldis, who built the
château of which the present belfry formed a part.
Cogolin is uninteresting enough in its newer parts, but as one ascends
the slope of the hill on which the town is built it grows more and more
picturesque until, when the lower town is actually lost sight of, it
finally takes rank as a delightful old-world place, with scarce a note
of the twentieth century about it, where they still bring water from the
public fountain and most of the shops of the smaller kind transact their
business on the sidewalk--where there is one.
There is a peculiar odour all over Cogolin, which comes from the
manufacture of corks and queer-looking “whisk-brooms.” It’s not a bad or
unhealthful smell, but it is peculiar, and many will not like it. From
Cogolin all roads lead to the heart of the Maures, and the stream of
carts loaded with great slabs of cork is incessant.
Here, as in many other parts of Les Maures, the manufacture of corks is
an industry which furnishes a livelihood to many. The workrooms of the
cork-makers, to attract clients or amuse the populace--the writer
doesn’t know which--are often in full view from the street. Certainly it
is amusing to see a workman stamp out, or cut out, the corks and drop
them into a waiting basket, as if they were plums gathered from a tree.
In the larger establishments, where the work is done by machinery, the
process is more complicated, and less interesting, and the writer did
not see that any better results were obtained.
The whole region of Les Maures is dominated by the _chêne-liège_, or the
cork-oak. Usually they are great, straight-trunked trees with a heavy
foliage. Some still possess their natural brown trunks, and some are a
gray fawn colour, showing that they are already aged and have been many
times robbed of their bark for the manufacture of floats for the
fisherman’s nets and corks for bottles. The first coat which is stripped
has no mercantile value, and the trunk is left to heal itself as best
it may, the sap oozing out and forming another skin, which in due time
forms the cork-bark of commerce.
The trees are stripped only in part at one time, else they would perish.
The first marketable crop is gathered in ten or a dozen years, and it
takes another decade before the same portion can be again obtained.
This cork-bark industry means a fortune to Les Maures and its rather
scanty population. The discovery, or real development, of the industry
was due to a lonesome shepherd, who, finding how soft and compressible
the bark of the _chêne-liège_ really was, manufactured a few corks to
pass the time while watching his flocks, taking them at the first
opportunity to town, to see if he could find a market, which, needless
to say, he did immediately. The account has something of a legendary
flavour about it, but no doubt the discovery was made in just such a
way.
Cogolin has another industry which, in its way, is considerable,--the
manufacture of briar pipes, though mostly it is the gathering of the
briar-roots which makes the industry, the actual fashioning of the pipes
themselves being carried on most extensively at St. Claude in the Jura,
to which point many train-loads of the roots are sent each year. Just
why the industry should be carried on so far from the source of supply
of the raw material is one of the problems that economists are trying
always to solve, but the traffic clings tenaciously to the customs of
old. When Les Maures goes in for the manufacture of briar pipes on a
large scale there will be a new and increased prosperity for the
inhabitants; this in spite of the growing consumption of the deadly
cigarette, which, in France, is made of something which looks amazingly
like cabbage-stalk--and a poor quality at that. The contempt for French
tobacco is of long duration. It is recalled that a certain minister
under Charles X. was invited to smoke smuggled tobacco at a friend’s
house, and was implored to use his influence to the substituting of the
same grade of tobacco for the poisonous cabbage-leaf then grown in
France. His reply was appreciative but non-committal, and so the thing
has gone on to this day, and the French public smokes uncomplainingly a
very ordinary tobacco.
Three kilometres distant sits Grimaud, snug and serene on the terrace of
a mountainside, overlooking Cogolin and the Golfe, and all its
environment. The little town has all the characteristics of its
neighbours, with perhaps a superabundance of shade-trees for a place
which has not very ample streets and squares. At the apex of the
ascending _ruelles_ is a cone which is surmounted by the pathetic ruins
of the old château of the Grimaldi. Without grandeur and without life,
this château is in strong contrast with the palace of the present
members of the ancient house of Grimaldi, the Prince of Monaco and his
family.
The ruins of Grimaud’s château are, to be sure, a whited sepulchre, and
a dismal one, but the view from the platform is one of great beauty. Les
Maures forms an encircling cordon, through which the brilliance of the
Golfe breaks toward the south. In the twilight of an early June evening
the effect will be surprising and grateful in its quiet grandeur; a
welcome change after the refulgence of the Alpine glow of Switzerland
and the gorgeous, bloody sunsets of the Mediterranean coast towns.
After a meditation here, one will be in the proper mood for the repose
which awaits him at “Annibal’s” in the town below. It is not grand, this
little hotel of M. Annibal, but it is typical of the _pays_, and you, as
likely as not, ate your dinner on a little balcony overlooking a little
tree-bordered _place_, which has already put you in a soulful mood. When
you return from the château, you will need no sedative to make you
sleep, and you will bless the good fortune which brought you thither--if
you are a true vagabond and not a devotee of the “resorts.” The latter
class are advised to keep away; Grimaud would “bore them stiff,” as a
strenuous American, who was “doing” the Riviera on a motor-cycle, told
the writer.
La Garde-Freinet next calls one, and it must not be ignored by any who
would know what a real mountain town in France is like. It is different
from what it is in Switzerland or the Tyrol; in fact, it is not like
anything anywhere else. It is simply a distinctively French small town
nestling in the heart of the Mediterranean coast range, and cut off from
most of the distractions of civilization, except newspapers (twenty-four
hours old) and the post and telegraph.
La Garde-Freinet sits almost upon the very crest of the Chaîne des
Maures. The road from Grimaud, which is but a dozen kilometres or so,
rises constantly through rocky escarpments like a route in Corsica,
which indeed the whole region of Les Maures resembles.
All is solitude and of that quietness which one only observes on a
lonely mountain road, while all around is a girdle of tree-clad peaks,
not gigantic, perhaps, but sufficiently imposing to give one the
impression that the road is mounting steadily all of the way, which,
even in these days of hill-climbing automobiles, is something which is
bound to be remarked by the traveller by road.
Finally one comes in sight of the old Saracen fortress of Fraxinet, or
Freinet, from which the present town of something less than two thousand
souls takes its name. It stands out in the clear brilliance of the
Provençal sky, as if one might reach out his hand and touch its walls,
though it is a hundred or more metres above the town, which finally one
reaches through the usual narrow entrance possessed by most French towns
whether they are of the mountain or the plain.
It was from just such fortified heights as this that the Saracens were
able to command all Provence and the valley of the Rhône up to the Jura.
Concerning these far-away times, and the exact movements of the
Saracens, historians are not very precise, and a good deal has to be
taken on faith; but where monuments were left behind to tell the story,
albeit they were mostly fortresses, enough has come down to allow one to
build up a fabric which will give a more or less just view of the
extent of the Saracen influence which swept over southern Gaul from the
eighth to the tenth centuries.
They made one of their greatest strongholds here on the Pic du Fraxinet
(“the place planted with _frênes_”), and, in spite of the fact that they
were sooner or later driven from their position, as history does tell in
this case, their descendants, becoming Christians, were the ancestors of
the present growers of mulberry-trees and cork-oaks, and tenders of
silk-worms, which form the principal occupations of the inhabitants of
La Garde-Freinet to-day.
Any one, with the least eye for the fair sex, will note the fact that
the women of La Garde-Freinet--the _Fraxinétaines_ of the
ethnologists--have a unique kind of beauty greatly to be admired. They
are not as beautiful as the women of Arles, to whom the palm must always
be given among the women of France; but they are well-formed, with
beautiful hair, great, liquid black eyes, oval faces, and plump,
well-formed arms, justifying, even to-day, the beauty which they are
supposed to have acquired from their Moorish ancestors.
There are no monuments at La Garde-Freinet except the ruined, dominant
fortress, but for all that the pilgrimage is one worth the making, if
only for glimpses of those wonderfully beautiful women, or for the
delightful journey thither.
From La Foux and Grimaud one rapidly advances toward the Estérel, that
sheltering range of reddish, rocky mountains which makes Cannes and La
Napoule what they are.
St. Tropez and its tall white houses are left behind, and the shores of
the Golfe are followed until one comes to the most ancient town of Ste.
Maxime. Unlike St. Tropez, Ste. Maxime, though only thirty minutes away
by boat, across the mouth of the Golfe, has not the penetrating mistral
for a scourge. On the other hand one does get the sun in his eyes when
he wishes to view the sea, and has not that magically coloured curtain
of the Estérel, with all its varied reds and browns, before his eyes.
One cannot have everything as he wishes, even on the Riviera. If he has
the view, he often has also the mistral; and, if he finds a place that
is really sheltered from the mistral, it has a more or less restricted
view, and a climate which the doctors and invalids call “relaxing,”
whatever that arbitrary term may mean.
Here in the Golfe de St. Tropez, at St. Tropez, at La Foux, and at Ste.
Maxime, one sees again those great _tartanes_ and _balancelles_, the
great white-winged craft which fly about the Mediterranean coasts of
France with all the idyllic picturesqueness of old.
There are still twenty kilometres before one reaches Fréjus, the first
town of real latter-day importance since passing Toulon, and this, too,
in spite of its great antiquity. Other of the coast towns have risen or
degenerated into mere resorts, but Fréjus holds its own as the centre of
affairs for a very considerable region.