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.