Rambles on the Riviera

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

TWENTY kilometres beyond Ste. Maxime one comes to the Golfe de Fréjus and its neighbouring towns of Fréjus and St. Raphaël, the former the ville commerçant and the latter the ville d’eau.

As with Arles, on the banks of the Rhône, one may well say of Fréjus that the town and its environs form a veritable open-air museum. It will be true to add also, in this case, that the museum has a far greater area than at Arles, for Fréjus, and the antiquities directly connected with it, cover a radius of at least forty kilometres.

This sign-board does not look as durable as the moss-grown old arches over which it stands sentinel; perhaps some day the stress of time (or some other reason) will cause it to disappear.

The remains of this great aqueduct of other days prove conclusively the great regard and hope which the Romans must have had for the Forum Julii of Julius Cæsar, for all, without question, attribute the foundation of Fréjus to the conqueror of the Gauls.

Fréjus is prolific in quaint customs and legends too numerous to mention, though two, at least, stand out so plainly in the memory of the writer that they are here recounted.

On a certain occasion in August,—not the usual season for tourists, but genuine travel-lovers, having no season, go anywhere at any time,—as the town was entered by the highroad, our automobile was abruptly stopped at the barrière by a motley crew clad in all manner of military costumes, like the armies of the South American republics. Firearms, too, were there, and when a grenadier of the time of Louis-Philippe let off a smoky charge of gunpowder under our very noses, it was a signal for a general feu-de-joie which might have rivalled a Fourth of July celebration in the United States, for the disaster which it bid fair to bring in its wake. As a matter of fact, nothing happened, and we were allowed to proceed in peace, though the sleep-destroying cannonade was kept up throughout the night.

There is a legend, too, concerning the landing of St. François de Paule here, which the native is fond of telling the stranger, but which needs something more than the proverbial grain of salt to go with it, because St. François is claimed to have first put foot on shore at various other points along the coast.

The story is to the effect that the ship which bore the holy man from the East having foundered, or not having been sufficiently sea-worthy to continue the voyage, St. François stepped overboard and walked ashore on the waves. He did not walk on the waves themselves in this case, but laid his mantle upon them and walked on that. What he did when he came to the edge of his mantle tradition does not state.

The ecclesiastical and political history of Fréjus is most interesting, though it cannot be epitomized here. Two significant Napoleonic events of the early nineteenth century stand out so strongly, however, that they perforce must be mentioned.

Of the architectural and historical monuments of Fréjus one must at least take cognizance of the Baptistery, one of the few of its class out of Italy and dating from some period previous to the tenth century. Architecturally it is not a great structure, neither is it such in size; but its very existence here, well over into Gaul, marks a distinct era in the Christianizing and church-building efforts of those early times. The cathedral at Fréjus is by no means of equal archæological importance to this tiny Baptistery, though the bishopric itself was founded as early as the fourth century, and at least one of its early bishops became a Pope (Jean XXII., 1316-34).

The old aqueduct of Fréjus, a relic of Roman days and Roman ways, is the chief monumental wonder of the neighbourhood. It has long been in a ruinous state of disuse, though its decay is merely that incident to time, for it was marvellously well built of small stones without ornament of any kind.

At Fréjus there are also remains of a Roman theatre, now nothing more than a mass of débris, though one easily traces its diameter as having been something approaching two hundred feet.

The arena of Fréjus is in quite as dismantled a state as the theatre, one of the principal roadways now passing through its centre, so that to-day the monument is hardly more than a great open Place at the crossing of four roads. From the grandeur of the structure, as it must once have been, it is a monument comparable in many ways with those better preserved and more magnificent arenas at Arles and Nîmes.

From Fréjus to St. Raphaël is a bare three kilometres. St. Raphaël boasts as many inhabitants as Fréjus, but it is mostly a city of pleasure, and has no monuments of a past age to suggest that even a reflected glory from Fréjus ever shone over its site. To-day the plain which lies between the two towns is dotted here and there with palatial residences: “C’est tout palais,” the native tells you, and he is not far wrong, but in a former day it was a broad bay, where floated the galleys of Cæsar and Augustus.

St. Raphaël is not wholly given up to pleasure, for it is a notable fact that in industrial enterprise it has already surpassed Fréjus, due principally to a vast traffic in bauxite, a clay from which aluminium is obtained, and there are always at its quays steamers from England, Germany, and Holland loading the reddish earth.

In spite of the expectations of a former generation of landlords and landowners, St. Raphaël, progressive as it has been, has never grown up on the lines upon which it was planned. The grand boulevards and avenues came as a matter of course, and the great hotels, and, ultimately, the inevitable casino and its attendant attractions; but, nevertheless, St. Raphaël has remained a ville des villas, and the population has mostly gone to the suburban hillsides, especially around Valesclure, where new houses are springing up like mushrooms, all built of that white sandstone which flashes so brilliantly in the sunlight against the background of the green-clad, reddish-brown Estérel.

The Estérel is a coast range of mountains as different from Les Maures, their neighbour to the westward, as could possibly be, in colour, in outline, and in climatic influences, and these to no little extent have a decided effect on the manners and customs of the people who live in the neighbourhood.

The Route d’Italie passes to the north of the Estérel crest, and is one of those remarkable series of roadways which cross and recross France, and may be considered the direct descendants of the military roads laid out by the Romans, and developed and perfected by Napoleon. To-day a generously endowed department of the French government tenderly cares for them, with the result that the roads of France have become one of the most precious possessions of the nation.

All this has recently been changed, and, where once were only narrow foot-paths and roads, made use of by the shepherds and peasants, there are a broad and elegant highway flanking the indentations of the coast-line, and many interior routes crossing and recrossing one of the most lovely and unspoiled wildwoods still to be seen in France. There are other parts much more wild, the Cevennes or the Vivarais, for instance; but they have not a tithe of the grandeur and beauty of the red porphyry rocks of the Estérel combined with the blue waters of the Mediterranean and the forest-covered flanks of its mountain range.

From Fréjus, St. Raphaël, or La Napoule, or even Cannes, one may enter the Estérel and lose himself to the world, if he likes, for a matter of a week, or ten days, or a fortnight, and never so much as have a suspicion of the conventional Riviera gaieties which are going on so close at hand.

As a roadway of scenic surprises the “Corniche d’Or” of the Estérel is the peer of the better known rival beyond Nice, though it has nothing to excel that superb half-dozen kilometres just before, and after, Monte Carlo and Monaco.

The interior route of the Estérel, the Route d’Italie, mounts to an altitude of three hundred metres, while the “Corniche” is practically level, with no hills which would tire the least muscular cyclist or the weakest-powered automobile.

This delightful tract of unspoiled wildwood is bounded on the north by the Route d’Italie, while the ingeniously planned “Corniche” follows the coast-line all the way to Cannes, which is really the door by which one enters the Riviera of the guide-books and the winter tourists.

The “Corniche d’Or,” its inception and construction, was really due to the efforts of the omnific “Touring Club de France.” Formerly the way by the coast was but a narrow track, or a “Sentier de Douane.” To-day it is an ample roadway along its whole length, on which one has little fear of speeding automobiles for the simple reason that the jutting capes and promontories of porphyry rock are death-dealing in their abruptness and frequency, and no automobilist who is sane—let it be here emphasized—takes such dangerous risks.

One first enters the “Route de la Corniche” by leaving St. Raphaël by way of the newly opened Boulevard du Touring Club, and soon passes two great projecting rocks known as the “Lion de Terre” and the “Lion de Mer.” They do not look in the least like lions,—natural curiosities seldom do look like what they are named for,—but they will be recognizable nevertheless. Throughout its length the road follows the shore so closely that the sea is always in sight.

From the same spot one sees the Tour du Dramont, a one-time refuge of Jeanne de Provence during a revolution among her subjects.

In following the road one does not come to a town or indeed a settlement of any notable size until he reaches Agay, on the other side of the promontory. The town lies at the mouth of a tiny river bearing the same name. It makes some pretence at being a resort, but it is still a diminutive one, and, accordingly, all the more attractive to the world-wearied traveller.

Three routes lead from Agay, one to Cannes by Les Trois Termes (twenty-nine kilometres), another by the Col de Belle Barbe, and another directly by the “Corniche.”

Near the Col de Belle Barbe is the Oratoire de St. Honorat and the Grotte de Ste. Baume. The latter is a place of pilgrimage for the devout of the region, and for those from farther abroad, but most of the time it is a mere rendezvous for curious sightseers.

From Agay the “Corniche” runs also by Le Trayas, and to roll over its smoothly made surface in a swift-moving automobile is the very poetry of motion, or as near thereto as we are likely to get until we adopt the flying-machine for regular travel. It is an experience that no one should miss, even if he has to hire a seat on the automobile omnibus which frequently runs between St. Raphaël and La Napoule and Cannes.

It is twenty kilometres from Agay to La Napoule, and is a good afternoon’s journey by carriage, or even on donkey-back. Better yet, one should walk, if he feels equal to it, and has the time at his disposal.

Between Anthéore and Le Trayas is a narrow pathway which mounts to St. Barthélémy, but the coast road still continues its delightful course toward La Napoule.

Le Trayas, though it figures in the railway time-tables, is hardly more than a hamlet; but it boasts proudly of a hotel and a group of villas. It has not yet become spoiled in spite of this, and though it lacks the picturesque local colour of the average Mediterranean coast town, and almost altogether the distractions of the great resorts, it is worth the visiting, if only for its charming situation.

The Département of the Var joins that of the Alpes-Maritimes just beyond, and, at three kilometres farther on, the coast road rises to its greatest height, a trifle over a hundred metres.

LA NAPOULE is known chiefly to those birds of passage who annually hibernate at Cannes as the end of a six-mile constitutional which the doctors advise their patients to take as an antidote to overfeeding and “tea-fights.” In reality it is much more than this; it is one of the most charmingly situated of all the Riviera coast towns, and has a history which dates back to a fourteenth-century fortress, built by the Comté de Villeneuve, a tower of which stands to-day as a part of the more modern château which rises back of the town.

Mont Vinaigre is the culminating peak of the Estérel, and is visible from a great distance. Its great white observatory tower rises high above the neighbouring peaks and, when one finally reaches the vantage-ground of the little platform which is found at the utmost height, he obtains a view which is far more vast in effect than many of the “grandest views” scattered here and there about the world. In clear weather the outlook extends from Bordighera to Sainte Baume, as if the whole region were spread out in a great map.

The inn, modest and lacking in up-to-date appointments as it is, has a delightfully wild and unspoiled situation, sheltered from the north by numerous chestnut and plane-trees, and in summer or winter its climatic conditions are as likely to fit the varying moods of the traveller as any other spot on the Riviera. Truly Les Adrets is a retreat far from the madding crowd, where an author or an artist might produce a masterwork if what he needed was only quiet and a change of scene. There are no distractions at Les Adrets to break the monotony of its existence. One may chat with a passing automobile tourist, or with one of those guardians of the peace of the countryside, the gendarmes,—who have barracks near by,—but this is the only diversion.

At the inn itself one finds nothing of luxury. One pays two francs for his repasts and a franc for his modest room. This is not dear, and has the additional advantage that neither one nor the other of these requirements of the traveller have the least resemblance to the sort of thing that one gets in the towns.

Never is there a throng of people to be seen in these parts, and, if one wanders abroad at night, he is likely enough to have thoughts of the highwaymen of other days. Formerly the forests and mountains of the Estérel were infested with a class of brigands who were by no means of the polished villain order which one has so frequently seen upon the stage. They were not of the Claude Duval class of society, but something very akin to what one pictures as the Corsican bandit of tradition.

To-day, however, all is peaceful enough, with the Gendarmerie near by, a terror to all wrong-doers, and the only reminiscences which one is likely to have of the highwaymen of other days are such as one gets from an old mountaineer or a review of the pages of history and romance, where will be found the names of Robert Macaire and Gaspard de Besse, two famous, or infamous, characters whose names and lives were closely connected with this region. It is all tranquil enough to-day, and one is no more likely to meet with any of these unworthies in the Estérel than he is with the “Flying Dutchman” at sea.

Cannes is truly “aristocratic villadom,” or “séjour aristocratique et recherché,” as the French have it, with all that the term implies. Consequently Cannes is conventional, and the real lover of nature—regardless of the town’s charming situation—will have none of it.

It is believed that the town grew up from the ancient Ligurian city of Aegytna, destroyed by Quintus Opimius a hundred and fifty years before the beginning of the Christian era.

If one does not make his entry into Cannes by road, direct from the Estérel, he will probably come by the way of Le Cannet. Le Cannet is itself a sumptuous suburb which in every way foretells the luxury which awaits one in the parent city by the seashore.

The Boulevard Carnot descends from Le Cannet to the sea by a long easy slope, and again one comes to the blue water of the enchanted Mediterranean. At times, Cannes is most lively,—always in a most conventional and eminently respectable fashion,—and at other times it sleeps the sleep of an emptied city, only to awake when the first fogs of November descend upon “brumeuse Angleterre.”

To tell the truth, Cannes is far more delightful “out of season,” when its gay, idling population of strangers has disappeared, stolen away to the watering-places of the north, there to live the same deadly dull existence, made up of rounds of tea-drinking and croquet-playing, with perhaps an occasional ride in a char-à-banc. Probably the millionaire improves somewhat upon this régime, but there are countless thousands who live this very life in European watering-places—and think they are enjoying themselves.

Not every one in Cannes speaks English; but for a shopkeeper to prosper to the full he should do so, and so the local “professors” have a busy time of it, in season and out, teaching what they call the “idiome britannique” and the “argot Américaine.”

The shore east and west of the centre of the town is flanked with hotels and villas, and great properties are yearly being cut up and put into the hands of the real-estate agents in order that more of the same sort may be erected where olive and palm trees formerly grew.

Horticulture is still a great industry at Cannes, as well as the selling of building-lots, but the marvel is that there is any unoccupied land upon which to raise anything. A dozen years from now how will the horticulturalists of Cannes be able to grow those decorative little orange and palm trees with which Paris and Ostend and London and even Manchester hotel “palm-gardens” are embellished?

Another monument of the middle ages is the ancient “Tour Seigneuriale,” erected in 1080 by Adelbert II., an abbot of the Monastery of Lerins. For three hundred years it was in constant use, serving both as a citadelle and as a marine observatory. To-day its functions are no more; but, with the tower of the church, it does form a sort of a beacon, from offshore, for the Cannes boatmen.