enlarge-imageToulon to FrejusToulon to Frejus
Toulon to Frejus
Between Toulon and Hyères, lying back from the coast, in the valley of the Gapeau, is a bit of transplanted Africa, where the brilliant sun shines with all the vigour that it does on the opposite Mediterranean shore. The valley is perhaps the most important topographically west of the Rhône, at least until one reachesthe Var at Nice. There is a sprinkling of small towns here and there, and more frequent country residences and vineyards, but there is an air of solitude about it that can but be remarked by all who travel by road.
One great highroad runs out from Toulon through Solliès-Pont, Cuers, Puget-Ville, Pignans, and Le Luc to Fréjus. The coast road leads to the same objective point, but the characteristics of the two are as different as can be. A more varied and more charming combination of scenic charms, than can be had by journeying out via one route and back by the other, can hardly be found in this world, unless one has in mind some imaginary blend of Switzerland and the Mediterranean.
The region is known as Les Maures, the name in reality referring to the mountain chain whose peaks follow the coast-line at a distance of from thirty to fifty kilometres.
The whole region known as Les Maures is in a state of semi-solitude; twenty-three thousand souls for an area of one hundred and twenty thousand hectares is a remarkable sparsity of population for most parts of France.
Cuers is the metropolis of the region and boasts of some three thousand inhabitants, and a great trade in the oil of the olive.
There is absolutely nothing of interest to the tourist in any of these little towns between Toulon and Fréjus. There is to be sure the usual picturesque church, which, if not grand or architecturally excellent, is invariably what artists call “interesting,” and there is always a picturesque grouping of roof-tops, clustered around the church in a manner unknown outside of France.
Occasionally one does see a small town in France which reminds him of Italy, and occasionally one that suggests Holland, but mostly they are French and nothing but French, though they be as varied in colour as Joseph’s coat, and as diversified in manners and customs as one would imagine of a country whose climate runs the whole gamut from northern snows to southern olive groves.
In reality, Cuers shares its importance with Les Solliès, whose curious name grew up from the memory of a Temple of the Sun, upon the remains of which is built the present church of Solliès-Ville.
enlarge-imageIn Les MauresIn Les Maures
In Les Maures
Solliès-Pont owes its name to thepont, or bridge, by which the “Route Nationale” crosses the Gapeau. It is the centre of the cherry culture in the Var, and at the time of year when the trees are in blossom, the aspectof the surrounding hillsides would put cherry-blossoming Japan to shame. The crop is the first which comes into the market in France. The lovers of early fruits, in Paris restaurants and hotels, know the “cerises du Var” very well indeed. They buy them at the highest market prices, delightfully put up in boxes of poplar-wood and garnished with lace-paper. Annually Solliès-Pont despatches something like a hundred thousand cases of these first cherries of the year, each weighing from three to twelve kilos, and bringing—well, anything they can command, the very first perhaps as much as eight or ten francs a kilo. This for the first few straggling boxes which some fortunate grower has been able to pick off a well-sunned tree. Within a fortnight the price will have fallen to fifty centimes, and at the end of a month the traffic is all over, so far as the export to outside markets is concerned.
“Cherries are grown everywhere,” one says. Yes, but not such cherries as at Solliès-Pont.
Here at this little railway station in the Var one may see a whole train loaded with a hundred thousand kilos of the most luscious cherries one ever cast eyes upon.
The aspect of the region round about has nothing of the grayness of the olive orchardseast and west; all this has given way to a flowering radiance and a brilliant green, as of an oasis in a desert.
The gathering of this important crop is conducted with more care than that of any other of the Riviera. The trees are not shaken and their fruit picked up off the ground, nor do agile lads climb in and out among the branches. Not even a ladder is thrust between the thick leaves of the trees, but a great straddling stepladder, like those used by the olive pickers of the Bouches-du-Rhône, is carried about from tree to tree, and gives a foothold to two, three, or even four lithe, young girls, whose graces are none the less for their gymnastics at reaching for the fruit head-high and at arm’s length.
One marvels perhaps—when he sees these boxes of luscious cherries in the Paris market—as to how they may have been packed with such symmetry. It is very simple, though the writer had to see it done at Solliès-Pont before he realized it. The boxes are simply packed from the top downwards, so to speak. The first layer is packed in close rows, the stems all pointing upwards, then the rest of the contents are put in without plan or design, and the cover fastened down. When the packages are opened, it is the bottom that is lifted,and thus one sees first the rosy-red globules, all in rows, like the little wooden balls of the counting machines.
The south of France is destined to provision a great part of Europe, and already it is playing its part well. The cherries of Solliès-Pont go—after Paris has had its fill—to England, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, and Russia, though doubtless only the “milords” and millionaires get a chance at them.
Besides the consumption of the fruitau naturel, the cherries of the Var are the most preferred of all those delicacies which are preserved in brandy, and a cocktail, of any of the many varieties that are made in America (and one place, and one only, in Paris—which shall be nameless), with one of the cherries of Solliès-Pont drowned therein, is a superdelicious thing, unexcelled in all the “made drinks” the world knows to-day.
THEreal French Riviera is not the resorts of rank and fashion alone; it is the whole ensemble of that marvellous bit of coast-line extending eastward from Toulon to the Italian frontier. Topographically, geographically, and climatically it abounds in salient features which, in combination, are unknown in any similar strip of territory in all the world, though there is very little that is strange, outré, or exotic about any of its aspects. It is simply a combination of conditions which are indigenous to the sunny, sheltered shores of the northern Mediterranean, which are here blessed, owing to a variety of reasons, with a singularly equable climate and situation.
Doubtless the region is not the peer of southern California in topography or climate; indeed, without fear or favour, the statement is here made that it is not; but it has what California never has had, nor ever will, a history-strewn pathway traversing its entire length,where the monuments left by the ancient Greeks and Romans tell a vivid story of the past greatness of the progenitors and moulders of modern civilization.
This in itself should be enough to make the Riviera revered, as it justly is; but it is not this, but the gay life of those who neither toil nor spin that makes this world’s beauty-spot (for Monaco and Monte Carlo are assuredly the most beautiful spots in the world) so worshipped by those who have sojourned here.
This is wrong of course, but the simple life has not yet come to be the institution that its prophets would have us believe, and, after all, a passion of some sort is the birthright of every man, whether it be gambling at Monte Carlo, automobiling on sea or land, painting, or attempting to paint, the masterpieces of nature, or studying historic monuments. At any rate, all these diversions are here, and more, and, as one may pursue any of them under more idyllic conditions here than elsewhere, the Riviera is become justly famed—and notorious.
Not all Riviera visitors live in palatial hotels; some of them liveen pension, which, like the boarding-house of other lands, has its undeniable advantage of economy, and its equallyundeniable disadvantages too numerous to mention and needless to recall.
Of course the Riviera has undeniable social attractions, since it was developed (so far as the English—and Americans—are concerned) by that vain man, Lord Brougham.
Lord Brougham, Lord Chancellor of England, first gave the popular fillip to Cannes in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign. From that time the Riviera, east and west of Cannes, has steadily increased in popularity and in transplanted institutions. The chief of these is perhaps the tea-tippling craze which has struck the Riviera with full force. It’s not as exhilarating an amusement as automobiling, which runs it a close second here, but a “tea-fight” at a Rivierahôtel de luxehas at least something more than the excitement of a game of golf or croquet, which also flourish on the sand-dunes under the pines, from St. Tropez to Menton, and even over into Italy.
It’s a pity the tea-drinking craze is so monopolizing,—really it is as bad as the “Pernod” habit, and is no more confined to old maids than are Bath chairs or the reading of theMorning Post. Bishop Berkeley certainly was in error when he wrote, or spoke, about the “cup that cheers but does not inebriate,” forthe saying has come to be one of the false truths which is so much of a platitude that few have ever thought of denying it.
The doctors say that one should not take tea or alcohol on the Riviera, the ozone of the climate supplying all the stimulant necessary. If one wants anything more exciting, let him try the tables at Monte Carlo.
Riviera weather is a variable commodity. Some localities are more subject to the mistral than others, though none admit that they have it to the least degree, and some places are more relaxing than others. Menton is warm, and very little rain falls; Nice is blazing hot and cold by turn; and there are seasons at Cannes, in winter, when, but for the date in the daily paper, you would think it was May.
Beaulieu and Cap Martin lead off for uniformity of the day and night temperature. The reading at the former place (in that part known as “Petite Afrique”) on a January day in 1906 being: minimum during the night, 9° centigrade; maximum during the day, 11° centigrade; 8A. M., 10° centigrade; 2P. M., 9° centigrade, and, in a particularly well-sheltered spot in the gardens of the Hôtel Metropole, 15° centigrade. This is a remarkableand convincing demonstration of the claims for an equable temperature which are set forth.
In general this is not true of the Riviera. A bright, sunny, and cloudless January day, when one is uncomfortably warm at midday, is, as likely as not, followed at night by a sudden fall in temperature that makes one frigid, if only by contrast.
enlarge-imageComparative Theometric ScaleComparative Theometric Scale
Comparative Theometric Scale
The Riviera house-agent tells you: “Do not come here unless you are prepared to stay” (he might have added “and pay”), “for the Riviera renders all other lands uninhabitable after once you have fallen under its charm.”
Amid all the gorgeousness of perhaps the most exquisite beauty-spot in all the world—that same little strip of coast between Hyèresand Menton—is a colony of parasitic dwellers who are no part of the attractions of the place; but who unconsciously act as a loadstone which draws countless others of their countrymen, with their never absent diversions of golf, tennis, and croquet. One pursues these harmless sports amid a delightful setting, but why come here for that purpose? One cannot walk theBoulevardsandGrandes Promenadesall of the time, to be sure, but he might take that rest which he professedly comes for, or failing that, take a plunge into the giddy whirl of the life of the “Casino” or the “Cercle.” The result will be the same, and he will be just as tired when night comes and he has overfed himself with adîner Parisienat a great palace hotel where the only persons who do not “dress” are the waiters.
This is certain,—the traveller and seeker after change and rest will not find it here any more than in Piccadilly or on Broadway, unless he leaves the element of big hotels far in the background, and lives simply in some little hovering suburb such as Cagnes is to Nice or Le Cannet to Cannes, or preferably goes farther afield. Only thus may one live the life of the author of the following lines:
“There found he all for which he long did crave,Beauty and solitude and simple ways,Plain folk and primitive, made courteous byTraditions old, and a cerulean sky.”
“There found he all for which he long did crave,Beauty and solitude and simple ways,Plain folk and primitive, made courteous byTraditions old, and a cerulean sky.”
The rest is hubble, bubble, toil, and trouble of the same kind that one has in the hotels of San Francisco, London, or Amsterdam; everything cooked in the same pot and tasting of cottolene and beef extract.
There is some truth in this,—for some people,—but the ties that bind are not taken into consideration, and, though the words are an echo of those uttered by Alphonse Karr when he first settled at St. Raphaël,—after having been driven from Étretat by the vulgar throng,—they will not fit every one’s ideas or pocket-books.
Popularity has made a boulevard of the whole coast from St. Raphaël to San Remo, and indeed to Genoa, and there is no seclusion to be had, nor freedom from the “sirens” of automobiles, or the tin horns of trams and whistles of locomotives; unless one leaves the beaten track and settles in some background village, such as Les Maures or the Estérel, where the hum of life is but the drone of yesterday and Paris papers are three days old when they reach you.
For all that the whole Riviera, and its gay life as well, is delightful, though it is as enervating and fatiguing as the week’s shopping and theatre-going in Paris with which American travellers usually wind up their tour of Europe.
The Riviera isn’t exactly as a Frenchman wrote of it: “all Americans, English, and Germans,” and it is hardly likely you will find a hotel where none of the attendants speak French (as this same Frenchman declared), but nevertheless “All right” is as often the reply as “Oui, monsieur.”
All the multifarious attractions of this strip of coast-line are doubly enhanced by the delicious climate, and the wonders of the Baie des Anges and the Golfe de la Napoule are more and more charming as the sun rises higher in the heavens, and La Napoule, St. Jean, Beaulieu, Passable, Villefranche, Cap Martin, and Cap Ferrat, the “Corniche,” La Turbie, Monaco, and Menton are all names to conjure with when one wants to call to mind what a modern Eden might be like.
Of course Monte Carlo dominates everything. It is the one objective point, more or less frequently, of all Riviera dwellers. The sumptuousness of it acts like a loadstone towardsteel, or the candle-flame to the moth, and many are the wings that are singed and clipped within its boundaries.
Whatever may be the moral or immoral aspect of Monte Carlo, it does not matter in the least. It has its opponents and its partisans,—and the bank goes on winning for ever. Meantime the whole region is prosperous, and the public certainly gets what it comes for. TheMonégasquesthemselves profit the most however. They are, for instance, exempt from taxes of any sort, which is considerable of a boon in heavily taxed continental Europe.
Monte Carlo is an enigma. Its palatial hotels, its Casino, its game, and its concerts and theatre, its pigeon-shooting, its automobile yachting, and all the rest contribute to a round of gaiety not elsewhere known. It may rain “hallebardes,” as the French have it, but the most adverse weather report which ever gets into the papers from Monte Carlo is “ciel nuageux.”
enlarge-imageThe Terrace, Monte CarloThe Terrace, Monte Carlo
The Terrace, Monte Carlo
If Marseilles is the “Modern Babylon” of the workaday world, the Riviera—in the season—may well be called the “Cosmopolis de luxe.” In winter all nations under the sun are there, but in summer it is quite another story; still, Monte Carlo’s tables run the yeararound, and, as the inhabitant of the principality is not allowed to enter its profane portals, it is certain that visitors are not entirely absent.
There are three distinct Rivieras: the French Riviera proper, from Toulon to Menton; the Italian Riviera, from Bordighera to Alassio; and the Levantine Riviera, from Genoa to Viareggio.
Partisans plead loudly for Cairo, Biskra, Capri, Palermo, and Majorca,—and some for Madeira or Grand Canary,—but the comparatively restricted bit of Mediterranean coast-line known as the three Rivieras will undoubtedly hold its own with the mass of winter birds of passage. Just why this is so is obvious for three reasons. The first because it is accessible, the second, because it is moderately cheap to get to, and to live in after one gets there, unless one really does “plunge,” which most Anglo-Saxons do not; and the third,—whisper it gently,—because the English or American tourist, be he semi-invalid or be he not, hopes to find his fellows there, and as many as possible of his pet institutions, such as afternoon tea and cocktails, marmalade and broiled live lobsters, to say nothing of his own language,spoken in the lisping accents of a Swiss or German waiter.
It is not necessary to struggle with French on the Riviera, and the estimable lady of the following anecdote might have called for help in English and got it just as quickly:
At the door of a Riviera express, stopping at the Gare de Cannes, an elderly English lady tripped over the rug and was prostrated her full-length on the platform.
Gallant Frenchmen rushed to her aid from all quarters: “Vous n’avez pas de mal, madame?” “Merci, non, seulement une petite sac de voyage,” she replied, as she limpingly and lispingly made her way through the crowd.
This ought to dispose of the language question once for all. If you are on the Riviera, speak English, or, likely enough, you will fall into similar errors unless you know that vague thing, idiomatic French, which is only acquired by familiarity.
The French Riviera has from forty to fifty rainy days a year, which is certainly not much; and it is conceivable that a stay of two months at Nice, Cannes, or Menton will not bring a rainy day to mar the memory of this sunny land. On the other hand, the Levantine Riviera may have ten days of rain in a month, andthe next month another ten days may follow—or it may not. It is well, however, not to overlook the fact that Pisa, not so very far inland from the easternmost end of the Italian Riviera, is called the “Pozzo dell Italia”—the well of Italy.
There was a time when Cannes, Nice, and Menton were favoured as invalid resorts, and as mere pleasant places to while away a dull period of repose, but to-day all this is changed, and even the semi-invalid is looked at askance by the managers of hotels and the purveyors of amusements.
The social attractions have quite swamped the health-giving inducements of the chief towns of the Riviera, and the automobile has taken the place of the Bath chair; indeed, it is the world, the flesh, and the devil which have come into the province where ministering angels formerly held sway.
At the head of all the throng of Riviera pleasure-seekers are the royalties and the nobility of many lands. “Au-dessous d’eux,” as one reads in the monologue of Charles Quint, “la foule,” but here the throng is still those who have the distinction of wealth, whatever may be their other virtues. A “petit millionaire Français,” by which the Frenchman meansone who has perhaps thirty thousand francs a year, stands no show here; his place is taken by the sugar and copper kings and “milords” and millionaires from overseas.
There are others, of course, who come and go, and who have not got a millionsous, or ever will have, but the best they can do is to hire a garden seat on the promenade and with Don Cesar de Bazan “regarder entrer et sortir les duchesses.” It is either this (in most of the resorts of fashion along the Riviera) or one must “manger les haricots” for eleven months in order to be able to ape “le monde” for the other twelfth part of the year. Most of us would not do the thing, of course, so we are content to slip in and out, and admire, and marvel, and deplore, and put in our time in some spot nearer to nature, where dress clothes cease from troubling and functions are no more.
JUSToff the coast road from Toulon to Hyères is the tiny town of La Garde. The commune boasts of twenty-five hundred inhabitants, most of whom evidently live in hillside dwellings, for the town proper has but a few hundreds, a very few, judging from its somnolence and lack of life. More country than town, the district abounds in lovely sweeps of landscape. Pradet, another little village, lies toward the coast, and, amid the dull grays of the olive-trees, gleams the white tower of a chapel which belongs to the modern château. The chapel, which bears the sentimental nomenclature of “La Pauline,” is filled by a wonderful lot of sculptures from the chisel of Pradier. Decidedly it is a thing to be seen and appreciated by lovers of sculptured art, even though its modern château is painful in its bald, pagan architectural forms.
Beyond La Garde lies the plain of Hyères, and offshore the great Golfe de Giens, wellsheltered and surrounded by the peninsula of the same name, one of the beauty-spots of the Mediterranean scarcely known and still less visited by tourists. Directly off the tip end of the peninsula of Giens is a little group of rocky isles known as the Iles d’Hyères. They are indescribably lovely, but the seafarers of these parts of the Mediterranean dread them in a storm as do Channel sailors the Casquets in a fog.
The chief of these isles is Porquerolles, and it possesses a village of the same name, which has never yet been marked down as a place of resort. To be sure, no one, unless he were an artist attached to the painting of marines, or an author who thought to get far from the madding throng, would ever come here, anyway. The village is not so bad, though, and it is as if one had entered a new world. There is an inn where one is sure of getting a passable breakfast of fish and eggs; a “Grande Place” which, paradoxically, is not grand at all; and a humble little church which is not bad in its way. Two or three cafés, a bake-shop, and a Bureau des Douanes, of course, complete the business part of the place. Each littlemaisonettehas a terrace overshadowed with vines, and, all in all, it is truly an idylliclittle settlement. The isle culminates in a peak five hundred feet or so high, on the top of which is seated a fortification called Fort de la Repentance.
The entire isle, with the exception of that portion occupied by the fort and its batteries, belongs to a M. and Madame de Roussen, who are known to readers of French novels under the names of Pierre Ninous and Paul d’Aigremont. The proprietors have charmingly ensconced themselves in a delightful residence, which, if it does not rise to the dignity of a château, has as magnificent a stage setting as the most theatrical of the châteaux of the Loire; only, in this case, it is a seascape which confronts one, instead of the sweep of the broad blue river of Touraine.
Two hundred and fifty inhabitants live here, but away in the west there was formerly a colony of a thousand or more workmen engaged in the manufacture of soda. For more reasons than one—the principal being that the sulphurous fumes from the works were having an ill effect on the verdure—the establishment was purchased by the present proprietors of the isle.
The village has somewhat of the airs of its bigger brothers and sisters elsewhere in thatits streets are lighted at night; the wharves are as animated as those of a great world-town, particularly on the arrival of the boat from Toulon; and the market-women sit about the street corners with their wares picturesquely displayed before them as they do in larger communities.
Truly, Porquerolles is unspoiled as yet, and the marvel is that it has not become an “artist’s sketching-ground” before now. It has many claims in this respect besides its natural beauties and attractions, one, not unappreciated by artists, being that it is not likely to be overrun by tourists. The reason for this is that theCourrier des Iles d’Hyères, as the diminutive steamer which arrives three times a week is called, is subsidized by the ministry for war, and the captain has the right to refuse passage to civilians when his craft is overloaded with travelling soldiers and sailors, whom the French government, presumably from motives of economy, prefers to move in this way from point to point among the various forts along the coast.
enlarge-imageThe Peninsula of GiensThe Peninsula of Giens
The Peninsula of Giens
Four or five other islets make up the group which geographers and map-makers know as the Iles d’Hyères, but which the sentimental Provençaux best like to think of as the Ilesd’Or; but their characteristics are quite the same as Porquerolles. There is here a picturesque fort called Alicastre, derived from Castrum Ali, a souvenir, it is said, of a Saracen chief who once entrenched himself here. Local report has it that the Man in the Iron Mask was imprisoned here at one time, but the nearest that history comes to this is to place his imprisonment at Ste. Marguerite and the Château d’If.
From the sea, as one comes by boat from Toulon, the Presqu’ile de Giens looks as though it were an island and had no connection with the land, for the neck connecting it with the mainland is invisible, both from the eastward and the westward, while the rocks of the tip end of the peninsula are abruptly imposing as they rise from the sea-level to a moderate but jagged height.
As one approaches closer he notes the capricious scallops of the shore-line of this bizarre but beautiful jutting point, and congratulates himself that he did not make his way overland.
A little village is in the extreme south, its whitewashed houses shepherded by a little church and the ruins of an old fortress-château. The town is as nothing, but the view is most soothing and tranquil in its impressivebeauty and quiet charm. Nothing is violent or exaggerated, but the components of many ideal pictures are to be had for the turning of the head. Giens is another “artist’s sketching-ground” which has been wofully neglected.
The eastern shore is less savage and there are some attempts at agriculture, but on the whole Giens and its peninsula are but a distant echo of anything seen elsewhere. The quadrilateral walls of the old château, a semaphore, and a coast-guard station form, collectively, a beacon by sea and by land, and, as one makes his way to the mainland along the narrow causeway, he is reminded of that sandy ligature which binds Mont St. Michel with Pontorson, on the boundary of Brittany and Normandy.
Hyères is no longer fashionable. One would not think this to read the alluring advertisements of its palatial hotels, which, if not so grand and palatial as those at Monte Carlo, are, at least, far more splendid than those “board-walk “ abominations of the United States, or the deadly brick Georgian façades which adorn many of the sea-fronts of the south coast of England. The fact is, that society, or what passes for it, flutters around the gaming-tables of Monte Carlo, though for motivesof economy or respectability they may sojourn at Nice, Menton, or Cap Martin.
For this reason Hyères is all the more delightful. It is the most southerly of all the Riviera resorts, and, while it is still a place of villas and hotels, there is a restfulness about it all that many a resort with more lurid attractions entirely lacks.
Built cosily on the southern slope of a hill, it is effectually sheltered from the dread mistral, which, when it blows here, seems to come to sea-level at some distance from the shore. The effect is curious and may have been remarked before. The sea inshore will be of that rippling blue that one associates with the Mediterranean of the poets and painters, while perhaps a league distant it will roll up into those choppy whitecaps which only the Mediterranean possesses in all their disagreeableness. Truly the wind-broken surface of the Mediterranean in, or near, the Golfe de Lyon is something to be dreaded, whether one is aboard a liner bound for the Far East or on one of those abominable little boats which make the passage to Corsica or Sardinia.
Hyères in one of its moods is almost tropical in its softness with its famous avenue of palms which wave in the gentle breezes which springup mysteriously from nowhere and last for about an hour at midday. Its avenues and promenades are delightful, and there is never a suggestion of the snows which occasionally fall upon most of the Riviera resorts at least once during a winter. The only snow one is likely to see at Hyères is the white-capped Alps in the dim northeastern distance, and that will be so far away that it will look like a soft fleecy cloud.
Hyères is beautiful from any point of view, even when one enters it by railway from Marseilles, and even more so—indescribably more so, the writer thinks—when approaching by the highroad, from Toulon or Solliès-Pont, awheel or “en auto.”
Of all the historical memories of Hyères none is the equal of that connected with St. Louis. None will be able to read without emotion the memoirs of Joinville, giving the details of the return of Louis IX. and his wife, Marguerite de Provence, from the Crusades. The account of their arrival “au port d’Yeres devant le chastel” is most thrilling. One readily enough locates the site to-day, though the outlines of the old city walls and the château have sadly suffered from the stress of time.
This was a great occasion for Hyères; the greatest it has ever known, perhaps. “They saluted the returning sovereign with loud acclamations, and the standard of France floated from the donjon of the castle as witness to the fidelity of the inhabitants for the sovereign.”
The “good King René,” in a later century, had a great affection for Hyères also, and was equally beloved by its inhabitants. One of his legacies to Jeanne de Provence were the salt-works of Hyères, which were even then in existence.
Hyères enjoyed a strenuous enough life through all these years, but the saddest event in its whole career was when the traitorous Connétable de Bourbon took the château and turned it over to France’s arch-enemy, Charles V.
Charles IX. visited Hyères and remained five days within its walls, “his progress having been made between two rows of fruit-bearing orange-trees, freshly planted in the streets through which he was to pass.” This flattery so pleased the monarch that he himself, so history, or legend, states, carved the following inscription upon the trunk of one of those same orange-trees, “Caroli Regis Amplexu Glorior.”
One of the most beautiful strips of coast-lineon the whole Riviera lies between Hyères and Fréjus. A narrow-gauge railway makes its way almost at the water’s edge for the entire distance, and the coast road, a great departmental highway, follows the same route. The distance is too great—seventy-five kilometres or more—for the pedestrian, unless he is one who keeps up old-time traditions, but nevertheless there is but one way to enjoy this everchanging itinerary to the full, and that is to make the journey somehow or other by highroad. The automobile, a bicycle, or a gentle plodding burro will make the trip more enjoyable than is otherwise conceivable, even though the striking beauties which one sees from the slow-running little train give one a glimmer of satisfaction. Seventy-five kilometres, scarce fifty miles! It is nothing to an automobile, not much more to a bicycle, and only a two-days’ jaunt for a sure-footed little donkey, which you may hire anywhere in these parts for ten francs a day, including his keeper. No more shall be said of this altogether delightful method of travelling this short stretch of wonderland’s roadway, but the suggestion is thrown out for what it may be worth to any who would taste the joys of a new experience.
Close under the frowning height of LesMaures runs the coast road, for quite its whole length up to Fréjus, while on the opposite side, and beneath, are the surging, restless waves of the Mediterranean.
First one passes the Salines de Hyères, one of those great governmental salt-works which line the Mediterranean coast, and soon reaches La Londe, famous for its lead mines and the rude gaiety of its seven or eight hundred workmen, who on a Sunday go back to primitive conditions and eat, drink, and make merry in rather a Gargantuan manner. This will not have much interest for the lover of the beautiful, but up to this point he will have regaled himself with a promenade along a beautiful sea-bordered roadway, whose opposite side has been flanked with rose-laurel, palms, orange-trees, and many exotic plants and shrubs of semi-tropical lands.
From La Londe and its sordid industrialism one has twenty straight kilometres ahead of him until he reaches Bormes, a town which has been considered as a possible rival to Nice and Cannes, but which has never got beyond the outlining of sumptuous streets and boulevards and the erecting of two great hotels to which visitors do not come. It is an exquisite little town, the old bourg parallelled with the traceryof the new streets and avenues. Take it all in all, the site is about one of the best in the south for a winter station, though the non-proximity of the sea—a strong five kilometres away—may account for the slow growth of Bormes as a popular resort.
The old town is most picturesque, its tortuous, sloping streets ever mounting and descending and making vistas of doorways and window balconies which would make a scene-painter green with envy, everything is so theatrical. Like some of the little hill-towns of the country to the westward of Aix, Bormes is a reflection of Italy, although it has its own characteristics of manners and customs.
The country immediately around this little town of less than seven hundred souls is of an incomparable splendour. There is nothing exactly like it to be seen in the whole of Provence. In every direction are seen little scattered hamlets, or a group of two or three little houses hidden away amid groves of eucalyptus and thickets of mimosa, while the flanking panorama of Les Maures on one side, and the Mediterranean on the other, gives it all a setting which has a grandeur with nothing of the pretentious or spectacular about it. It is all focussed so finely, and it is so delicately colouredand outlined that it can only be compared to a pastel.
The Rade de Bormes, though it really has nothing to do with Bormes, a half a dozen kilometres distant, is another of those delightful bays which are scattered all along the Mediterranean shore. It has all the beauty which one’s fancy pictures, and the maker of high-coloured pictures would find his paradise along its banks, for there is a brilliancy about its ensemble that seems almost unnatural.
In 1482 St. François de Paule, called to France by the death of Louis XI., landed here. At the time Bormes was stricken with a plague or pest, and all intercourse with strangers was forbidden. But, when the saint demanded aid and refreshment after his long voyage, it was necessary to draw the cordon and open the gates of the town. In return for this hospitality, it is said by tradition, the holy man cured miraculously the sick of the town. The popular devotion to St. François de Paule exists at Bormes even up to the present day, in remembrance of this fortunate event.
The old town itself is built on the sloping bank of a sort of natural amphitheatre, in spite of which it is well shaded and shadowed by numerous great banks of trees, while in everyopen plot may be seen aloes, cactus, agavas, immense geraniums, and the Barbary fig.
The ruins of the feudal château of Bormes recall the memory of the Baroness Suzanne de Villeneuve, of Grasse and Bormes, who, in the sixteenth century, so steadfastly sought to avenge the assassination of her husband.
Bormes possesses one other historic monument in the Hermitage of Notre Dame de Constance, which, on a still higher hill, dominates the town, and everything else within the boundary of a distant horizon, in a startling fashion.
Below, on the outskirts, is an old chapel and its surrounding cemetery, which, more than anything else in all France, looks Italian to every stone.
One other shrine, this time an artistic one as well as a religious one, gives Bormes a high rank in the regard of worshippers of modern art and artists. On the little Place de la Liberté is the Chapelle St. François de Paule, where is interred the remains of the painter Cazin.
In spite of the fact that it is far from the sea, Bormes has its “faubourg maritime,” a little port which has an exceedingly active commerce for its size. In reality the wordportis excessive; it is hardly more than a beachwhere the fishermen’s boats are hauled up like the dories of down-east fishermen in New England. There is an apology for a dike or mole, but it is unusable. This will be the futureville de bainsif Bormes ever really does become a resort of note. Its assured success is not yet in sight, and accordingly Bormes is still tranquil, and there are no noisy trams and hooting train-loads of excursionists breaking the stillness of its tranquil life.
FROMBormes 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 andcalanquesmake 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 leagueof 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 itsbouillabaissehave 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, theplants, 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 thedarse, 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, orplace, 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 somnolentas they were before the advent of electricity and automobiles; indeed, an automobile would have a hard time of it in some of these narrowruelles.
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 foundationwhich 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—becominggarçons de caféorvalets de chambrein 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 ormécanicien.
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.