Medieval streets and buildings have almost disappeared.
If we except Cap Martin, no Riviera walks are lovelier than those of Cap Ferrat. On the Villefranche side, until you have passed through Saint Jean, the alternative to the tramway road is an inhospitable though tantalizing lane. For large estates, shut off by walls and hedges, are between you and the harbor. Unless you are lucky enough to know one of the owners, you will not see the harbor of Villefranche from the best of the lower vantage points. This side of Villefranche is so sheltered that one resident, an American, has been able to transform his garden into a bit of old Japan where the cherry trees blossom in Nippon profusion and colors.
It is best to pass across the cape, not turning in at the tramway bifurcation, until you reach the Promenade Maurice-Rouvier, which skirts the Anse des Fourmis along the sea from Beaulieu to Saint Jean. After you have reached Saint Jean the peninsula is before you. A maze of superb roads tempt you, circling the fort several hundred feet above sea level, crossing the peninsula on the slopes of the fort, and following the sea. Returning to Saint Jean, there is still another walk directly ahead of you to the east. The Cap du Saint Hospice is pine-clad, with a sixteenth-century tower at its end.
The Artist and I made a mistake of twelve hours in our visit to Saint Hospice. We should have come in the morning for the sunrise. To remedy the error we decided to spend the night at the Hôtel du Pare Saint Jean. But the sun got up long before we did.
"Our usual luck," said the Artist with a grin that had nothing of regret in it.
CHAPTER IX
NICE
Unless the traveler has some special reason for starting at another point, he first becomes acquainted with the Riviera at Nice, and radiates from Nice in his exploration of the coast and hinterland. The Artist confessed to me that in student days the Riviera meant Nice to him, with the inevitable visit to lay a gold piece on the table at Monte Carlo. And it was Nice of the Carnival and Mardi-Gras. I in turn made a similar avowal. We knew well the Promenade des Anglais, the Casino and the Jardin Public opposite, the Place Masséna beyond the garden, where you take a tram or a char à banc to almost anywhere, and the Avenue de la Gare. The Artist had the advantage of me in his intimate sketching knowledge of the old Italian city back from the Quai du Midi, while I knew better than he the Avenue de la Gare. How many times have I pushed a baby carriage up and down that street while my wife shopped!
Nice was to us a resort, cosmopolitan like other famous playgrounds of the world, and where one strictly on pleasure bent had the same kind of a time he would have at Aix-les-Bains or Deauville, Wiesbaden or Ostend, Brighton or Atlantic City. You strolled among crowds, you bought things you did not want, you could not get away from music, you danced and went to the theater or opera, and you spent much too much of your time in hotels and restaurants. If you went on excursions, you enjoyed them, of course. But you always hurried back to Nice in order not to miss doing something of exactly the same kind that you could have done any day in the place you came from.
You have to give Nice time, and get out of your rut, before you awaken to its unique characteristics. Then, if you detach yourself from the amusement-seekers, the time-killers, the apathetic, the bored, the blasé and the conscientious tourists, you begin to realize that the metropolis of the Riviera (including its suburbs and Monte Carlo) is a world in itself—an inexhaustible reservoir for exploration and reflection. Because it is the only place in Europe where Americans (North and South) can honestly say that they feel at home, because it was made for and by everybody and caters to everybody, Nice stands the test of cosmopolitanism. Every great capital and every seaport at the cross-roads of world trade is cosmopolitan, but in a narrower sense than Nice. Capitals and seaports have the general character, in the last analysis the atmosphere, of the country they administer and serve. None has the sans patrie stamp of Nice. If Edward Everett Hale had allowed his hero to go to Nice, the man without a country would not have felt alone in the world.
I was on the Suez Canal when the Germans heralded the Verdun offensive. I hurried back to France, and spent a couple of days with my wife at Nice before going on to the front. They were, perhaps, the most critical days of the war, when one watched the communiqué with the same intensity as one tried to read hope into serious bulletins from a loved one's bedside. After leaving Nice, I discovered that the pall of death did hang over France. But in Nice there seemed to be no mass instinct of national danger, no sickening anxiety. On the Avenue de la Gare I noticed hundreds pass by the newspaper bulletins without displaying enough interest to stop and read.
Two years later, at another critical moment when the Germans were once more closing in on Paris and bombarding the city with the long-distance cannon, I spoke at the Eldorado. The meeting, organized by the Préfet and Maire, drew a large and sympathetic audience. Among residents and visitors are to be found thousands of intense patriots. But when I left the theater and walked back to my hotel, I realized that Nice in 1918 was like Nice in 1916. The population as a whole, inhabitants and guests, had no French national consciousness. When I delivered the same message in the municipal casino of Grasse the next day, I knew that I was again in France. Frenchmen themselves attribute the lack of war spirit in Nice to the general indifference and lesser patriotism of the Midi! But this is because Nice means the Midi to most of them. They are unfair to the Midi. In no way does Nice represent the Midi of France except that it basks in the same sun.
The common explanation of the failure of France to assimilate Nice is that only sixty years have passed since the annexation and that a large portion of the Niçois are Italian in blood and culture and instincts. There may be some truth in all this. But two generations is a long time, and France has proved her ability to make six decades count in attaching to herself and stamping in her image other border populations. Two factors have worked against the assimilation of Nice: the maintenance of the independence of Monaco, with privileges and no responsibilities for its inhabitants; and the enormous number of foreign residents, who have lost their attachment to their own countries and who do not care to give or are incapable of giving allegiance to the country in which they live. Add to these demoralizing influences, at work throughout the sixty years, the flood of tourists and temporary residents of all nations; and is it to be wondered at that the Niçois, native and alien, have so little in common with France?
When you stroll along the Promenade des Anglais, with its hotels and palm-surrounded villas, the Mediterranean coast line extending alluringly from the distant lighthouse of Antibes in the west to the Château, set in green, in the foreground to the east, you feel that you are in one of the fairy spots of the earth. The sea, the city climbing up the hill to Cimiez, the white-capped mountains beyond, and on the handsome promenade the best-gowned of Europe, all in the brilliant sunshine of a soft spring day—what could be more charming? And then, suddenly, your unwilling nostrils breathe in a strong whiff of sewage. Have you been mistaken? Surely you are dreaming. The Casino dances on the water. A bevy of girls come out of the Hôtel Ruhl to join the Lenten noon-day throng. Nothing disagreeable like sewage—but there it is again! Whew! Where can that sewer empty? Fault of French engineering, an American would say.
But the sea has brought me that smell on the boardwalk in front of the Traymore at Atlantic City. It is difficult to get ahead of nature, and the undertow does bring back what you thought you were rid of.
Figuratively speaking, the surprise on the Promenade des Anglais meets you every day in your study of Nice. The city charms: and it repels. You have been drinking in its beauty and its fascination. Suddenly something sordid, ugly, disgusting, breaks the spell. On the Promenade des Anglais sewage greets the eye as well as the nose. Not vicious women and poor little dolls alone, but cruel and weak faces, shifty and vapid faces, self-centered and morose faces, leech faces, pig faces, of well-tailored men—you watch them pass, you remember what you have seen at the tables, in near-by Monte Carlo, and the utter depravity of your race frightens you. Except clothes and jewels and the ability to get a check cashed, what is the difference between these people and the sailors from a hundred ships, making merry with their girls in the narrow streets back from the Vieux Port of Marseilles?
The law of compensation often comforts and cheers. But as often it is remorseless. Broken health and empty purses, desperation, mute suffering and madness, we saw at Monte Carlo. Where the world flocks for pleasure, agony of soul reveals itself more readily than elsewhere because of its incongruity. Nice is full of tragedy, and none takes the pains to conceal it as at Monte Carlo. The casual visitor creates his own atmosphere in Nice, and he goes away with the most pleasant memory, having found what he sought. But you cannot stroll day after day on the Promenade without marking many that do not smile. You watch them and you see unhappiness, unrest, despair, and resignation. It you become acquainted with the life and gossip of the various colonies, you will not need a Victor Marguerite to reveal to you the inner life of the world's "playground." More frequently than not it is a case of on with the dance. What a price people do pay to play!
Just one illustration. The Russians used to be an important factor in the social life of Nice. They had money and they could give an American points on spending. Attracted by the sun, many made their homes in Nice. They lived like the lilies of the field. They could count on a sure thing. The moujiks of great estates toiled for them, and from the days of their great-great-grandfathers the revenues had never ceased. During the first years of the World War, the Russians were in high favor at Nice. They were the powerful allies of France, brothers-in-arms, who fought for the common cause. Then came the Revolution. Cosmopolitan Nice would have forgiven the defection of Russia. But when the revenues from Petrograd and Moscow banks no longer came in, that was another matter! Where the pursuit of pleasure is king, there is no pity for the moneyless courtier, whatever the cause of his change of fortune. The Russians sold their jewels and their fur coats, the rugs and furniture of their villas, and then the villas themselves. Perhaps they were "accommodated" a little bit at first. But they were soon left to their own resources.
Before the end of the war, the center of the Russian colony was a soup kitchen on a side street, presided over by princesses and served by beautiful million-heiresses of the old régime. Good stuff in those girls, too, who smiled as gayly as of old and talked to me eagerly about becoming governesses or stenographers. And real noblesse in the old men who climbed up the narrow stairs with their pails, coming to fetch their one meal of the day. In one of them I recognized a former ambassador to France. The last time I had seen him he was on horseback between Czar Nicholas and President Loubet crossing the Point Alexandre III on the opening day of the Paris Exposition of 1900.
Enough of shadows! None ever went to Nice in search of them, and comparatively few stay long enough to find them. They are in the picture, and there would be no true picture without them. But they ought to stay in the background. They do stay there. You smell the sewage rarely. The all-pervading sunshine is a tonic. Speculating about why others came here and what they are doing with their lives may hold you through the rainy season. The Carnival puts you in a more material frame of mind. Unless Lent is early, the sun begins to warm the cockles of your heart on Mardi-Gras, and by May it will almost blind you on the water-front. One is not in the mood to let the misfortunes and unhappiness and evil of others cloud his joy. After all, of the quarter million pleasure-seekers who come to Nice each year, the greater part are in as good moral health as yourself, and very few of them have any more reason than you to be "in the dumps."
Unless one becomes engrossed in the study of cosmopolitan human nature to the point of being sunshine-proof, one soon tires of the foreign residential and hotel and shopping quarters of the city. They lack "subjects," as the Artist would put it. But at the eastern end of Nice, the Old Town, home of Garibaldi and many another Red Shirt, takes you far from the psychology of cosmopolitanism and the philosophy of hedonism. This is the direction of Grande Corniche, of villa-studded winding and mounting roads, of the best views (if we except Cimiez) of city and sea.
