The Riviera of the Corniche Road

by Frederick Treves

There is a class of English lady—elderly, dour and unattached—that is comprised under the not unkindly term of “aunt.” They are propriety personified. They are spoken of as “worthy.” Although not personally attractive they are eminent by reason of their intimate knowledge of the economics of life abroad. To them those human mysteries, the keeper of the pension, the petty trader and the laundress are as an open book. They fill the frivolous bachelor with reverential alarm, but their acquaintance with the rate of exchange, the price of butter and the cheap shop is supreme in its intricacy. These “aunts” are to be found in larger numbers in Mentone than in any other resort of the English in France.

The old town of Mentone is small and circumscribed. It stands in the centre of the place as a low hillock or promontory. In relation to the rest of Mentone it is like the brown body of a butterfly whose gaudy wings are spread over the West Bay on the one side and the East Bay on the other.

The history of Mentone is meagre and of little interest. Compared with neighbouring towns it is of no great antiquity. The Romans passed by the site on which it stands without a halt. The Lombards and the Saracens left the spot alone for it offered no attractions to the neediest robber. According to Dr. Müller, whose work on Mentone is above praise, there is no mention of the town in the old chronicles until the commencement of the thirteenth century. It was a small place but poorly fortified and therefore little able to protect itself. It became in consequence the victim of any tyrant in the country round and its experience of tyranny must have been long-enduring and acute.

It seems to have belonged first to Ventimiglia and then to have been the property of the Vento family of Genoa. Later it came under the rule of the Counts of Provence and in 1346 was purchased by Carlo Grimaldi of Monaco for sixteen thousand gold florins. It remained a part of the principality of Monaco for some hundreds of years. It was but slightly disturbed by the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, because it was so little worth fighting about. In 1848 the whole population of Mentone, under the leadership of the Chevalier Trenca, rose against the oppression of the Grimaldi and the town became, with Roquebrune, a republic. Finally it was sold by Monaco to France in 1861 for the sum of four million francs and there its story ends.

MENTONE: THE EAST BAY.

The best general view of Mentone is to be obtained from the pier. Between the East Bay and the West stands the old town, a heap of drab houses and red roofs, piled up in the form of a mound on the summit of which are St. Michael’s Church and the plume-like cypresses of the old cemetery. Behind this drab town are two green hills, round and low—St. Vincent and Les Chappes; and beyond again—shutting out the world—are the ash-grey slopes of the Maritime Alps. To the west is the massif of Mont Agel and the crag of St. Agnes; while to the east is the towering height of the Berceau.

The old town is small, but it has the merit—rare in these parts—of being clean and free from “the evil smell” of which Mr. Hare has complained. It is Italian in character and, owing to its place on a hill, is made up of steep lanes and many stairs, of headlong passages and vaulted ways. The numerous arches that cross the streets are the outcome of an experience of earthquakes painfully acquired in years gone by. At the foot of the town is the Place du Cap out of which certain undecided old lanes ramble to the sea, with the rolling gait of unsteady mariners. Among these the Ruelle Giapetta and the Rue du Bastion are notable by their picturesqueness.

The way up to the old town is by the steps of the Rue des Logettes. The first street encountered is the Rue de Bréa. It is a mean street, but it is occupied by houses which have been, at one time, among the most pretentious in Mentone. At No. 3 Napoleon lodged during the Italian campaign. It is a large building of four stories with a fine doorway in white stone. It is now given up to poor tenants who hang their washing out of the windows. At No. 2, a private house in comfortable state, General Bréa was born in 1790. He was one of Napoleon’s generals, was at Leipzig and Waterloo and was assassinated in Paris on June 24th, 1848. On the wall of a garden in the Rue Bréa is a marble tablet to commemorate the visit of Pius VII in 1814. The Pope was returning to Rome after his long exile in France and it was from the terrace of this garden that he blessed the people crowding in the street. While dealing with famous people it may be noted that in the Rue St. Michel (No. 19) is the house in which the Chevalier Carlo Trenca was born, the president of the short-lived Republic of Mentone.