CAP FERRAT is the name of a narrow tongue of land which is suddenly thrust out into the sea between Villefranche and Beaulieu. It is one of the great landmarks along the coast, is nearly a mile in length and rises at one point to the height of 446 feet. It is a peninsula of rock covered with trees and forms a pleasant strip of green athwart the blue expanse of water. At its further end it breaks up into two capes which spread apart like the limbs of a Y. One is Cap de St. Hospice, the other Cap Ferrat.
Cap de St. Hospice is a very humble cape, small and low. All the present dignity of the peninsula belongs to Cap Ferrat, which has a lighthouse on its point and a great hotel, as well as a semaphore on a hill and a number of villas of high quality. Cap de St. Hospice has none of these things; but it possesses a little fishing village, a lonely church, an ancient tower and a wealth of glorious memories. Cap Ferrat is modern. It has no associations; for until the road-maker and the villa builder came it was merely a strip of rough forest. The whole interest of this would-be island centres around the promontory of St. Hospice.
ST. PAUL DU VAR: A SIDE STREET.
ST. PAUL DU VAR: A SHOP OF THE MEDIÆVAL TYPE.
In the early days the land, far and wide, that bordered on the cape was buried in the gloom of paganism. It was as dark as a moonless night in winter and as chill. Then, in a certain year, a spark of light appeared on Cap de St. Hospice. It was very small, a mere isolated speck in the overwhelming shadow. It glowed from a humble monastery of a few stone huts which formed the first Christian settlement in this part of the Mediterranean. With the passage of years the spark grew until the darkness about the cape changed to day and the whole country beyond was flooded with a light that men came to know as the Light of the World.
The missionary who established himself upon this remote point of land was St. Hospice or St. Auspicius. He, with only a few followers, planted on the cape, in the year 560, an outpost of the Christian religion. So primitive and crude was the settlement that it was rather an entrenchment than a monastery. Of the rough stone hovels that composed it no trace, of course, exists.