The bare term “The Corniche Road” is, however, generally understood to refer to the greatest road of them all, La Grande Corniche.
AT THE BEND OF THE ROAD.
Of all the great roads in Europe it is probable that La Grande Corniche—which runs from Nice eastwards towards Italy—is the best known and the most popular. Roads become famous in many ways, some by reason of historical associations, some on account of the heights they reach, and others by the engineering difficulties they have been able to surmount. La Grande Corniche can claim none of these distinctions. It is comparatively a modern road, it mounts to little more than 1,700 feet, and it cannot boast of any great achievement in its making. It passes by many towns but it avoids them all, all save one little forgotten village outside whose walls it sweeps with some disdain.
It starts certainly from Nice, but it goes practically nowhere, since long before Mentone is in view it drops into a quite common highway, and thus incontinently ends. It is not even the shortest way from point to point, being, on the contrary, the longest. It cannot pretend to be what the Italians call a “master way,” since no road of any note either enters it or leaves it.
In so far as it evades all towns it is unlike the usual great highway. It passes through no cobbled, wondering street; breaks into no quiet, fountained square; crosses no market-place alive with chattering folk; receives no blessing from the shadow of a church. Nowhere is its coming heralded by an avenue of obsequious trees, it forces its way through no vaulted gateway, it lingers by no village green, it knows not the scent of a garden nor the luscious green of a cultivated field. Neither the farmer’s cart nor the lumbering diligence will be met with on this unamiable road, nor will its quiet be disturbed by the patter of a flock of sheep nor by a company of merry villagers on their way to the fair.
La Grande Corniche is, in fact, a modern military road built by the French under Napoleon I in 1806. It was made with murderous intent. It was constructed to carry arms and men, guns and munitions and the implements of war. It was a road of destruction designed to convey bloodshed and desolation into Italy and beyond. He who conceived it had in his mind the picture of a road alive, from end to end, with columns of fighting men marching eastwards under a cloud of angry dust with the banner of France in the van; had in his ears the merciless tramp of ten thousand feet, the clatter of sweating cavalry, the rumble of unending cannon wheels. It was a picture, he thought, worthy of the heart-racking labour that the making of the road involved.
But yet, in spite of all this, the popularity of the road is readily to be understood. It is cut out, as a mere thread, upon the side of a mountain range which is thrown into as many drooping folds as is a vast curtain gathered up into a fraction of its width. It is never monotonous, never, indeed, even straight. It winds in and out of many a valley, it skirts many a fearful gorge, it clings to the flank of many a treacherous slope. Here it creeps beneath a jutting crag, there it mounts in the sunlight over a radiant hill or dips into the silence of a rocky glen.
It has followed in its making any level ledge that gave a foothold to man or beast. It has used the goat track; it has used the path of the mountaineer; while at one point it has taken to itself a stretch of the ancient Roman road. It is a daring, determined highway, headstrong and self-confident, hesitating before no difficulty and daunted by no alarms, heeding nothing, respecting nothing, and obedient only to the call “onwards to Italy at any cost!”