test this with half an hour in the old part of the town. It will not be disappointing. Facing the wide Cours Masséna is the medieval wall of the town, with a big round-towered gateway leading into a street that almost at once brings one out on to the seaward defensive wall, at the base of which the waves break continuously, often shooting up columns of spray on to the pathway above. In the narrow streets there are arches, quaint doorways, and medieval defensive towers, often incorporating Roman stones and many other details telling of the changes that time has wrought. A narrow doorway in the old wall at the harbour end of the Cours Masséna has a stone lintel from some Roman building, placed upside down by the medieval masons. One of the most interesting relics of the Greek town is a dark green diorite boulder, bearing the strange inscription: ‘I am Terpon, servant of the august goddess Aphrodite; may Cypris reward with her favours those that erected me here.’
The Îles des Lérins that lie opposite Cannes are full of interest. Steamboats ply regularly to them from the harbour. Ste. Marguerite, the larger island, retains the fort, built by Cardinal Richelieu, wherein was imprisoned by Louis XIV., at the end of the seventeenth century, the mysterious ‘Man with the Iron Mask.’
St. Honorat, the smaller island, is the Lindisfarne of the South of France, for there, during the European upheavals in the fifth century, St. Honorat founded a monastery and kept alive the sacred spark of a pure and restrained life beyond the reach of the barbarous waves of invasion that were sweeping over south-western Europe. In the eighth century Saracens wiped out the monastery and massacred the monks, but their crude weapons could not destroy the influence which had gone forth from the islet in the four centuries of its previous existence. In the ninth century the monastery was refounded, and two hundred years later the fortified building existing to-day was put up to secure the monks from attack.
NICE
Town Plan No. 25.—NICE.
may be described as ‘Paris by the Sea.’ Its wide streets are entirely reminiscent of the metropolis, and the whole life of the great resort is French, in marked contrast to the English feeling of Cannes. The enormous hotels, the plane-bordered streets, the kiosks, the trams, and the people, are all so essentially Parisian that, out of sight of the sea or the mountains, one easily forgets that one is by the
CAP MARTIN.