Riviera Towns

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

VILLEFRANCHE

During the heat of the war, shortly after the intervention of the United States, I wrote a magazine article setting forth for American readers the claims of France to Alsace-Lorraine and trying to explain why the French felt as they did about Alsace-Lorraine. Of course I spoke of Strasbourg and Mulhouse; but a copy-reader, faithfully making all spellings conform to the Century Dictionary, changed my MS. reading to Strassburg and Mulhaüsen. Can you imagine my horror when I saw those awful German names staring out at me under my own signature—and in an article espousing the side of France in the Alsace-Lorraine controversy? Perhaps not—unless you understand the feeling of the actual possessor and the aspirant to possession of border and other moot territories. "By their spelling ye shall know them!" is their cry. Later, I happened to be in America when that dear good faithful copy-reader changed my Bizerte to the dictionary's Bizerta in an article on Tunis, and was able to go to the mat with him. I explained that the spelling was an essential part of the political tenor of the article.

All this I repeated to the wife and critic combined in one delightful but Ulster-minded person who insisted that in English Menton must be spelled Mentone.

"You write Marseilles instead of Marseille and put the 's' on Lyon too: I've seen you do it!" she cried. "And the French call London Londres!"

"But those cities happen not to be in terre irredente," I explained. "Menton lies too near the Italian frontier for a friend of France to call it Mentone, whatever the English usage may be. If we retain Mentone, why have we abandoned Nizza for Nice, Eza for Éze, Roccabruna for Roquebrune, Monte Calvo for Mont Chauve, Testa del Can for Tête du Chien, Villa Franca for Villefranche?"

"Since you have at last arrived at Villefranche, you had better start your chapter," was her woman's answer.

You may have a confused picture, you may even forget many places you have visited in your travels, but Villefranche? Never! Whether you have first seen Villefranche as you came around the corner of Montboron from Nice or across the neck of Cap Ferrat from Beaulieu on the Petite Corniche, as you came through the Col des Quatre Chemins on the Grande Corniche, or as you climbed up behind Fort Montalban on the Moyenne Corniche, the memory is equally indelible. But each corniche gives a different impression of the only natural harbor on the Riviera. The Petite Corniche, which mounts rather high around Montboron, is the near view. You see only the rade with Cap Ferrat as a background. Approaching in the opposite direction, Montboron is the background. On the Moyenne Corniche the rade comes gradually into your field of vision. You are way above the sea, but the harbor still forms the principal part of the water foreground in the picture. On the Grande Corniche, where the Riviera coast from Cap d'Antibes to Cap Martin is before you, and the Mediterranean rises to meet the sky, every outstanding feature of the picture is a cape or town, fortification or lighthouse, except at Villefranche. Here the land is the setting. The water of the harbor, changing as you look to green and back to blue until you are not sure which is the color, is the feature that attracts and holds you. Montboron, the littoral and Cap Ferrat are as secondary as the prongs and ring which hold a precious stone.

The water edge of the harbor has become conventionalized to a large extent by the artificial stone wall built at the inner end and part-way along the Montboron slope, to make possible railway and carriage road, and by the quays and breakwaters. But enough of the unimproved line remains to indicate how the harbor must have looked before the masons got to work. The rocks of Villefranche are copper with streaks of brown-gray that change in depth of color as the sunlight changes in intensity. Water and rocks are not afraid to compete with flowers and trees and mountain shades for the Artist's attention. Villefranche as a maritime picture wins. And yet foliage and flora are no mean rivals. Turning the point of Montboron from Nice has brought you from the climate where many southland growths are exotic to the beginning of the tropical portion of the Riviera which extends into Italy, with Menton and Bordighera as its most typical spots.

Villefranche comes close after Menton—and ahead of Beaulieu and Monte Carlo and Condamine—in the claim to a perennial touch of the south. From Montboron to the hills east of Oneglia the mountain wall protects from the north wind and radiates the sun. But there is no deep harbor like that of Villefranche: and no other place has a Cap Martin to form a windshield from strong sea breezes.

Climate as much as the safe anchorage attracted pirates. From the Caliph Omar to the last of the Deys of Algiers, Mohammedan corsairs swept the Mediterranean. Because the Maritime Alps deprived the inhabitants of the Riviera of retreat to or succor from the hinterland, this coast was the joy of Saracens and Moors, Berbers and Turks. It is hard to believe that up to a hundred years ago the Riverains—the inhabitants of all the Mediterranean littoral, in fact, from Gibraltar to Messina—were constantly in danger of corsair raids just as our American pioneer ancestors were of Indian raids. The lay of the land and the lack of a powerful suzerain state to defend them made the Riverains facile prey. Villefranche afforded the easiest landing. Try to climb up from Villefranche over crags and through stone-paved and rock-lined ravines to the Moyenne Corniche, and then on to the higher mountain-slopes, and you can imagine how difficult it was to get away from raiders, and why the Barbary pirates took a full bag of luckless Riverains on every raid. You comprehend the raison d'être of the fortified hill towns, and Éze, perched on her cliff, has a new meaning as you look down on Villefranche. This fastness was held by the Saracens long after the crescent yielded elsewhere to the cross—and then became a frequent refuge for the descendants of the victors in the medieval struggle.