Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

The assertion “voir La Corse,” in the original, was not a figure of speech, for under certain conditions of wind and weather the same is possible to-day.

A half a dozen kilometres to the eastward of Grasse the highroad crosses the river Loup, and one sees a semicircular town before him known as Villeneuve-Loubet. The town has hotels and all the faint echoes of the watering-places of the coast. This is a pity, for it is delightful, or was, before all this up-to-dateness came. Its château, still proudly rearing its head above the town, was built in the twelfth century by the Comtes de Provence.

The primitive town was called Loubet, a corruption of the name of the river which bathes its walls. Before even the days of the occupation of the Comtes de Provence, as early as the seventh century, there was a monastery here known by the name of Notre Dame la Dorée, of which scanty remains are visible even to-day. Owing to various Mussulman incursions, the occupants of the monastery were forced to flee to the protection of the château, and soon the “Ville-neuve” was created, ultimately forming the hyphenated name by which the place is known to-day.

Still onward, on the road to Nice, is Cagnes, a sort of economical overflow from the more aristocratic resort, with few advantages to-day as an abiding-place, and most of the disadvantages of the larger city. There are tooting trams, automobile garages, and shops for the sale of many of the minor wants of life, which in former times one had to walk the ten or a dozen kilometres into Nice to get. The automobile is a very good thing for touring, but, as a perambulator in which to “run down to the village,” it is much overrated and a confirmed nuisance to every one; and Cannes suffers from this more than any other place in France, unless it be Giverny on the Seine, the most overautomobiled town in the world,—one to every score of inhabitants.

Once Cagnes bid fair to become an artists’ resort, but it became overrun with “tea and toast” tourists, and so it just missed becoming a Pont Aven or a Barbizon. For all that, it is a picturesque enough place to-day; indeed, it is delightful, and if it were not for the automobiles everywhere about, and that awful tram, it would be even more so. However, its little artists’ hotel was, and is, able to make up for a good deal that is otherwise lacking, and the sawmills, brick-works, and distilleries of the neighbourhood are not offensive enough to take away all of its sylvan charm.

In earlier times Cagnes was both a place of military importance and a sort of a city of pleasure, something after the Pompeiian order, one fancies, from the Roman remains which have been found here.

There is an ancient château of the Grimaldi family, still very much in evidence, though it has become the property of a German. In many respects it is a beautiful Renaissance work and is accordingly an architectural monument of rank.

Directly inland from Cagnes is Vence, an ancient episcopal city which was shorn of its ecclesiastical rights at the Revolution. In spite of this the memories and the very substantial reminders of other days, still to be seen within the precincts of the one-time cathedral, give it rank as an ecclesiastical shrine quite out of the ordinary. The church itself is built upon the site, and in part out of, an ancient temple to Cybele, and the fortifications, erected when the Saracens had possession of the city, are still readily traced. It is a most picturesquely disposed little city, and well worth more attention than is generally bestowed upon it.

Between Grasse and Nice lies the valley of the Loup, a stream of some sixty kilometres in length emptying into the Mediterranean, and which has the reputation of being the most torrential waterway in France, in this respect far exceeding the more important streams, such as the Rhône, the Durance, and the Touloubre. Its course is so sinuous, as it comes down from its source in the Alpes-Maritimes, that it is known locally as “le serpent.” With all violence it rolls down its rapidly sloping bed, amid rock-cut gorges and wooded ravines, in quite the manner of the scenic waterfalls of the geographies that one scans at school. It does not resemble Niagara in any manner, nor is it a slim, narrow cascade at any point; but throughout its whole length it is a series of tiny waterfalls which, in a photograph, do indeed look like miniature Niagaras. All along its course are numerous centres of population, though none of them reach to the dignity of a town and hardly that of a village, if one excepts Le Bar, the chief point of departure for excursions in the gorges.

Le Bar is reminiscent of the Saracens, who were for long masters of the neighbouring country. The walls of the houses and barriers are of that warm, rosy, mud-baked tint that one associates mostly with the Orient, and no artist’s palette is too rich in colour to depict them as they are. The Saracens called the place “Al-Bar,” which came later, by an easy process of evolution, to Albarnum, and finally Le Bar.