It was an important place under the Roman domination, and, in time, when the town came to be a valued possession of the Comtés de Provence, the cross succeeded the crescent. In the tiny church of the town there is a remarkable ancient painting picturing a “danse macabre,” supposed to be of the fifteenth century.
Gourdon
Above Le Bar is the aerial village of Gourdon, fantastic in name, situation, and all its elements. At its feet rushes the restless Loup, and tears its way through one of those curious rock-walls which one only sees in these parts. To the westward is the curious and imposing outline of Grasse, the metropolis of the neighbourhood.
Near by the railway crosses the ravine on an imposing and really beautiful modern viaduct of seven arches, each twelve metres in height—nearly forty feet.
Up the ravine toward the source, or downward to the sea, the charms multiply themselves like the glasses of the kaleidoscope until one, as a result of a first visit to this much neglected scenic spectacle, is quite of the mind that it resembles nothing so much as a miniature Yellowstone.
CHAPTER X.
NICE AND CIMIEZ
WHEN one crosses the Var he crosses the ancient frontier between France and the Comté de Nice. The old-time French inhabitants of the Comté ever considered it an alien land, and invariably expressed the wish to be buried in the Cemetery of St. Laurent du Var, just over the border in the royal domain.
The present Pont du Var, which one crosses as he comes from the westward, from Cagnes or Antibes, is the successor of another flung across the same stream by Vauban, much against his will, it would seem, for he said boldly that it was so foolish a project as never to be worth a hundredth part of its cost. How poorly he reckoned can be judged by the hundreds of thousands of travellers—millions doubtless—who, in later years, have made use of it. He evidently did not foresee the tide of tourist travel, whatever may have been his genius as a military engineer.