Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

Many have sung the praises of “Nice la Belle” in prose and verse; in times past, Dupatay, Lalande, and Delille; and, in our own day, Alphonse Karr, Dumas père, De Banville, Mistral, Jacques Normand, Bourget, Nadaud, and a host of others too numerous to mention.

Nice is a marvellous blend of the old and the new; the old quarter of the Niçois, with narrow streets of stairs, overhanging balconies, and all the accessories of the life of the Latins as they have been pictured for ages past; the new, with broad boulevards, straight tree-bordered avenues flanked with gay shops, hotels, kiosks, automobile cabs, and all the rest of what we have come unwisely to regard as the necessities of the age. The curtain of trees flanking these great modern thoroughfares is the only thing that saves them from becoming monotonous; as it is, they are as attractive as any of their kind in Paris, Lyons, or Marseilles.

The Promenade des Anglais is the finest of these thoroughfares. With its yuccas, and its garden, and its sea-wall, and its fringe of white-crested, lapping waves, it is all very entrancing,—all except the inartistic thing of glass roofs and iron struts, known the world over as a pier, and which, in spite of its utility,—if it really is useful,—is an abomination. Artificiality is all very well in its place, but out of place it is as indigestible as the nougat of Montélimar.

The Nice of to-day bears little resemblance to the Nice of half a century ago, as one learns from recorded history and a gossip with an old inhabitant. Then it was simply a collection of maisons groupées, with narrow, crooked streets between, huddled around the flanks of the old château.

In those days the railway ended at Genoa on the east and at Toulon on the west, and the space between was only covered by diligence, horse or donkey back, or by boat. The “high life,” as the French have come themselves to term listlessness and indolence, had not yet arrived, in spite of the fact that its outpost had already been planted at Cannes by England’s chancellor.

Those were parlous times for Monte Carlo. There was but one table for “trente et quarante” and one for “roulette,” and the opening of the game waited upon the arrival of a score of persons who came from Nice daily by voiture publique, via La Turbie, or by the cranky little steamer which took an hour and forty minutes in good weather, and which in bad did not start out at all. On these occasions there was little or nothing “doing” at Monte Carlo, but the new régime saw to it that transportation facilities were increased and improved, and immediately everything prospered.

However much one may deplore the advent of the railway along picturesque travel routes, and it certainly does detract not a little from several charming Riviera panoramas, there is no question but that it is a necessary evil. Perhaps after all it isn’t an evil, for one can be very comfortable in any of the great and luxurious expresses which deposit their hordes all along the Riviera during the winter season. The new thirteen-hour train from Paris, the “Côte d’Azur Rapide,” has already become one of the world’s wonders for speed, taking less than three-quarters of an hour in making the nine stops between Paris and Nice. Then there are the “London-Riviera Express,” the “Vienne-Cannes Express,” the “Calais-Nice Express,” and the Nord-Sud-Brenner (Cannes, Nice, Vintimille to Berlin), with sleeping-cars and dining-cars, but not yet with bathrooms, barber-shops, or stenographers and typewriters, which have already arrived in America, where business is combined with the joy of living.

From the very fact of its past history and of its geographical location, Nice is the most cosmopolitan of all the cities of the Riviera, if we except Monte Carlo.

To the stranger, English, French, and Italians seem to be about on a par at Nice, with a liberal addition of Germans and Russians, though naturally French are really in the majority. There are many Italian-speaking people in the old town of Nice, away from the frankly tourist quarters, but it is a strange Italian that one hears, and in many cases is not Italian at all, but the Niçois patois, which sounds quite as much like the real Provençal tongue as it does Italian, though in reality it is not a very near approach to either.