Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

Between the battery-crowned heights are the reservoirs and magazines of powder, all in full view of the automobile and coach tourists from Nice to Monte Carlo. The route skirts La Revere and the great towering rock back of Monte Carlo, known as the “Tête de Chien,” and the tourist may readily enough judge for himself as to the utility and efficacy of these distinctly modern defences.

The crowning glory, however, is on Mont Agel, the culminating peak in the vicinity of Nice. It is situated at a height of eleven hundred and forty-nine metres, and it would take a long siege indeed to capture this fortress, if things ever came to an issue in its neighbourhood.

Of all the wonderful examples of road-making in France, and they are more numerous and excellent than elsewhere, the “Route de la Grande Corniche” is the best known, covering as it does a matter of nearly fifty kilometres from Nice to Vintimille.

Personally conducted tourists make the trip in brakes and char-à-bancs via Mont Gros and its observatory, the Col des Quatre Chemins, by Eze perched on its pyramidal rock, and La Turbie with its memories of Augustus, until they descend, either via Roquebrune to Menton, or by the steeps of La Turbie to Monte Carlo and its “distractions de haut goût.”

It is all very wonderful and, to the traveller who makes the trip for the first time or the hundredth, the beauties of the panorama which unfolds at every white kilometre stone is so totally different from that which he has just passed that he wonders if he is not journeying on some sort of a magic carpet which simply floats in space. Certainly there is no more beautiful view-point in all the world than that from the height overlooking Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Cap Martin, all bedded like jewels amid an inconceivable brilliancy and softness, a combination which seems paradoxical enough in print, but which in real life is quite the reverse, although it is ravishingly beautiful enough to be unreal.

The twenty-franc excursionists from Nice are rushed out from town in the early morning, via “La Grande Corniche,” to Menton, and back in the early afternoon via the “Route du Bord du Mer,” at something like the speed that the malle-poste of other days used to thread the great national roadways of France. Really the excursion is quite worth the money, and you do cover the ground, but you cover it much too rapidly, and so do the speeding automobilists. By far the best way to drink in all the beauties of this delightful promenade is to devote a week to it, and do it on foot. Walking tours are not fashionable any more, and in many thousands of miles of travel by road in France, the writer has never so much as walked between neighbouring villages, but some day that promenade au pied is going to be made on the “Corniche” between Nice and Menton, returning, as do the “trippers,” via the lower road through Monte Carlo, La Condamine, and Beaulieu. It is the only way to appreciate the artistic beauties, and the strategic value, of this great highway of a civilization of another day, whose life, if not as refined as that of the present, could hardly have been more dissolute than that which to-day goes on to some extent here in this playground of the world.

One should make the journey out by the “Corniche” and back by the waterside, lunching at the auberge at Eze off an anchovy or two, a handful of dried figs, and a flagon of thick, red, perfumed wine. Then he will indeed think life worth living, and regret that such things as railway trains, automobiles, and palace hotels ever existed.

Beyond Nice the Corniche route toward Italy is ample and majestic throughout its whole course, though, as a whole, it is no more beautiful than that Corniche by the Estérel. It winds around Mont Gros, at the back of Nice, and reaches its greatest height just beyond the Auberge de la Drette. En route, at least after passing the Col des Quatre Chemins, there is that ever-present panorama of the Mediterranean blue which all Frenchmen, and most dwellers on its shores, and some others besides, consider the most beautiful bit of water in the world.

To know the full charms of the road from Nice to Villefranche and Beaulieu one should start early in the morning, say in April or even May, when, to him who has only known the Riviera in the winter months, the very liquidness of the atmosphere and the landscape will be a revelation. All is impregnated with a penetrating gentle light, under which the house walls, the roadway, the waves, the rocks, and the foliage take on a subtle tone which is quite indescribable and quite different from the artificiality which is more or less present all through the Riviera towns in winter. There is a difference, too, from the sun-baked dryness of the dead of summer. Each rock, each cliff, each bank of sand, and each wavelet of the Mediterranean has a note which forms the one tone needful for the gamut which is played upon one’s emotions.

Rounding Mont Boron by the coast road, one soon comes to Villefranche, whose very name indicates the privileges which were accorded to it by its founder, Charles II., Comte de Provence et Roi de Naples. Built in 1295, it became at once a free trading port, and speedily drew to itself a very considerable population. Soon, too, it came into prominence as a military port, and the Ducs de Savoie made it their chief arsenal.