Some day a “Club Privé,” and “Promenades,” and “Places,” and “Squares” will come, and an effort will be made to stop the flood of English and American and German tourists, who are appropriating nearly every beauty-spot on the Riviera where there is a post-office and a telegraph station.
Above, on a hill to the eastward, is a chapel dedicated to Nôtre Dame de Pitié, greatly venerated by the fishermen and sailors of the town, but mostly remembered by travellers for the very remarkable outlook which is to be had from the platform of its great square tower. With its rectangular little houses glistening white in the sunlight, and red roofs, and great towering palms and eucalyptus, St. Nazaire resembles a great flowering bouquet, and when the simile is carried further, and the bouquet is tied up with a waving ribbon of yellow sand, and placed in a broad blue vase of the sea, the picture is one which, once seen, will be unforgettable.
Toward the horizon is seen a cone which bears the enigmatical name of Six-Fours. More majestic is Cap Sicié, which breaks the waves of the Mediterranean into myriads of flakes, and gives a warning to the ships lying in the basins at Marseilles that the sea is rising, and that one of those intermittent tempests, for which the Golfe de Lyon is noted, is due. Cap Nègre lies farther in, a black basalt wall which gives an accent of sombreness to the otherwise gay picture.
CHAPTER II.
OVER CAP SICIÉ
THE great promontory of Cap Sicié is a peninsula, five kilometres across the “neck,” and jutting seaward double that distance.
Just beyond Sanary, or St. Nazaire-du-Var, is the great Baie de Sanary, snuggled close under the promontory height and forming a welcome shelter from the seas which pile up on the coast from Toulon to Marseilles.
There is a little excursion offshore which one should make before he descends on the great arsenal of Toulon, on the other side of the Cap; but unless the traveller is forewarned he is likely to overlook it altogether, and thereby miss what to many will be a new form of human happiness.
Travellers to Naples make the trip to Ischia, if they are not afraid of earthquakes; or to Capri, if they like the damp of the grottoes; but travellers en route to Toulon may make the short trip to the Iles des Embiez, from the little haven of Le Brusc, and have something of the suggestion of both the former popular tourist points,—with an utter absence of tourists.
Embiez is not much of an island in point of size, and the map-makers scarcely know it at all. One makes his way from Le Brusc, through an expanse of calm and limpid water, on a flat-bottomed sort of craft which looks as though it might have degenerated from a punt.
The way is not long; it is astonishingly short for a sea voyage, and it is only with a previous knowledge of the shallows—or, rather, the deeps—that the craft can find its way across the scarcely hidden banks of yellow sand. Fifteen minutes of this voyaging brings one to the isle, and from its little jetty a douanier accosts your boat to know if you have anything dutiable on board, as well as for your ship’s papers, and a doctor’s certificate. He need have no fears, however, for no one would ever take the trouble to smuggle anything into Embiez. “Nothing doing,” and the douanier returns to his fishing off the jetty’s end.