Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

Occasionally one does see a small town in France which reminds him of Italy, and occasionally one that suggests Holland, but mostly they are French and nothing but French, though they be as varied in colour as Joseph’s coat, and as diversified in manners and customs as one would imagine of a country whose climate runs the whole gamut from northern snows to southern olive groves.

In reality, Cuers shares its importance with Les Solliès, whose curious name grew up from the memory of a Temple of the Sun, upon the remains of which is built the present church of Solliès-Ville.

In Les Maures

Solliès-Pont owes its name to the pont, or bridge, by which the “Route Nationale” crosses the Gapeau. It is the centre of the cherry culture in the Var, and at the time of year when the trees are in blossom, the aspect of the surrounding hillsides would put cherry-blossoming Japan to shame. The crop is the first which comes into the market in France. The lovers of early fruits, in Paris restaurants and hotels, know the “cerises du Var” very well indeed. They buy them at the highest market prices, delightfully put up in boxes of poplar-wood and garnished with lace-paper. Annually Solliès-Pont despatches something like a hundred thousand cases of these first cherries of the year, each weighing from three to twelve kilos, and bringing—well, anything they can command, the very first perhaps as much as eight or ten francs a kilo. This for the first few straggling boxes which some fortunate grower has been able to pick off a well-sunned tree. Within a fortnight the price will have fallen to fifty centimes, and at the end of a month the traffic is all over, so far as the export to outside markets is concerned.

“Cherries are grown everywhere,” one says. Yes, but not such cherries as at Solliès-Pont.

Here at this little railway station in the Var one may see a whole train loaded with a hundred thousand kilos of the most luscious cherries one ever cast eyes upon.

The aspect of the region round about has nothing of the grayness of the olive orchards east and west; all this has given way to a flowering radiance and a brilliant green, as of an oasis in a desert.

The gathering of this important crop is conducted with more care than that of any other of the Riviera. The trees are not shaken and their fruit picked up off the ground, nor do agile lads climb in and out among the branches. Not even a ladder is thrust between the thick leaves of the trees, but a great straddling stepladder, like those used by the olive pickers of the Bouches-du-Rhône, is carried about from tree to tree, and gives a foothold to two, three, or even four lithe, young girls, whose graces are none the less for their gymnastics at reaching for the fruit head-high and at arm’s length.