Amid all the gorgeousness of perhaps the most exquisite beauty-spot in all the world—that same little strip of coast between Hyères and Menton—is a colony of parasitic dwellers who are no part of the attractions of the place; but who unconsciously act as a loadstone which draws countless others of their countrymen, with their never absent diversions of golf, tennis, and croquet. One pursues these harmless sports amid a delightful setting, but why come here for that purpose? One cannot walk the Boulevards and Grandes Promenades all of the time, to be sure, but he might take that rest which he professedly comes for, or failing that, take a plunge into the giddy whirl of the life of the “Casino” or the “Cercle.” The result will be the same, and he will be just as tired when night comes and he has overfed himself with a dîner Parisien at a great palace hotel where the only persons who do not “dress” are the waiters.
This is certain,—the traveller and seeker after change and rest will not find it here any more than in Piccadilly or on Broadway, unless he leaves the element of big hotels far in the background, and lives simply in some little hovering suburb such as Cagnes is to Nice or Le Cannet to Cannes, or preferably goes farther afield. Only thus may one live the life of the author of the following lines:
“There found he all for which he long did crave,
Beauty and solitude and simple ways,
Plain folk and primitive, made courteous by
Traditions old, and a cerulean sky.”
The rest is hubble, bubble, toil, and trouble of the same kind that one has in the hotels of San Francisco, London, or Amsterdam; everything cooked in the same pot and tasting of cottolene and beef extract.
There is some truth in this,—for some people,—but the ties that bind are not taken into consideration, and, though the words are an echo of those uttered by Alphonse Karr when he first settled at St. Raphaël,—after having been driven from Étretat by the vulgar throng,—they will not fit every one’s ideas or pocket-books.
Popularity has made a boulevard of the whole coast from St. Raphaël to San Remo, and indeed to Genoa, and there is no seclusion to be had, nor freedom from the “sirens” of automobiles, or the tin horns of trams and whistles of locomotives; unless one leaves the beaten track and settles in some background village, such as Les Maures or the Estérel, where the hum of life is but the drone of yesterday and Paris papers are three days old when they reach you.
For all that the whole Riviera, and its gay life as well, is delightful, though it is as enervating and fatiguing as the week’s shopping and theatre-going in Paris with which American travellers usually wind up their tour of Europe.
The Riviera isn’t exactly as a Frenchman wrote of it: “all Americans, English, and Germans,” and it is hardly likely you will find a hotel where none of the attendants speak French (as this same Frenchman declared), but nevertheless “All right” is as often the reply as “Oui, monsieur.”
All the multifarious attractions of this strip of coast-line are doubly enhanced by the delicious climate, and the wonders of the Baie des Anges and the Golfe de la Napoule are more and more charming as the sun rises higher in the heavens, and La Napoule, St. Jean, Beaulieu, Passable, Villefranche, Cap Martin, and Cap Ferrat, the “Corniche,” La Turbie, Monaco, and Menton are all names to conjure with when one wants to call to mind what a modern Eden might be like.
Of course Monte Carlo dominates everything. It is the one objective point, more or less frequently, of all Riviera dwellers. The sumptuousness of it acts like a loadstone toward steel, or the candle-flame to the moth, and many are the wings that are singed and clipped within its boundaries.