Gallant Frenchmen rushed to her aid from all quarters: “Vous n’avez pas de mal, madame?” “Merci, non, seulement une petite sac de voyage,” she replied, as she limpingly and lispingly made her way through the crowd.
This ought to dispose of the language question once for all. If you are on the Riviera, speak English, or, likely enough, you will fall into similar errors unless you know that vague thing, idiomatic French, which is only acquired by familiarity.
The French Riviera has from forty to fifty rainy days a year, which is certainly not much; and it is conceivable that a stay of two months at Nice, Cannes, or Menton will not bring a rainy day to mar the memory of this sunny land. On the other hand, the Levantine Riviera may have ten days of rain in a month, and the next month another ten days may follow—or it may not. It is well, however, not to overlook the fact that Pisa, not so very far inland from the easternmost end of the Italian Riviera, is called the “Pozzo dell Italia”—the well of Italy.
There was a time when Cannes, Nice, and Menton were favoured as invalid resorts, and as mere pleasant places to while away a dull period of repose, but to-day all this is changed, and even the semi-invalid is looked at askance by the managers of hotels and the purveyors of amusements.
The social attractions have quite swamped the health-giving inducements of the chief towns of the Riviera, and the automobile has taken the place of the Bath chair; indeed, it is the world, the flesh, and the devil which have come into the province where ministering angels formerly held sway.
At the head of all the throng of Riviera pleasure-seekers are the royalties and the nobility of many lands. “Au-dessous d’eux,” as one reads in the monologue of Charles Quint, “la foule,” but here the throng is still those who have the distinction of wealth, whatever may be their other virtues. A “petit millionaire Français,” by which the Frenchman means one who has perhaps thirty thousand francs a year, stands no show here; his place is taken by the sugar and copper kings and “milords” and millionaires from overseas.
There are others, of course, who come and go, and who have not got a million sous, or ever will have, but the best they can do is to hire a garden seat on the promenade and with Don Cesar de Bazan “regarder entrer et sortir les duchesses.” It is either this (in most of the resorts of fashion along the Riviera) or one must “manger les haricots” for eleven months in order to be able to ape “le monde” for the other twelfth part of the year. Most of us would not do the thing, of course, so we are content to slip in and out, and admire, and marvel, and deplore, and put in our time in some spot nearer to nature, where dress clothes cease from troubling and functions are no more.
CHAPTER IV.
HYÈRES AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
JUST off the coast road from Toulon to Hyères is the tiny town of La Garde. The commune boasts of twenty-five hundred inhabitants, most of whom evidently live in hillside dwellings, for the town proper has but a few hundreds, a very few, judging from its somnolence and lack of life. More country than town, the district abounds in lovely sweeps of landscape. Pradet, another little village, lies toward the coast, and, amid the dull grays of the olive-trees, gleams the white tower of a chapel which belongs to the modern château. The chapel, which bears the sentimental nomenclature of “La Pauline,” is filled by a wonderful lot of sculptures from the chisel of Pradier. Decidedly it is a thing to be seen and appreciated by lovers of sculptured art, even though its modern château is painful in its bald, pagan architectural forms.
Beyond La Garde lies the plain of Hyères, and offshore the great Golfe de Giens, well sheltered and surrounded by the peninsula of the same name, one of the beauty-spots of the Mediterranean scarcely known and still less visited by tourists. Directly off the tip end of the peninsula of Giens is a little group of rocky isles known as the Iles d’Hyères. They are indescribably lovely, but the seafarers of these parts of the Mediterranean dread them in a storm as do Channel sailors the Casquets in a fog.