Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

At Cavalaire the mountains of the Maures become less abrupt, and surround the bay in a low semicircle of foot-hills, quite different from the precipitous “corniches” of the Estérel or the mountains beyond Nice.

The Baie de Cavalaire has nearly a league of fine sands; not so extensive that they are as yet in demand as an automobile race-track, but fine enough to rank as quite the best of their kind on the whole Mediterranean shore of France. There will never be a resort here which will rival Nice or Cannes; these latter have too great a start; but whatever does grow up here in the way of a watering-place—a railway station and a Café-Restaurant famous for its bouillabaisse have already arrived—will surpass them in many respects.

The place has, moreover, according to medical reports, the least contrasting day and night temperature in winter of any of the Mediterranean stations. This would seem cause enough for the founding here of a great resort, but there is nothing of the kind nearer than the little village of Le Lavandou, passed on the road from Bormes, a hamlet whose inhabitants are too few for the makers of guide-books to number, but which already boasts of a Grand Hotel and a Hôtel des Étrangers.

At La Croix, just north of the Baie de Cavalaire, has grown up a little winter colony, consisting almost entirely of people from Lyons. It is here that formerly existed some of the most celebrated vineyards in Provence, the plants, it is supposed, being originally brought hither by the Saracens.

The sudden breaking upon one’s vision of the ravishing Golfe de St. Tropez, with its bordering fringe of palms, agavas, and rose-laurels, and its wonderful parasol-pines, which nowhere along the Riviera are as beautiful as here, is an experience long to be remembered.

The lovely little town of St. Tropez sleeps its life away on the shores of this beautiful bay, quite in idyllic fashion, though it does boast of a Tribunal de Pêche and of a few small craft floating in the gentle ripples of the darse, the little harbour enclosed by moles of masonry from the open gulf.

Up and down this basin are groups of fine parti-coloured houses, all with a certain well-kept and prosperous air, with nothing of the sordid or base aspect about them, such as one sees on so many watersides. A little square, or place, forms an unusual note of life and colour with its central statue of the great sailor, Suffren.

Only on this square and on the quays are there any of the modern attributes of twentieth-century life; the narrow but cleanly streets away from the waterside are as calm and somnolent as they were before the advent of electricity and automobiles; indeed, an automobile would have a hard time of it in some of these narrow ruelles.

The near-by panorama seen from the quays, or the end of the stone pier-head, is superb. The whole contour of the Golfe is a marvel of graceful curves, backed up with sloping, well-wooded hills and, still farther away, by the massive black of the Maures, the hill of St. Raphaël, and the red and brown tints of the Estérel, while still more distant to the northward, hanging in a soft film of vapour, are the peaks of the snowy Alps.

By following the old side streets, crowded with overhanging porches and projecting buttresses, with here and there a garden wall half-hiding broad-leafed fig-trees and palms, one reaches the Promenade des Lices, a remarkably well-placed and appointed promenade, shaded with great plane-trees, in strong contrast to the occasional pines and laurels.