St. Tropez’s history is ancient enough to please the most blasé delver in the things of antiquity. It may have been the Gallo-Grec Athenopolis, or it may have been the Phœnician Heraclea Caccabaria; but, at all events, its present growth came from a foundation which followed close upon the death of the martyr St. Tropez in the second century.
St. Tropez, in the days when sailing-ships had the seas to themselves, was possessed of a traffic and a commerce which, with the advent of the building of great steamships, lapsed into inconsequential proportions. The yards where the wooden ships were built and fitted out are deserted, and a part of the population has gone back to the land or taken to fishing; others—the young men—becoming garçons de café or valets de chambre in the great tourist hotels of the coast; or, rather, they did look upon these occupations as a bright and rosy future, until the coming of the automobile, since when the peasant youth of France aspires to be a chauffeur or mécanicien.
A new industry has recently sprung up at St. Tropez, the manufacture of electric cables, but it has not the picturesqueness, nor has it as yet reached anything like the proportions, of the old hempen cordage industry.
Ruined Chapel near St. Tropez
St. Tropez possesses its wonderful Golfe, its gardens, and its “Petite Afrique,” and is more and more visited by Riviera tourists; but it still awaits that great tide of traffic which has made more famous and rich many other less favoured Mediterranean coast towns. There is a reason for all this; principally that it faces the mistral’s icy breath, for the coast-line has here taken a bend and the Golfe runs inland in a westerly direction, which makes the town face directly north. As an offset to this the inhabitant points out to you that you may regard the sea without being troubled by the sun shining in your eyes.
At the head of the Golfe is La Foux. It sits in the midst of a sandy plain, surrounded by a border of superb umbrella-pines. The chief attraction for the visitor is the remarkable specimens of the little horses of Les Maures to be seen here. They are known as “les Eygues,” and have preserved all the purity of the type first brought from the Orient by the Saracens. Six centuries and more have not wiped out the Arab strain to anything like the extent that might be supposed, and accordingly the little horses of Les Maures are vastly more docile and agreeable playmates than the “petits chevaux” of the Casinos of Monte Carlo and Nice.
The umbrella or parasol pines of La Foux are famous throughout the whole Riviera. Elsewhere there are isolated examples, but here there are groves of them, all branching with a wide-spreading luxuriance which is quite at its best. It might seem as though they were planted by the hand of man, so decorative are they to the landscape from any point of view, but most of them are of an age that precludes all thought of this.
The giant of its race is directly on the bank of the Golfe, near the Château de Berteaux. Its branches extend out in every direction, like the ribs of a parasol or umbrella, and its trunk is thirty feet or more in circumference, while the shadow from its overhanging branches makes a great round oasis of shade in the brilliant Mediterranean sunlight. The tree and its position cannot be mistaken by travellers by road or rail, for the railway itself has a “halte” almost beneath its branches. All around these parasol-pines push themselves up through the sand which has been carried down into the headwaters of the Golfe by the Mole and the Giscle, torrents which at certain seasons bring down a vast alluvial deposit from the upper valleys of Les Maures.