Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

It is not far from La Foux to the plain of Cogolin. A league or more behind one of the first buttresses of Les Maures, one enters the rich alluvial prairie of Cogolin. Sheep, goats, and cows, and the Arabian-blooded horses, which are so much admired at the courses at La Foux, find welcome pasture here in these verdant fields.

Cogolin is not the capital of the Golfe country, that honour belonging to Grimaud, of which St. Tropez is virtually the port; still, Cogolin is quite a little metropolis, and is the centre of the liveliest happenings of all the region between Hyères and Fréjus. The town has two different aspects, one banal and modern, and the other picturesque and feudal, recalling the thirteenth-century days of the Grimaldis, who built the château of which the present belfry formed a part.

Cogolin is uninteresting enough in its newer parts, but as one ascends the slope of the hill on which the town is built it grows more and more picturesque until, when the lower town is actually lost sight of, it finally takes rank as a delightful old-world place, with scarce a note of the twentieth century about it, where they still bring water from the public fountain and most of the shops of the smaller kind transact their business on the sidewalk—where there is one.

There is a peculiar odour all over Cogolin, which comes from the manufacture of corks and queer-looking “whisk-brooms.” It’s not a bad or unhealthful smell, but it is peculiar, and many will not like it. From Cogolin all roads lead to the heart of the Maures, and the stream of carts loaded with great slabs of cork is incessant.

Here, as in many other parts of Les Maures, the manufacture of corks is an industry which furnishes a livelihood to many. The workrooms of the cork-makers, to attract clients or amuse the populace—the writer doesn’t know which—are often in full view from the street. Certainly it is amusing to see a workman stamp out, or cut out, the corks and drop them into a waiting basket, as if they were plums gathered from a tree. In the larger establishments, where the work is done by machinery, the process is more complicated, and less interesting, and the writer did not see that any better results were obtained.

The whole region of Les Maures is dominated by the chêne-liège, or the cork-oak. Usually they are great, straight-trunked trees with a heavy foliage. Some still possess their natural brown trunks, and some are a gray fawn colour, showing that they are already aged and have been many times robbed of their bark for the manufacture of floats for the fisherman’s nets and corks for bottles. The first coat which is stripped has no mercantile value, and the trunk is left to heal itself as best it may, the sap oozing out and forming another skin, which in due time forms the cork-bark of commerce.

The trees are stripped only in part at one time, else they would perish. The first marketable crop is gathered in ten or a dozen years, and it takes another decade before the same portion can be again obtained.

This cork-bark industry means a fortune to Les Maures and its rather scanty population. The discovery, or real development, of the industry was due to a lonesome shepherd, who, finding how soft and compressible the bark of the chêne-liège really was, manufactured a few corks to pass the time while watching his flocks, taking them at the first opportunity to town, to see if he could find a market, which, needless to say, he did immediately. The account has something of a legendary flavour about it, but no doubt the discovery was made in just such a way.

Cogolin has another industry which, in its way, is considerable,—the manufacture of briar pipes, though mostly it is the gathering of the briar-roots which makes the industry, the actual fashioning of the pipes themselves being carried on most extensively at St. Claude in the Jura, to which point many train-loads of the roots are sent each year. Just why the industry should be carried on so far from the source of supply of the raw material is one of the problems that economists are trying always to solve, but the traffic clings tenaciously to the customs of old. When Les Maures goes in for the manufacture of briar pipes on a large scale there will be a new and increased prosperity for the inhabitants; this in spite of the growing consumption of the deadly cigarette, which, in France, is made of something which looks amazingly like cabbage-stalk—and a poor quality at that. The contempt for French tobacco is of long duration. It is recalled that a certain minister under Charles X. was invited to smoke smuggled tobacco at a friend’s house, and was implored to use his influence to the substituting of the same grade of tobacco for the poisonous cabbage-leaf then grown in France. His reply was appreciative but non-committal, and so the thing has gone on to this day, and the French public smokes uncomplainingly a very ordinary tobacco.

Three kilometres distant sits Grimaud, snug and serene on the terrace of a mountainside, overlooking Cogolin and the Golfe, and all its environment. The little town has all the characteristics of its neighbours, with perhaps a superabundance of shade-trees for a place which has not very ample streets and squares. At the apex of the ascending ruelles is a cone which is surmounted by the pathetic ruins of the old château of the Grimaldi. Without grandeur and without life, this château is in strong contrast with the palace of the present members of the ancient house of Grimaldi, the Prince of Monaco and his family.