Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

The ruins of Grimaud’s château are, to be sure, a whited sepulchre, and a dismal one, but the view from the platform is one of great beauty. Les Maures forms an encircling cordon, through which the brilliance of the Golfe breaks toward the south. In the twilight of an early June evening the effect will be surprising and grateful in its quiet grandeur; a welcome change after the refulgence of the Alpine glow of Switzerland and the gorgeous, bloody sunsets of the Mediterranean coast towns.

After a meditation here, one will be in the proper mood for the repose which awaits him at “Annibal’s” in the town below. It is not grand, this little hotel of M. Annibal, but it is typical of the pays, and you, as likely as not, ate your dinner on a little balcony overlooking a little tree-bordered place, which has already put you in a soulful mood. When you return from the château, you will need no sedative to make you sleep, and you will bless the good fortune which brought you thither—if you are a true vagabond and not a devotee of the “resorts.” The latter class are advised to keep away; Grimaud would “bore them stiff,” as a strenuous American, who was “doing” the Riviera on a motor-cycle, told the writer.

La Garde-Freinet next calls one, and it must not be ignored by any who would know what a real mountain town in France is like. It is different from what it is in Switzerland or the Tyrol; in fact, it is not like anything anywhere else. It is simply a distinctively French small town nestling in the heart of the Mediterranean coast range, and cut off from most of the distractions of civilization, except newspapers (twenty-four hours old) and the post and telegraph.

La Garde-Freinet sits almost upon the very crest of the Chaîne des Maures. The road from Grimaud, which is but a dozen kilometres or so, rises constantly through rocky escarpments like a route in Corsica, which indeed the whole region of Les Maures resembles.

All is solitude and of that quietness which one only observes on a lonely mountain road, while all around is a girdle of tree-clad peaks, not gigantic, perhaps, but sufficiently imposing to give one the impression that the road is mounting steadily all of the way, which, even in these days of hill-climbing automobiles, is something which is bound to be remarked by the traveller by road.

Finally one comes in sight of the old Saracen fortress of Fraxinet, or Freinet, from which the present town of something less than two thousand souls takes its name. It stands out in the clear brilliance of the Provençal sky, as if one might reach out his hand and touch its walls, though it is a hundred or more metres above the town, which finally one reaches through the usual narrow entrance possessed by most French towns whether they are of the mountain or the plain.

It was from just such fortified heights as this that the Saracens were able to command all Provence and the valley of the Rhône up to the Jura. Concerning these far-away times, and the exact movements of the Saracens, historians are not very precise, and a good deal has to be taken on faith; but where monuments were left behind to tell the story, albeit they were mostly fortresses, enough has come down to allow one to build up a fabric which will give a more or less just view of the extent of the Saracen influence which swept over southern Gaul from the eighth to the tenth centuries.

They made one of their greatest strongholds here on the Pic du Fraxinet (“the place planted with frênes”), and, in spite of the fact that they were sooner or later driven from their position, as history does tell in this case, their descendants, becoming Christians, were the ancestors of the present growers of mulberry-trees and cork-oaks, and tenders of silk-worms, which form the principal occupations of the inhabitants of La Garde-Freinet to-day.

Any one, with the least eye for the fair sex, will note the fact that the women of La Garde-Freinet—the Fraxinétaines of the ethnologists—have a unique kind of beauty greatly to be admired. They are not as beautiful as the women of Arles, to whom the palm must always be given among the women of France; but they are well-formed, with beautiful hair, great, liquid black eyes, oval faces, and plump, well-formed arms, justifying, even to-day, the beauty which they are supposed to have acquired from their Moorish ancestors.

There are no monuments at La Garde-Freinet except the ruined, dominant fortress, but for all that the pilgrimage is one worth the making, if only for glimpses of those wonderfully beautiful women, or for the delightful journey thither.