St. Raphaël
There was some sort of a feudal town here in the middle ages, but it never grew to historical or artistic importance, and the town was little known until the advent of Alphonse Karr and his fellows, who made of it, or at least intimated that it could be made, what it is to-day,—a “winter resort,” or, as the French have it, a “station hivernale.” It is a very simple expression, but one which leads to a certain amount of misunderstanding among the newcomers, who think that they have only to take up their residence, from November to March, anywhere along the shores of the Mediterranean east of Marseilles to swelter in tropical sunshine. This they will not do, and unless they keep indoors between five and seven in the evening on most days, they will get a chill which will not only go to the marrow, but as like as not will carry pneumonia with it; that is, if one dresses in what are commonly called “summer clothes,” the kind that are pictured in the posters which decorate the dull walls of the railway stations as being suitable for the life of the Riviera.
St. Raphaël is not wholly given up to pleasure, for it is a notable fact that in industrial enterprise it has already surpassed Fréjus, due principally to a vast traffic in bauxite, a clay from which aluminium is obtained, and there are always at its quays steamers from England, Germany, and Holland loading the reddish earth.
Nevertheless, St. Raphaël is in the main a city of villas, less pretentious than those of Cannes, but still villas in the general meaning of the word. There is one called locally (in Provençal) the “Oustalet du Capelan” (The House of the Curé), which was a long time occupied by Gounod. Lovers of the master and his works will make of it a musical shrine and place of pilgrimage. An inscription over the door recalls that in this house Gounod composed “Romeo et Juliette.”
Maison Close, St. Raphaël
The Maison Close, inhabited by Alphonse Karr, is literally a maison close, for it is surrounded by a high wall, and the most that one can see and admire is the suggestion of the wonderful garden behind. In Karr’s time it must have been a highly satisfactory retreat, and no wonder he found it not difficult to let the rush of the world go by with unconcern.
Hamon, the landscape painter, was another devotee of St. Raphaël, and he described it as “la campagne de Rome au fond du Golfe du Naples;” it needs not a great stretch of the imagination to follow the simile.