Between Anthéore and Le Trayas is a narrow pathway which mounts to St. Barthélémy, but the coast road still continues its delightful course toward La Napoule.
Le Trayas, though it figures in the railway time-tables, is hardly more than a hamlet; but it boasts proudly of a hotel and a group of villas. It has not yet become spoiled in spite of this, and though it lacks the picturesque local colour of the average Mediterranean coast town, and almost altogether the distractions of the great resorts, it is worth the visiting, if only for its charming situation.
The Département of the Var joins that of the Alpes-Maritimes just beyond, and, at three kilometres farther on, the coast road rises to its greatest height, a trifle over a hundred metres.
Before one comes to La Napoule he passes the progressive, hard-pushing little resort of Théoule, so altogether delightful from every point of view that one can but wish that winter tourists had never heard of it. This was not to be, however, and Théoule is doing its utmost to become both a winter and a summer resort, with many of the qualifications of both. It is deliciously situated on the Golfe de la Napoule, or, rather, on a little anse or bay thereof, and consists of perhaps a hundred houses of all classes, most of which rejoice in the name of Villa Something-or-other. Most of these villas are well hidden by the trees, and their coquette architecture (on the order of a Swiss châlet, but stuccoed here and there and with bits of coloured glass stuck into the gables,—and perhaps a plaster cat on the ridge-pole) is not so obtrusive as it might otherwise be.
Leaving Théoule, the coast road continues to La Napoule, but, properly speaking, the “Corniche” ends at Théoule. Throughout its whole length it is a wonderfully varied and attractive route to the popular Riviera towns, and one could hardly do better, if he has journeyed from the north by train, than to leave the cars at Fréjus or St. Raphaël and make the journey eastward via the Corniche d’Or. If he does this, as likely as not he will find some delightful beauty-spot which will appeal to him as far more attractive than a Cannes or Nice boarding-house, where the gossip is the same sort of thing that one gets in Bloomsbury or on Beacon Hill. The thing is decidedly worth the trying, and the suggestion is here given for what it may be worth to the reader.
CHAPTER VII.
LA NAPOULE AND CANNES
LA NAPOULE is known chiefly to those birds of passage who annually hibernate at Cannes as the end of a six-mile constitutional which the doctors advise their patients to take as an antidote to overfeeding and “tea-fights.” In reality it is much more than this; it is one of the most charmingly situated of all the Riviera coast towns, and has a history which dates back to a fourteenth-century fortress, built by the Comté de Villeneuve, a tower of which stands to-day as a part of the more modern château which rises back of the town.
On the Golfe de la Napoule