Cannes is truly “aristocratic villadom,” or “séjour aristocratique et recherché,” as the French have it, with all that the term implies. Consequently Cannes is conventional, and the real lover of nature—regardless of the town’s charming situation—will have none of it.
It is believed that the town grew up from the ancient Ligurian city of Aegytna, destroyed by Quintus Opimius a hundred and fifty years before the beginning of the Christian era.
If one does not make his entry into Cannes by road, direct from the Estérel, he will probably come by the way of Le Cannet. Le Cannet is itself a sumptuous suburb which in every way foretells the luxury which awaits one in the parent city by the seashore.
Three kilometres of palm and plantain bordered avenue, lined with villas and hotels, joins Le Cannet with Cannes. Not long ago the suburb was an humble, indifferent village, but the tide of popularity came that way, and it has become transformed.
The Boulevard Carnot descends from Le Cannet to the sea by a long easy slope, and again one comes to the blue water of the enchanted Mediterranean. At times, Cannes is most lively,—always in a most conventional and eminently respectable fashion,—and at other times it sleeps the sleep of an emptied city, only to awake when the first fogs of November descend upon “brumeuse Angleterre.”
To tell the truth, Cannes is far more delightful “out of season,” when its gay, idling population of strangers has disappeared, stolen away to the watering-places of the north, there to live the same deadly dull existence, made up of rounds of tea-drinking and croquet-playing, with perhaps an occasional ride in a char-à-banc. Probably the millionaire improves somewhat upon this régime, but there are countless thousands who live this very life in European watering-places—and think they are enjoying themselves.
Cannes’s off season is of course summer, but, considering that it is so delightfully and salubriously situated at the water’s edge, and has a summer temperature of but 22° Centigrade, this is difficult to understand. Certainly Cannes is more delightful in the winter months than “brumeuse Angleterre,” but then it is equally so in June.
Not every one in Cannes speaks English; but for a shopkeeper to prosper to the full he should do so, and so the local “professors” have a busy time of it, in season and out, teaching what they call the “idiome britannique” and the “argot Américaine.”
The shore east and west of the centre of the town is flanked with hotels and villas, and great properties are yearly being cut up and put into the hands of the real-estate agents in order that more of the same sort may be erected where olive and palm trees formerly grew.
Horticulture is still a great industry at Cannes, as well as the selling of building-lots, but the marvel is that there is any unoccupied land upon which to raise anything. A dozen years from now how will the horticulturalists of Cannes be able to grow those decorative little orange and palm trees with which Paris and Ostend and London and even Manchester hotel “palm-gardens” are embellished?