The Rue d’Antibes is the principal shopping street of the newer and richer Cannes. If we follow it out into the country by its straight French boulevard it leads us at last to the funny old border city from which it still takes its unpretending name. Antibes itself belongs to that very first crop of civilized Provençal towns which owe their origin to the sturdy old Phocæan colonists. It is a Greek city by descent, the Antipolis which faced and defended the harbor of Nicæa; and for picturesqueness and beauty it has not its equal on the whole picturesque and beautiful Riviera. Everybody who has travelled by the “Paris, Lyon, Méditerranée” knows well the exquisite view of the mole and harbor as seen in passing from the railway. But that charming glimpse, quaint and varied as it is, gives by no means a full idea of the ancient Phocæan city. The town stands still surrounded by its bristling fortification, the work of Vauban, pierced by narrow gates in their thickness, and topped with noble ramparts. The Fort Carré that crowns the seaward promontory, the rocky islets, and the two stone breakwaters of the port (a small-scale Genoa), all add to the striking effect of the situation and prospect. Within, the place is as quaint and curious as without: a labyrinth of narrow streets, poor in memorials of Antipolis, but rich in Roman remains, including that famous and pathetic inscription to the boy Septentrio, QVI ANTIPOLI IN THEATRO BIDVO SALTAVIT ET PLACVIT. The last three words borrowed from this provincial tombstone, have become proverbial of the short-lived glory of the actor’s art.
The general aspect of Antibes town, however, is at present mediæval, or even seventeenth century. A flavor as of Louis Quatorz pervades the whole city, with its obtrusive military air of a border fortress; for, of course, while the Var still formed the frontier between France and Italy, Antibes ranked necessarily as a strategic post of immense importance; and at the present day, in our new recrudescence of military barbarism, great barracks surround the fortifications with fresh white-washed walls, and the “Hun! Deusse!” of the noisy French drill-sergeant resounds all day long from the exercise-ground by the railway station. Antibes itself is therefore by no means a place to stop at; it is the Cap d’Antibes close by that attracts now every year an increasing influx of peaceful and cultivated visitors. The walks and drives are charming; the pine-woods, carpeted with wild anemones, are a dream of delight; and the view from the Lighthouse Hill behind the town is one of the loveliest and most varied on the whole round Mediterranean.
But I must not linger here over the beauties of the Cap d’Antibes, but must be pushing onwards towards Monaco and Monte Carlo.
It is a wonderful spot, this little principality of Monaco, hemmed in between the high mountains and the assailing sea, and long hermetically cut off from all its more powerful and commercial neighbors. Between the palm-lined boulevards of Nice and the grand amphitheater of mountains that shuts in Mentone as with a perfect semicircle of rearing peaks, one rugged buttress, the last long subsiding spur of the great Alpine axis, runs boldly out to seaward, and ends in the bluff rocky headland of the Tête de Chien that overhangs Monte Carlo. Till very lately no road ever succeeded in turning the foot of that precipitous promontory: the famous Corniche route runs along a ledge high up its beetling side, past the massive Roman ruin of Turbia, and looks down from a height of fifteen hundred feet upon the palace of Monaco. This mountain bulwark of the Turbia long formed the real boundary line between ancient Gaul and Liguria; and on its very summit, where the narrow Roman road wound along the steep pass now widened into the magnificent highway of the Corniche, Augustus built a solid square monument to mark the limit between the Province and the Italian soil, as well as to overawe the mountaineers of this turbulent region. A round mediæval tower, at present likewise in ruins, crowns the Roman work. Here the Alps end abruptly. The rock of Monaco at the base is their last ineffectual seaward protest.
And what a rock it is, that quaint ridge of land, crowned by the strange capital of that miniature principality! Figure to yourself a huge whale petrified, as he basks there on the shoals his back rising some two hundred feet from the water’s edge, his head to the sea, and his tail just touching the mainland, and you have a rough mental picture of the Rock of Monaco. It is, in fact, an isolated hillock, jutting into the Mediterranean at the foot of the Maritime Alps (a final reminder, as it were, of their dying dignity), and united to the Undercliff only by a narrow isthmus at the foot of the crag which bears the mediæval bastions of the Prince’s palace. As you look down on it from above from the heights of the Corniche, I have no hesitation in saying it forms the most picturesque town site in all Europe. On every side, save seaward, huge mountains gird it round; while towards the smiling blue Mediterranean itself the great rock runs outward, bathed by tiny white breakers in every part, except where the low isthmus links it to the shore; and with a good field-glass you can see down in a bird’s eye view into every street and courtyard of the clean little capital. The red-tiled houses, the white palace with its orderly gardens and quadrangles, the round lunettes of the old wall, the steep cobbled mule-path which mounts the rock from the modern railway-station, all lie spread out before one like a pictorial map, painted in the bright blue of Mediterranean seas, the dazzling gray of Mediterranean sunshine, and the brilliant russet of Mediterranean roofs.
There can be no question at all that Monte Carlo even now, with all its gew-gaw additions, is very beautiful: no Haussmann could spoil so much loveliness of position; and even the new town itself, which grows apace each time I revisit it, has a picturesqueness of hardy arch, bold rock, well-perched villa, which redeems it to a great extent from any rash charge of common vulgarity. All looks like a scene in a theater, not like a prosaic bit of this work-a-day world of ours. Around us is the blue Mediterranean, broken into a hundred petty sapphire bays. Back of us rise tier after tier of Maritime Alps, their huge summits clouded in a fleecy mist. To the left stands the white rock of Monaco; to the right, the green Italian shore, fading away into the purple mountains that guard the Gulf of Genoa. Lovely by nature, the immediate neighborhood of the Casino has been made in some ways still more lovely by art. From the water’s edge, terraces of tropical vegetation succeed one another in gradual steps towards the grand façade of the gambling-house; clusters of palms and aloes, their base girt by exotic flowers, are thrust cunningly into the foreground of every point in the view, so that you see the bay and the mountains through the artistic vistas thus deftly arranged in the very spots where a painter’s fancy would have set them. You look across to Monaco past a clump of drooping date-branches; you catch a glimpse of Bordighera through a framework of spreading dracænas and quaintly symmetrical fan-palms.
Once more under way, and this time on foot. For the road from Monte Carlo to Mentone is almost as lovely in its way as that from Nice to Monte Carlo. It runs at first among the ever-increasing villas and hotels of the capital of Chance, and past that sumptuous church, built from the gains of the table, which native wit has not inaptly christened “Nôtre Dame de la Roulette.” There is one point of view of Monaco and its bay, on the slopes of the Cap Martin, not far from Roquebrune, so beautiful that though I have seen it, I suppose, a hundred times or more, I can never come upon it to this day without giving vent to an involuntary cry of surprise and admiration.
Roquebrune itself, which was an Italian Roccabruna when I first knew it, has a quaint situation of its own, and a quaint story connected with it. Brown as its own rocks, the tumbled little village stands oddly jumbled in and out among huge masses of pudding-stone, which must have fallen at some time or other in headlong confusion from the scarred face of the neighboring hillside. From the Corniche road it is still quite easy to recognize the bare patch on the mountain slope whence the landslip detached itself, and to trace its path down the hill to its existing position. But local legend goes a little farther than that: it asks us to believe that the rock fell as we see it with the houses on top; in other words, that the village was built before the catastrophe took place, and that it glided down piecemeal into the tossed-about form it at present presents to us. Be this as it may, and the story makes some demand on the hearer’s credulity, it is certain that the houses now occupy most picturesque positions: here perched by twos and threes on broken masses of conglomerate, there wedged in between two great walls of beetling cliff, and yonder again hanging for dear life to some slender foothold on the precipitous hillside.
We reach the summit of the pass. The Bay of Monaco is separated from the Bay of Mentone by the long, low-headland of Cap Martin, covered with olive groves and scrubby maritime pines. As one turns the corner from Roquebrune by the col round the cliff, there bursts suddenly upon the view one of the loveliest prospects to be beheld from the Corniche. At our feet, embowered among green lemons and orange trees, Mentone half hides itself behind its villas and its gardens. In the middle distance the old church with its tall Italian campanile stands out against the blue peaks of that magnificent amphitheater. Beyond, again, a narrow gorge marks the site of the Pont St. Louis and the Italian frontier. Farther eastward the red rocks merge half indistinctly into the point of La Mortola, with Mr. Hanbury’s famous garden; then come the cliffs and fortifications of Ventimiglia, gleaming white in the sun; and last of all, the purple hills that hem in San Remo. It is an appropriate approach to a most lovely spot; for Mentone ranks high for beauty, even among her bevy of fair sisters on the Ligurian sea-board.
Yes, Mentone is beautiful, most undeniably beautiful; and for walks and drives perhaps it may bear away the palm from all rivals on that enchanted and enchanting Riviera. Five separate valleys, each carved out by its own torrent, with dry winter bed, converge upon the sea within the town precincts. Four principal rocky ridges divide these valleys with their chine-like backbone, besides numberless minor spurs branching laterally inland. Each valley is threaded by a well-made carriage-road, and each dividing ridge is climbed by a bridle-path and footway. The consequence is that the walks and drives at Mentone are never exhausted, and excursions among the hills might occupy the industrious pedestrian for many successive winters. What hills they are, too, those great bare needles and pinnacles of rock, worn into jagged peaks and points by the ceaseless rain of ages, and looking down from their inaccessible tops with glittering scorn upon the green lemon groves beneath them!