NICE.
Twenty-Two centuries ago—eighteen hundred years before Columbus sailed in quest of the New World—a Phocean colony from Marseilles founded this celebrated city, calling it Nichê (Nice or Victory), in honor of a signal triumph obtained by their arms over their enemies, the Ligurians, or inhabitants of the northern coast of Italy. For ages it flourished, being almost as famous with the ancients as a health-resort as it is to-day; but its evil hour came when the Goths, Lombards and Franks in A.D. 405, pouring through the defiles and gorges of the Maritime Alps, laid Nice and almost all the other cities of Italy, even beyond Rome, in ashes. A hundred years later it was rebuilt, but its beautiful forum, its classical temples, its mosaic-paved villas and marble theatres had disappeared utterly, and the new city was but a shadow of the old. In the tenth century the Saracens conquered Nice, and remained in quiet possession for seventy years, and during their stay introduced much of the tropical vegetation which we still admire. They were finally driven away by the insurgent natives in A.D. 975, but they left the impress of their occupation in many Arabic words which still mark the local patois; and as a number of the fugitives were captured and reduced to slavery, intermarrying in the course of time with the native population, the Moorish type is still very noticeable amongst the peasantry. Freed from the Saracenic yoke, the Niçois lived in peace for nearly two centuries, being only disturbed from time to time by the unwelcome visitations of pirates. Later on, toward the middle of the thirteenth century, like most other Southern and Italian cities, Nice fell a victim to the constant quarrels of the powerful families allied respectively to the Ghibelline and Guelphic factions. Thus, the incessant broils between the Lascaris of Tenda, the Grimaldis of Monaco and the Dorias of Dolceacqua desolated the surrounding country, and often reduced the city to a state of siege. The Niçois were compelled to keep up a perpetual guerilla, which, however inspiriting, was by no means conducive to their material prosperity. In 1364 an invasion of locusts from Africa led to a famine, and ultimately a plague which destroyed two-thirds of the population. The people, attributing their misfortunes to the intercession of the Jews with the powers below, rose up and massacred them: only five Israelites out of over two thousand are said to have escaped their blind fury. When order was at last re-established, and the Niçois began to settle down again, they perceived their impoverished and subordinate position to be so alarming that their only chance of safety was immediately to place themselves under the protection of the dukes of Savoy, who for a century and a half defended them from the attacks of their numerous enemies in a most valiant manner. But in 1521, Francis I. of France wrenched the city and province from the beneficent rule of the Savoyards and proclaimed himself count of Nice. In 1524 war broke out between Francis and the emperor Charles V., and the contending armies alternately devastated and pillaged Nice and its environs. The pest reappeared, and with it a drought and famine of so fearful a character that many thousand persons perished, and others in their despair slew themselves. Pope Paul III. undertook the difficult task of reconciling the belligerents, and even went so far as to travel to Nice for the purpose. A marble cross which gives its name to a suburb of the town ("La Croix de Marbre") still marks the spot where the conference took place in which Francis and Charles swore a peace in the presence of His Holiness which they took the first opportunity to violate. In 1540 the war recommenced, and a number of dissolute young men of good family formed themselves into organized companies of bandits and overran the country, to the terror of the wretched peasantry and the utter ruin of many hundreds of honest families. But in 1543 a second Joan of Arc was raised up by Providence to deliver the Niçois in the person of the still popular heroine, Catterina Segurana. Francis I. had recently scandalized Christendom by allying himself with the famous Mohammedan corsair, Barbarossa of Algiers with a view of reconquering Nice, which he considered the key of Italy. Accordingly, one fine morning three hundred vessels belonging to the Algerine pirate entered the neighboring port of Villefranche, and presently the whole country was filled with a horde of turbaned freebooters. Cimiez, Montboron, Mont Gros and a hundred other villages and hamlets were soon alive with French marauders and Turkish pirates, who presently proceeded to bombard the city itself. The siege was short, but terrible, and the inhabitants were at the last gasp when the energetic Catterina Segurana, a washer-woman by trade, and surnamed Mao faccia ("Ugly face"), on account of the homeliness of her countenance, seized a hatchet, and, after a vigorous address to her fellow-citizens, placed herself at their head and led them against the enemy. The same result attended her efforts as did those of her immediate prototype, the glorious Maid of Orleans. She so animated the people, so roused their patriotism, that before the day was over the French and infidels were conquered, and the bold and generous Catterina. stood surrounded by her enthusiastic fellow-citizens, waving the conquered Algerine flag, in token of victory, from the summit of the castle hill, on the spot where formerly stood her statue.[001]
From the time of the brave Catterina to our own, Nice has sustained at least a dozen sieges of more or less severity. That of 1706 was perhaps one of the most shocking on record. The city, by the treaty of Turin of
1696, had once more passed under the protectorate of the dukes of Savoy, but the French, who have always had a longing eye for the "Department of the Maritime Alps," as they even then called it, broke the treaty they had themselves framed, and sent the duc de la Feuillade over the frontier with twenty thousand men to conquer the country. Nice was then governed by the marquis de Caraglio, who, although entreated by the enemy to allow the women and children to leave the city's gates, positively refused to do so. The consequence was that during the siege, which lasted six months, more than a third of the inhabitants perished from starvation. Men are said to have killed their wives for food, and women their children. Sixty thousand shells fell in various parts of the town, and the castle, cathedral and many churches were entirely destroyed.[002]
In 1792, under the First Republic, Nice was again occupied by the French, and declared a chef-lieu de département. By the treaty of 1814 the place was handed over to the Piedmontese, and stayed contentedly beneath the rule of the Sardinian kings until 1860, when, by the treaty of March 24, Napoleon III. annexed the county of Nice and the duchy of Savoy to his imperial possessions, in exchange for the services his army had rendered Italy at Magenta and Solferino. How long Nice will continue French is a question somewhat difficult to answer just now. There exists in the city and province a very strong Italian party, and during the war of 1870, Nice was declared in a state of siege, owing to the constant and very serious demonstrations of a certain part of the population. One of the leading inhabitants, a noted banker, even went so far as to travel to Florence with the intention of proving to the Italian government that whilst the French troops were concentrated in the north those of Victor Emmanuel would find no difficulty in crossing the frontier and uniting Nice to Italy. To the honor of the Italian government, this treacherous suggestion was rejected, but in those days the feeling between France and Italy was more cordial than it has since been. The Italian party is so active in the city and the department that the government has difficulty in keeping note of its proceedings. Thousands of pamphlets are secretly circulated amongst the lower orders, in which the advantages of the city's return to Italy are vividly contrasted with the disadvantages it suffers from by remaining French. The clergy, however, who are both numerous and influential, are French to a man, and dread the hour which will see them governed by the "jailer of Pius IX.," and consequently prove a very great assistance to the authorities in counteracting the intrigues of the Italians. But should ever, in future years, a war break out between either France and Italy, or between France and Italy's new ally, Prussia, the question de Nice will be once more on the tapis, and victory alone will preserve this magnificent possession to its present owners.
Nice may well boast herself a rival in point of splendor of natural position of the most famous cities of the South—of Lisbon, Genoa, Naples and Constantinople—and she eclipses them in point of climate. Built at the eastern extremity of a fine gulf—that of Les Anges—and backed by an amphitheatre of hills and lofty mountains, she is sheltered from cold winds in winter, and in summer the Alpine breezes temper an atmosphere which would else be unendurably sultry, owing to the prevalence of the sirocco, a hot wind which passes directly hither over the Mediterranean from the burning shores of Africa. One can scarcely imagine a more glorious panorama than that of this city and its environs as seen from the sea or from any neighboring elevation. Let us suppose it a fine
morning late in spring, and that we stand upon the deck of a yacht about a mile and a half distant from the shore. Nice, we see, surrounds a steep and rugged rock which rises almost perpendicularly from the Mediterranean to the height of about six hundred feet, and is crested by the ruins of the ancient castle, and covered with terraced gardens forming a delicious promenade. Groves of cypresses and sycamores hang on the declivities of this rock, which in places is rough with cactuses and aloes and with the Indian fig, whose bright orange flowers, when the sun's rays fall on them, have a magic splendor of color. A group of palm trees at the extremest elevation, standing out on a high crag, add not a little to the picturesque appearance of this singular urban hill. On one side of this rock the rapid torrent Paillon, traversed by several handsome bridges, some of them adorned with statues, separates the "old" from the "new" town. On the other is the port, filled with steamers and innumerable fishing-craft. Beyond the port stretches the Boulevard de l'Impératrice, inaugurated a few years since by the late empress of Russia, with its fine villas, notably the splendid Venetian Palace, an exact reproduction of the celebrated Moncenigo Palace at Venice, belonging to Viscount Vigier, whose wife was once a popular idol of the musical world of Paris and London—Sophie Cruvelli—and the extraordinary Moresque-looking castle of Mr. Smith, which is well called the Folie d'un Anglais—the "craze of an Englishman." The latter stands on the end of a promontory, and with its lofty towers and domes closes in the view. It is perhaps the most curious residence in the world, being built on a barren rock, and its apartments literally hewn out of the marble of which it is composed. On the top of the hill is a long building, with two curious twin towers and a dome, built of red brick faced with white marble. Here is situated the chief entrance. You descend from the spacious entry-hall a long well staircase cut in the rock and lighted from above, until you reach a superb octagonal chamber of white marble ornamented with statues and Oriental divans covered with Persian silk. This is the great saloon, and leading out of it are other fine chambers, all of them lined with polished marble and furnished with Eastern magnificence. Externally, there is no trace of these chambers visible. They are, as I have said, excavated, like Egyptian tombs, in the heart of the mountain. The proprietor, an eccentric English bachelor, never inhabits this fantastic mansion, but lives in a second-rate hotel, spending thousands annually in adding embellishments to his astonishing castle, where, notwithstanding its magnificent suites of apartments, no human being has ever slept a night or eaten a meal.
"Smith's Craze," as I have said, closes in the view to our right. To the left, beyond the torrent Paillon, is situated modern Nice, with its quays, leviathan hotels, and an almost interminable line of villas marking the celebrated Promenade des Anglais. The background of the scene is filled up by a semicircle of well-wooded hills, verdant with vines, fig, orange, olive and pomegranate trees, and sparkling with white country-seats, convents, and campanili. Towering over these hills appears another range, of rocky and bold outlines, and then another, of lofty mountains whose peaks lose themselves in clouds, and by their fantastic figures form as delightful an horizon as the eye can behold. In the centre rises the conical peak of Monte Cao, an extinct volcano, exactly resembling Vesuvius in conformation, and only wanting a curl of smoke issuing from its crater to make the illusion perfect. Alongside of Monte Cao is another extinct volcano, on which are seen the ruins of the ancient and deserted village of Châteauneuf, while between the two summits (thirty-five hundred feet high) are distinctly visible the peaks of some of the ever-snowy Alps. The foreground of the picture is formed by the deep indigo waters of the Mediterranean, diversified by a hundred sunny sails, and overhead hangs the cloudless Italian sky.
Let us now put back to port and walk through the city, visiting first Old Nice,
then the modern Pompeii, as Alphonse Karr pleasantly calls the new town. Old Nice resembles Genoa on a small scale, and has very narrow streets of lofty (and in some cases really fine) houses, no end of churches, gloomy-looking convents, and one or two palaces. In the narrow streets surrounding the cathedral—a large and showy building, formerly a parish church—is a market supplied with native fruits—oranges, lemons, grapes, figs, and many varieties of melons and nuts. The streets, which are in places so narrow that you can almost stretch your arms across them, are full of bright-looking shops, with all their varied goods displayed at the open, unglazed windows. Here and there one comes across remains of ancient times of considerable interest. Thus, in the Rue Droite is an old house, with a series of quaint little arches and a curious Gothic gateway, which was formerly part of the palace inhabited by Joanna II. of Naples. Near the church of St. Jacques is another old residence, with an odd decoration on its front in the shape of colossal figures of Adam and Eve, executed in alto-rilievo, which have their feet on either side of the doorway and their heads above the fifth story. The tree of knowledge, over-laden with its dangerous fruit, flourishes between the windows of what was once the saloon, and is now a manufactory of maccaroni. In the Rue du Centre is the quondam palace of the Lascaris family, an old Italian mansion, with marble balconies, wide, majestic staircases adorned with Corinthian columns, and vast apartments frescoed by Carlone, a reputable Genoese painter of mythological subjects. Carlone's gods and goddesses look down no longer on the members of the House of Lascaris, who once ruled over Tenda, and were the lineal descendants of the imperial Byzantine house of Del Comneno, but on those of an amiable Niçois family, who most willingly show the old palace to any stranger who may choose to knock at their door.