Part 4 (2/2)

Except the view of Montreal and the St. Lawrence River from Mont Royal Mountain, I hardly know a town view in the world to equal that from Notre Dame de la Garde, for beauty and variety, on a clear spring morning.

Close at our feet lies the city itself, filling up the whole wide valley with its ma.s.s, and spreading out long arms of faubourg, or roadway, up the lateral openings. Beyond rise the great white limestone hills, dotted about like mushrooms, with their glittering _bastides_. In front lies the sea--the blue Mediterranean--with that treacherous smile which has so often deceived us all the day before we trusted ourselves too rashly, with ill-deserved confidence, upon its heaving bosom. Near the sh.o.r.e the waves chafe the islets and the Chateau d'If; then come the Old Port and the busy ba.s.sins; and, beyond them all, the Chain of Estaques, rising grim and gray in serrated outline against the western horizon. A beautiful prospect though barren and treeless, for nowhere in the world are mountains barer than those great white guardians of the Provencal seaboard.

The fortress that overhangs the Old Port at our feet itself deserves a few pa.s.sing words of polite notice; for it is the Fort St. Nicolas, the one link in his great despotic chain by which Louis Quatorze bound recalcitrant Ma.r.s.eilles to the throne of the Tuileries. The town--like all great commercial towns--had always clung hard to its ancient liberties.

Ever rebellious when kings oppressed, it was a stronghold of the Fronde; and when Louis at last made his entry perforce into the malcontent city, it was through a breach he had effected in the heavy ramparts. The king stood upon this commanding spot, just above the harbor, and, gazing landward, asked the citizens round him how men called those little square boxes which he saw dotted about over the sunlit hillsides. ”We call them _bastides_, sire,” answered a courtly Ma.r.s.eillais. ”Every citizen of our town has one.” ”Moi aussi, je veux avoir ma bastide a Ma.r.s.eille,” cried the theatrical monarch, and straightway gave orders for building the Fort St. Nicolas: so runs the tale that pa.s.ses for history. But as the fort stands in the very best possible position, commanding the port, and could only have been arranged for after consultation with the engineers of the period--it was Vauban who planned it--I fear we must set down Louis's _bon mot_ as one of those royal epigrams which has been carefully prepared and led up to beforehand.

In every town, however, it is a favorite theory of mine that the best of all sights is the town itself: and nowhere on earth is this truism truer than here at Ma.r.s.eilles. After one has climbed Notre Dame, and explored the Prado and smiled at the Chateau d'Eau and stood beneath the frowning towers of St. Victor, one returns once more with real pleasure and interest to the crowded Cannebiere and sees the full tide of human life flow eagerly on down that picturesque boulevard. That, after all, is the main picture that Ma.r.s.eilles always leaves photographed on the visitor's memory. How eager, how keen, how vivacious is the talk; how fiery the eyes; how emphatic the gesture! With what teeming energy, with what feverish haste, the great city pours forth its hurrying thousands! With what endless spirit they move up and down in endless march upon its clattering pavements! _Circulez, messieurs, circulez_: and they do just circulate! From the Quai de la Fraternite to the Allees de Meilhan, what mirth and merriment, what life and movement! In every _cafe_, what warm southern faces! At every shop-door, what quick-witted, sharp-tongued, bartering humanity! I have many times stopped at Ma.r.s.eilles, on my way hither and thither round this terraqueous globe, farther south or east; but I never stop there without feeling once more the charm and interest of its strenuous personality. There is something of Greek quickness and Greek intelligence left even now about the old Phocaean colony. A Ma.r.s.eillais crowd has to this very day something of the sharp h.e.l.lenic wit; and I believe the rollicking humor of Aristophanes would be more readily seized by the public of the Alcazar than by any other popular audience in modern Europe.

”Bon chien cha.s.se de race,” and every Ma.r.s.eillais is a born Greek and a born litterateur. Is it not partly to this old Greek blood, then, that we may set down the long list of distinguished men who have drawn their first breath in the Phocaean city? From the days of the Troubadours, Raymond des Tours and Barral des Baux, Folquet, and Rostang, and De Salles, and Berenger, through the days of D'Urfe, and Mascaron, and Barbaroux, and De Pastoret, to the days of Mery, and Barthelemy, and Taxile Delord, and Joseph Autran, Ma.r.s.eilles has always been rich in talent. It is enough to say that her list of great men begins with Petronius Arbiter, and ends with Thiers, to show how long and diversely she has been represented in her foremost citizens. Surely, then, it is not mere fancy to suppose that in all this the true h.e.l.lenic blood has counted for something! Surely it is not too much to believe that with the Greek profile and the Greek complexion the inhabitants have still preserved to this day some modest measure of the quick Greek intellect, the bright Greek fancy, and the plastic and artistic Greek creative faculty! I love to think it, for Ma.r.s.eilles is dear to me; especially when I land there after a sound sea-tossing.

Unlike many of the old Mediterranean towns, too, Ma.r.s.eilles has not only a past but also a future. She lives and will live. In the middle of the past century, indeed, it might almost have seemed to a careless observer as if the Mediterranean were ”played out.” And so in part, no doubt, it really is; the tracks of commerce and of international intercourse have s.h.i.+fted to wider seas and vaster waterways. We shall never again find that inland basin ringed round by a girdle of the great merchant cities that do the carrying trade and finance of the world. Our area has widened, so that New York, Rio, San Francisco, Yokohama, Shanghai, Calcutta, Bombay, and Melbourne have taken the place of Syracuse, Alexandria, Tyre, and Carthage, of Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Constantinople. But in spite of this cramping change, this degradation of the Mediterranean from the center of the world into a mere auxiliary or side-avenue of the Atlantic, a certain number of Mediterranean ports have lived on uninterruptedly by force of position from one epoch into the other. Venice has had its faint revival of recent years; Trieste has had its rise; Barcelona, Algiers, Smyrna, Odessa, have grown into great harbors for cosmopolitan traffic. Of this new and rejuvenescent Mediterranean, girt round by the fresh young nationalities of Italy and the Orient, and itself no longer an inland sea, but linked by the Suez Ca.n.a.l with the Indian Ocean and so turned into the main highway of the nations between East and West, Ma.r.s.eilles is still the key and the capital. That proud position the Phocaean city is not likely to lose. And as the world is wider now than ever, the new Ma.r.s.eilles is perforce a greater and a wealthier town than even the old one in its proudest days. Where tribute came once from the North African, Levantine, and Italian coasts alone, it comes now from every sh.o.r.e of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, with Australia and the Pacific Isles thrown in as an afterthought. Regions Caesar never knew enrich the good Greeks of the Quai de la Fraternite: brown, black, and yellow men whom his legions never saw send tea and silk, cotton, corn, and tobacco to the crowded warehouses of the Cannebiere and the Rue de la Republique.

VI

NICE

The Queen of the Riviera--The Port of Limpia--Castle Hill--Promenade des Anglais--The Carnival and Battle of Flowers--Place Ma.s.sena, the center of business--Beauty of the suburbs--The road to Monte Carlo--The quaintly picturesque town of Villefranche--Aspects of Nice and its environs.

Who loves not Nice, knows it not. Who knows it, loves it. I admit it is windy, dusty, gusty. I allow it is meretricious, fas.h.i.+onable, vulgar. I grant its Carnival is a noisy orgy, its Promenade a meeting place for all the wealthiest idlers of Europe or America, and its clubs more desperate than Monte Carlo itself in their excessive devotion to games of hazard.

And yet, with all its faults, I love it still. Yes, deliberately love it; for nothing that man has done or may ever do to mar its native beauty can possibly deface that beauty itself as G.o.d made it. Nay, more, just because it is Nice, we can readily pardon it these obvious faults and minor blemishes. The Queen of the Riviera, with all her coquettish little airs and graces, pleases none the less, like some proud and haughty girl in court costume, partly by reason of that very finery of silks and feathers which we half-heartedly deprecate. If she were not herself, she would be other than she is. Nice is Nice, and that is enough for us.

Was ever town more graciously set, indeed, in more gracious surroundings?

Was ever pearl girt round with purer emeralds? On every side a vast semicircle of mountains hems it in, among which the bald and naked summit of the Mont Cau d'Aspremont towers highest and most conspicuous above its darkling compeers. In front the blue Mediterranean, that treacherous Mediterranean all guile and loveliness, smiles with myriad dimples to the clear-cut horizon. Eastward, the rocky promontories of the Mont Boron and the Cap Ferrat jut boldly out into the sea with their fringe of white das.h.i.+ng breakers. Westward, the longer and lower spit of the point of Antibes bounds the distant view, with the famous pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame de la Garoupe just dimly visible on its highest knoll against the serrated ridge of the glorious Esterel in the background. In the midst of all nestles Nice itself, the central gem in that coronet of mountains.

There are warmer and more sheltered nooks on the Riviera, I will allow: there can be none more beautiful. Mentone may surpa.s.s it in the charm of its mountain paths and innumerable excursions; Cannes in the rich variety of its nearer walks and drives; but for mingled glories of land and sea, art and nature, antiquity and novelty, picturesqueness and magnificence, Nice still stands without a single rival on all that enchanted coast that stretches its long array of cities and bays between Ma.r.s.eilles and Genoa.

There are those, I know, who run down Nice as commonplace and vulgarized.

But then they can never have strayed one inch, I feel sure, from the palm-shaded _trottoir_ of the Promenade des Anglais. If you want Italian mediaevalism, go to the Old Town; if you want quaint marine life, go to the good Greek port of Limpia; if you want a grand view of sea and land and snow mountains in the distance, go to the Castle Hill; if you want the most magnificent panorama in the whole of Europe, go to the summit of the Corniche Road. No, no; these brawlers disturb our pure wors.h.i.+p. We have only one Nice, let us make the most of it.

It is so easy to acquire a character for superiority by affecting to criticize what others admire. It is so easy to p.r.o.nounce a place vulgar and uninteresting by taking care to see only the most vulgar and uninteresting parts of it. But the old Rivieran who knows his Nice well, and loves it dearly, is troubled rather by the opposite difficulty. Where there is so much to look at and so much to describe, where to begin? what to omit? how much to glide over? how much to insist upon? Language fails him to give a conception of this complex and polychromatic city in a few short pages to anyone who knows it by name alone as the cosmopolitan winter capital of fas.h.i.+onable seekers after health and pleasure. It is that, indeed, but it is so much more that one can never tell it.

For there are at least three distinct Nices, Greek, Italian, French; each of them beautiful in its own way, and each of them interesting for its own special features. To the extreme east, huddled in between the Mont Boron and the Castle Hill, lies the seafaring Greek town, the most primitive and original Nice of all; the home of the fisher-folk and the petty coasting sailors; the Nicaea of the old undaunted Phocaean colonists; the Nizza di Mare of modern Italians; the mediaeval city; the birthplace of Garibaldi.

Divided from this earliest Nice by the scarped rock on whose summit stood the chateau of the Middle Ages, the eighteenth century Italian town (the Old Town as tourists nowadays usually call it, the central town of the three) occupies the s.p.a.ce between the Castle Hill and the half dry bed of the Paillon torrent. Finally, west of the Paillon, again, the modern fas.h.i.+onable pleasure resort extends its long line of villas, hotels, and palaces in front of the sea to the little stream of the Magnan on the road to Cannes, and stretches back in endless boulevards and avenues and gardens to the smiling heights of Cimiez and Carabacel. Every one of these three towns, ”in three different ages born,” has its own special history and its own points of interest. Every one of them teems with natural beauty, with picturesque elements, and with varieties of life, hard indeed to discover elsewhere.

The usual guide-book way to attack Nice is, of course, the topsy-turvey one, to begin at the Haussmannised white facades of the Promenade des Anglais and work backwards gradually through the Old Town to the Port of Limpia and the original nucleus that surrounds its quays. I will venture, however, to disregard this time-honored but grossly unhistorical practice, and allow the reader and myself, for once in our lives, to ”begin at the beginning.” The Port of Limpia, then, is, of course, the natural starting point and prime original of the very oldest Nice. Hither, in the fifth century before the Christian era, the bold Phocaean settlers of Ma.r.s.eilles sent out a little colony, which landed in the tiny land-locked harbor and called the spot Nicaea (that is to say, the town of victory) in grat.i.tude for their success against its rude Ligurian owners. For twenty-two centuries it has retained that name almost unchanged, now perhaps, the only memento still remaining of its Greek origin. During its flouris.h.i.+ng days as a h.e.l.lenic city Nicaea ranked among the chief commercial entrepots of the Ligurian coast; but when ”the Province” fell at last into the hands of the Romans, and the dictator Caesar favored rather the pretensions of Cemenelum or Cimiez on the hill-top in the rear, the town that cl.u.s.tered round the harbor of Limpia became for a time merely the port of its more successful inland rival. Cimiez still possesses its fine ruined Roman amphitheater and baths, besides relics of temples and some other remains of the imperial period; but the ”Quartier du Port,” the ancient town of Nice itself, is almost dest.i.tute of any architectural signs of its antique greatness.

Nevertheless, the quaint little seafaring village that cl.u.s.ters round the harbor, entirely cut off as it is by the ramping crags of the Castle Hill from its later representative, the Italianized Nice of the last century, may fairly claim to be the true Nice of history, the only spot that bore that name till the days of the Bourbons. Its annals are far too long and far too eventful to be narrated here in full. Goths, Burgundians, Lombards, and Franks disputed for it in turn, as the border fortress between Gaul and Italy; and that familiar round white bastion on the eastern face of the Castle Hill, now known to visitors as the Tour Bellanda, and included (such is fate!) as a modern belvedere in the grounds of the comfortable Pension Suisse, was originally erected in the fifth century after Christ to protect the town from the attacks of these insatiable invaders. But Nice had its consolations, too, in these evil days, for when the Lombards at last reduced the hill fortress of Cimiez, the Roman town, its survivors took refuge from their conquerors in the city by the port, which thus became once more, by the fall of its rival, unquestioned mistress of the surrounding littoral.

The after story of Nice is confused and confusing. Now a va.s.sal of the Frankish kings; now again a member of the Genoese league; now engaged in a desperate conflict with the piratical Saracens; and now const.i.tuted into a little independent republic on the Italian model; Nizza struggled on against an adverse fate as a fighting-ground of the races, till it fell finally into the hands of the Counts of Savoy, to whom it owes whatever little still remains of the mediaeval castle. Continually changing hands between France and the kingdom of Sardinia in later days, it was ultimately made over to Napoleon III. by the Treaty of Villafranca, and is now completely and entirely Gallicized. The native dialect, however, remains even to the present day an intermediate form between Provencal and Italian, and is freely spoken (with more force than elegance) in the Old Town and around the enlarged modern basins of the Port of Limpia. Indeed, for frankness of expression and perfect absence of any false delicacy, the ladies of the real old Greek Nice surpa.s.s even their London compeers at Billingsgate.

One of the most beautiful and unique features of Nice at the present day is the Castle Hill a ma.s.s of solid rearing rock, not unlike its namesake at Edinburgh in position, intervening between the Port and the eighteenth century town, to which latter I will in future allude as the Italian city.

It is a wonderful place, that Castle Hill--wonderful alike by nature, art, and history, and I fear I must also add at the same time ”uglification.”

In earlier days it bore on its summit or slopes the _chateau fort_ of the Counts of Provence with the old cathedral and archbishop's palace (now wholly destroyed), and the famous deep well, long ranked among the wonders of the world in the way of engineering. But military necessity knows no law; the cathedral gave place in the fifteenth century to the bastions of the Duke of Savoy's new-fangled castle; the castle itself in turn was mainly battered down in 1706 by the Duke of Berwick; and of all its antiquities none now remain save the Tour Bellanda, in its degraded condition of belvedere, and the scanty ground-plan of the mediaeval buildings.

Nevertheless, the Castle Hill is still one of the loveliest and greenest spots in Nice. A good carriage road ascends it to the top by leafy gradients, and leads to an open platform on the summit, now converted into charming gardens, rich with palms and aloes and cactuses and bright southern flowers. On one side, alas! a painfully artificial cataract, fed from the overflow of the waterworks, falls in stiff cascades among hand-built rockwork; but even that impertinent addition to the handicraft of nature can hardly offend the visitor for long among such glorious surroundings. For the view from the summit is one of the grandest in all France. The eye ranges right and left over a mingled panorama of sea and mountains, scarcely to be equaled anywhere round the lovely Mediterranean, save on the Ligurian coast and the neighborhood of Sorrento. Southward lies the blue expanse of water itself, bounded only in very clear and cloudless weather by the distant peaks of Corsica on the doubtful horizon.

Westward, the coast-line includes the promontory of Antibes, basking low on the sea, the Iles Lerins near Cannes, the mouth of the Var, and the dim-jagged ridge of the purple Esterel. Eastward, the bluff headland of the Mont Boron, grim and brown, blocks the view towards Italy. Close below the spectator's feet the three distinct towns of Nice gather round the Port and the two banks of the Paillon, spreading their garden suburbs, draped in roses and lemon groves, high up the spurs of the neighboring mountains. But northward a tumultuous sea of Alps rises billow-like to the sky, the nearer peaks frowning bare and rocky, while the more distant domes gleam white with virgin snow. It is a sight, once seen, never to be forgotten. One glances around entranced, and murmurs to oneself slowly, ”It is good to be here.” Below, the carriages are rolling like black specks along the crowded Promenade, and the band is playing gaily in the Public Garden; but up there you look across to the eternal hills, and feel yourself face to face for one moment with the Eternities behind them.

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