Part 5 (1/2)

One may descend from the summit either by the ancient cemetery or by the Place Garibaldi, through bosky gardens of date-palm, fan-palm, and agave.

Cool winding alleys now replace the demolished ramparts, and lovely views open out on every side as we proceed over the immediate foreground.

At the foot of the Castle Hill, a modern road, hewn in the solid rock round the base of the seaward escarpment, connects the Greek with the Italian town. The angle where it turns the corner, bears on native lips the quaint Provencal or rather Nicois name of Rauba Capeu or Rob-hat Point, from the common occurrence of sudden gusts of wind, which remove the unsuspecting Parisian headgear with effective rapidity, to the great joy of the observant _gamins_. Indeed, windiness is altogether the weak point of Nice, viewed as a health-resort; the town lies exposed in the open valley of the Paillon, down whose baking bed the _mistral_, that scourge of Provence, sweeps with violent force from the cold mountain-tops in the rear; and so it cannot for a moment compete in point of climate with Cannes, Monte Carlo, Mentone or San Remo, backed up close behind by their guardian barrier of sheltering hills. But not even the _mistral_ can make those who love Nice love her one atom the less. Her virtues are so many that a little wholesome bl.u.s.ter once in a while may surely be forgiven her. And yet the dust does certainly rise in clouds at times from the Promenade des Anglais.

The Italian city, which succeeds next in order, is picturesque and old-fas.h.i.+oned, but is being daily transformed and Gallicized out of all knowledge by its modern French masters. It dates back mainly to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the population became too dense for the narrow limits of the small Greek town, and began to overflow, behind the Castle Hill, on to the eastern banks of the Paillon torrent.

The sea-front in this quarter, now known as the Promenade du Midi, has been modernized into a mere eastward prolongation of the Promenade des Anglais, of which ”more anon;” but the remainder of the little triangular s.p.a.ce between the Castle Hill and the river-bed still consists of funny narrow Italian lanes, dark, dense, and dingy, from whose midst rises the odd and tile-covered dome of the cathedral of St. Reparate. That was the whole of Nice as it lived and moved till the beginning of this century; the real Nice of to-day, the Nice of the tourist, the invalid, and the fas.h.i.+onable world, the Nice that we all visit or talk about, is a purely modern accretion of some half-dozen decades.

This wonderful modern town, with its stately sea-front, its n.o.ble quays, its dainty white villas, its magnificent hotels, and its Casino, owes its existence entirely to the vogue which the coast has acquired in our own times as a health-resort for consumptives. As long ago as Smollett's time, the author of ”Roderick Random” remarks complacently that an acquaintance, ”understanding I intended to winter in the South of France, strongly recommended the climate of Nice in Provence, which indeed I had often heard extolled,” as well he might have done. But in those days visitors had to live in the narrow and dirty streets of the Italian town, whose picturesqueness itself can hardly atone for their unwholesome air and their unsavory odors. It was not till the hard winters of 1822-23-24 that a few kind-hearted English residents, anxious to find work for the starving poor, began the construction of a sea-road beyond the Paillon, which still bears the name of the Promenade des Anglais. Nice may well commemorate their deed to this day, for to them she owes as a watering-place her very existence.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The western suburb, thus pushed beyond the bed of the boundary torrent, has gradually grown in wealth and prosperity till it now represents the actual living Nice of the tourist and the winter resident. But how to describe that gay and beautiful city; that vast agglomeration of villas, _pensions_, hotels, and clubs; that endless array of sun-wors.h.i.+pers gathered together to this temple of the sun from all the four quarters of the habitable globe? The sea-front consists of the Promenade des Anglais itself, which stretches in an unbroken line of white and glittering houses, most of them tasteless, but all splendid and all opulent, from the old bank of the Paillon to its sister torrent, the Magnan, some two miles away. On one side the villas front the sh.o.r.e with their fantastic facades; on the other side a walk, overshadowed with date-palms and purple-flowering judas-trees, lines the steep s.h.i.+ngle beach of the tideless sea.

There is one marked peculiarity of the Promenade des Anglais, however, which at once distinguishes it from any similar group of private houses to be found anywhere in England. There the British love of privacy, which has, of course, its good points, but has also its compensating disadvantages, leads almost every owner of beautiful grounds or gardens to enclose them with a high fence or with the hideous monstrosity known to suburban Londoners as ”park paling.” This plan, while it ensures complete seclusion for the fortunate few within, shuts out the deserving many outside from all partic.i.p.ation in the beauty of the grounds or the natural scenery. On the Promenade des Anglais, on the contrary, a certain generous spirit of emulation in contributing to the public enjoyment and the general effectiveness of the scene as a whole has prompted the owners of the villas along the sea-front to enclose their gardens only with low ornamental bal.u.s.trades or with a slight and un.o.btrusive iron fence, so that the pa.s.sers-by can see freely into every one of them, and feast their eyes on the beautiful shrubs and flowers. The houses and grounds thus form a long line of delightful though undoubtedly garish and ornate decorations, in full face of the sea. The same plan has been adopted in the n.o.ble residential street known as Euclid Avenue at Cleveland, Ohio, and in many other American cities. It is to be regretted that English tastes and habits do not oftener thus permit their wealthier cla.s.ses to contribute, at no expense or trouble to themselves, to the general pleasure of less fortunate humanity.

The Promenade is, of course, during the season the focus and center of fas.h.i.+onable life at Nice. Here carriages roll, and amazons ride and flaneurs lounge in the warm suns.h.i.+ne during the livelong afternoon. In front are the baths, bathing being practicable at Nice from the beginning of March; behind are the endless hotels and clubs of this city of strangers. For the English are not alone on the Promenade des Anglais; the American tongue is heard there quite as often as the British dialect, while Germans, Russians, Poles, and Austrians cl.u.s.ter thick upon the shady seats beneath the planes and carob-trees. During the Carnival especially Nice resolves itself into one long orgy of frivolous amus.e.m.e.nt. Battles of flowers, battles of _confetti_, open-air masquerades, and universal tom-foolery pervade the place. Everybody vies with everybody else in making himself ridiculous; and even the staid Briton, released from the restraints of home or the City, abandons himself contentedly for a week at a time to a sort of prolonged and glorified sunny southern Derby Day. Mr.

Bult.i.tude disguises himself as a French clown; Mr. Dombey, in domino, flings roses at his friends on the seats of the tribune. Everywhere is laughter, noise, bustle, and turmoil; everywhere the manifold forms of antique saturnalian freedom, decked out with gay flowers or travestied in quaint clothing, but imported most incongruously for a week in the year into the midst of our modern work-a-day twentieth-century Europe.

Only a comparatively few winters ago fas.h.i.+onable Nice consisted almost entirely of the Promenade des Anglais, with a few slight tags and appendages in either direction. At its eastern end stood (and still stands) the Jardin Public, that paradise of children and of be-ribboned French nursemaids, where the band discourses lively music every afternoon at four, and all the world sits round on two-sou chairs to let all the rest of the world see for itself it is still in evidence. These, and the stately quays along the Paillon bank, lined with shops where female human nature can buy all the tastiest and most expensive gewgaws in Europe, const.i.tuted the real Nice of the early eighties. But with the rapid growth of that general taste for more sumptuous architecture which marks our age, the Phocaean city woke up a few years since with electric energy to find itself in danger of being left behind by its younger compet.i.tors.

So the Nicois conscript fathers put their wise heads together, in conclave a.s.sembled, and resolved on a general transmogrification of the center of their town. By continuously bridging and vaulting across the almost dry bed of the Paillon torrent they obtained a broad and central site for a new large garden, which now forms the natural focus of the transformed city. On the upper end of this important site they erected a large and handsome casino in the gorgeous style of the Third Republic, all glorious without and within, as the modern Frenchman understands such glory, and provided with a theater, a winter garden, restaurants, cafes, ball-rooms, _pet.i.ts chevaux_, and all the other most pressing requirements of an advanced civilization. But in doing this they sacrificed by the way the beautiful view towards the mountains behind, which can now only be obtained from the Square Ma.s.sena or the Pont Vieux farther up the river.

Most visitors to Nice, however, care little for views, and a great deal for the fitful and fearsome joys embodied to their minds in the outward and visible form of a casino.

This wholesale bridging over of the lower end of the Paillon has united the French and Italian towns and abolished the well-marked boundary line which once cut them off so conspicuously from one another. The inevitable result has been that the Italian town too has undergone a considerable modernization along the sea-front, so that the Promenade des Anglais and the Promenade du Midi now practically merge into one continuous parade, and are lined along all their length with the same clipped palm-trees and the same magnificent white palatial buildings. When the old theater in the Italian town was burnt down in the famous and fatal conflagration some years since the munic.i.p.ality erected a new one on the same site in the most approved style of Parisian luxury. A little behind lie the Prefecture and the beautiful flower market, which no visitor to Nice should ever miss; for Nice is above all things, even more than Florence, a city of flowers. The sheltered quarter of the Ponchettes, lying close under the lee of the Castle Hill, has become of late, owing to these changes, a favorite resort for invalids, who find here protection from the cutting winds which sweep with full force down the bare and open valley of the Paillon over the French town.

I am loth to quit that beloved sea-front, on the whole the most charming marine parade in Europe, with the Villefranche point and the pseudo-Gothic, pseudo-Oriental monstrosity of Smith's Folly on one side and the delicious bay towards Antibes on the other. But there are yet various aspects of Nice which remain to be described: the interior is almost as lovely in its way as the coast that fringes it. For this inner Nice, the Place Ma.s.sena, called (like the Place Garibaldi) after another distinguished native, forms the starting point and center. Here the trams from all quarters run together at last; hence the princ.i.p.al roads radiate in all directions. The Place Ma.s.sena is the center of business, as the Jardin Public and the Casino are the centers of pleasure. Also (_verb.u.m sap._) it contains an excellent _patisserie_, where you can enjoy an ice or a little French pastry with less permanent harm to your const.i.tution and morals than anywhere in Europe. Moreover, it forms the approach to the Avenue de la Gare, which divides with the Quays the honor of being the best shopping street in the most fas.h.i.+onable watering-place of the Mediterranean. If these delights thy soul may move, why, the Place Ma.s.sena is the exact spot to find them in.

Other great boulevards, like the Boulevard Victor Hugo and the Boulevard Dubouchage, have been opened out of late years to let the surplus wealth that flows into Nice in one constant stream find room to build upon.

Chateaux and gardens are springing up merrily on every side; the slopes of the hills gleam gay with villas; Cimiez and Carabacel, once separate villages, have now been united by continuous dwellings to the main town; and before long the city where Garibaldi was born and where Gambetta lies buried will swallow up in itself the entire s.p.a.ce of the valley, and its border spurs from mountain to mountain. The suburbs, indeed, are almost more lovely in their way than the town itself; and as one wanders at will among the olive-clad hills to westward, looking down upon the green lemon-groves that encircle the villas, and the wealth of roses that drape their sides, one cannot wonder that Joseph de Maistre, another Nicois of distinction, in the long dark evenings he spent at St. Petersburg, should time and again have recalled with a sigh ”ce doux vallon de Magnan.” Nor have the Russians themselves failed to appreciate the advantages of the change, for they flock by thousands to the Orthodox Quarter on the heights of Saint Philippe, which rings round the Greek chapel erected in memory of the Czarewitch Nicholas Alexandrowitch, who died at Nice in 1865.

After all, however, to the lover of the picturesque Nice town itself is but the threshold and starting point for that lovely country which spreads on all sides its endless objects of interest and scenic beauty from Antibes to Mentone. The excursions to be made from it in every direction are simply endless. Close by lie the monastery and amphitheater of Cimiez; the Italianesque cloisters and campanile of St. Pons; the conspicuous observatory on the Mont Gros, with its grand Alpine views; the hillside promenades of Le Ray and Les Fontaines. Farther afield the carriage-road up the Paillon valley leads direct to St. Andre through a romantic limestone gorge, which terminates at last in a grotto and natural bridge, overhung by the moldering remains of a most southern chateau. A little higher up, the steep mountain track takes one on to Falicon, perched ”like an eagle's nest” on its panoramic hill-top, one of the most famous points of view among the Maritime Alps. The boundary hills of the Magnan, covered in spring with the purple flowers of the wild gladiolus; the vine-clad heights of Le Bellet, looking down on the abrupt and rock-girt basin of the Var; the Valley of Hepaticas, carpeted in March with innumerable spring blossoms; the longer drive to Contes in the very heart of the mountains: all alike are lovely, and all alike tempt one to linger in their precincts among the shadow of the cypress trees or under the cool grottos green and lush with spreading fronds of wild maidenhair.

Among so many delicious excursions it were invidious to single out any for special praise; yet there can be little doubt that the most popular, at least with the general throng of tourists, is the magnificent coast-road by Villefranche (or Villafranca) to Monte Carlo and Monaco. This particular part of the coast, between Nice and Mentone, is the one where the main range of the Maritime Alps, ab.u.t.ting at last on the sea, tumbles over sheer with a precipitous descent from four thousand feet high to the level of the Mediterranean. Formerly, the barrier ridge could only be surmounted by the steep but glorious Corniche route; of late years, however, the French engineers, most famous of road-makers, have hewn an admirable carriage-drive out of the naked rock, often through covered galleries or tunnels in the cliff itself, the whole way from Nice to Monte Carlo and Mentone. The older portion of this road, between Nice and Villefranche, falls well within the scope of our present subject.

You leave modern Nice by the quays and the Pont Garibaldi, dash rapidly through the new broad streets that now intersect the Italian city, skirt the square basins lately added to the more shapeless ancient Greek port of Limpia, and begin to mount the first spurs of the Mont Boron among the villas and gardens of the Quartier du Lazaret. Banksia roses fall in cataracts over the walls as you go; looking back, the lovely panorama of Nice opens out before your eyes. In the foreground, the rocky islets of La Reserve foam white with the perpetual plas.h.i.+ng of that summer sea. In the middle distance, the old Greek harbor, with its mole and lighthouse, stands out against the steep rocks of the Castle Hill. The background rises up in chain on chain of Alps, allowing just a glimpse at their base of that gay and fickle promenade and all the Parisian prettinesses of the new French town. The whole forms a wonderful picture of the varied Mediterranean world, Greek, Roman, Italian, French, with the vine-clad hills and orange-groves behind merging slowly upward into the snow-bound Alps.

Turning the corner of the Mont Boron by the grotesque vulgarisms of the Chateau Smith (a curious semi-oriental specimen of the sh.e.l.l-grotto order of architecture on a gigantic scale) a totally fresh view bursts upon our eyes of the Rade de Villefranche, that exquisite land-locked bay bounded on one side by the scarped crags of the Mont Boron itself, and on the other by the long and rocky peninsula of St. Jean, which terminates in the Cap Ferrat and the Villefranche light. The long deep bay forms a favorite roadstead and rendezvous for the French Mediterranean squadron, whose huge ironclad monsters may often be seen ploughing their way in single file from seaward round the projecting headlands, or basking at ease on the calm surface of that gla.s.sy pond. The surrounding heights, of course, bristle with fortifications, which, in these suspicious days of armed European tension, the tourist and the sketcher are strictly prohibited from inspecting with too attentive an eye. The quaintly picturesque town of Villefranche itself, Italian and dirty, but amply redeemed by its slender bell-tower and its olive-clad terraces, nestles snugly at the very bottom of its pocket-like bay. The new road to Monte Carlo leaves it far below, with true modern contempt for mere old-world beauty; the artist and the lover of nature will know better than to follow the example of those ruthless engineers; they will find many subjects for a sketch among those whitewashed walls, and many a rare sea-flower tucked away unseen among those crannied crags.

And now, when all is said and done, I, who have known and loved Nice for so many bright winters, feel only too acutely how utterly I have failed to set before those of my readers who know it not the infinite charms of that gay and rose-wreathed queen of the smiling Riviera. For what words can paint the life and movement of the sparkling sea-front? the manifold humors of the Jardin Public? the southern vivacity of the washer-women who pound their clothes with big stones in the dry bed of the pebbly Paillon? the luxuriant festoons of honeysuckle and mimosa that drape the trellis-work arcades of Carabacel and Cimiez? Who shall describe aright with one pen the gnarled olives of Beaulieu and the palace-like front of the Cercle de la Mediterranee? Who shall write with equal truth of the jewelers' shops on the quays, of the oriental bazaars of the Avenue, and of the dome after dome of bare mountain tops that rise ever in long perspective to the brilliant white summits of the great Alpine backbone?

Who shall tell in one breath of the carmagnoles of the Carnival, or the dust-begrimed bouquets of the Battle of Flowers, and of the silent summits of the Mont Cau and the Cime de Vinaigrier, or the vast and varied sea-view that bursts on the soul unawares from the Corniche near Eza?

There are aspects of Nice and its environs which recall Bartholomew Fair, or the Champs elysees after a Sunday review; and there are aspects which recall the prospect from some solemn summit of the Bernese Oberland, mixed with some heather-clad hill overlooking the green Atlantic among the Western Highlands. Yet all is so graciously touched and lighted with Mediterranean color and Mediterranean suns.h.i.+ne, that even in the midst of her wildest frolics you can seldom be seriously angry with Nice. The works of G.o.d's hand are never far off. You look up from the crowd of carriages and loungers on the Promenade des Anglais, and the Cap Ferrat rises bold and bluff before your eyes above the das.h.i.+ng white waves of the sky-blue sea: you cross the bridge behind the Casino amid the murmur of the quays, and the great bald mountains soar aloft to heaven above the brawling valley of the snow-fed Paillon. It is a desecration, perhaps, but a desecration that leaves you still face to face with all that is purest and most beautiful in nature.

And then, the flowers, the waves, the soft air, the suns.h.i.+ne! On the beach, between the bathing places, men are drying scented orange peel to manufacture perfumes: in the dusty high roads you catch whiffs as you pa.s.s of lemon blossom and gardenia: the very trade of the town is an expert trade in golden acacia and crimson anemones: the very _gamins_ pelt you in the rough horse-play of the Carnival with sweet-smelling bunches of syringa and lilac. Luxury that elsewhere would move one to righteous wrath is here so democratic in its display that one almost condones it. The gleaming white villas, with carved caryatides or sculptured porches of freestone nymphs, let the wayfarer revel as he goes in the riches of their shrubberies or their sunlit fountains and in the breezes that blow over their perfumed parterres. Nice vulgar! Pah, my friend, if you say so, I know well why. You have a vulgar soul that sees only the gewgaws and the painted ladies. You have never strolled up by yourself from the noise and dust of the crowded town to the free heights of the Mont Alban or the flowery olive-grounds of the Magnan valley. You have never hunted for purple h.e.l.lebore among the gorges of the Paillon or picked orchids and irises in big handfuls upon the slopes of Saint Andre. I doubt even whether you have once turned aside for a moment from the gay crowd of the Casino and the Place Ma.s.sena into the narrow streets of the Italian town; communed in their own delicious dialect with the free fisherfolk of the Limpia quarter; or looked out with joy upon the tumbled plain of mountain heights from the breezy level of the Castle platform. Probably you have only sat for days in the balcony of your hotel, rolled at your ease down the afternoon Promenade, worn a false nose at the evening parade of the Carnival, or returned late at night by the last train from Monte Carlo with your pocket much lighter and your heart much heavier than when you left by the morning express in search of fortune. And then you say Nice is vulgar! You have no eyes, it seems, for sea, or sh.o.r.e, or sky, or mountain; but you look down curiously at the dust in the street, and you mutter to yourself that you find it uninteresting. When you go to Nice again, walk alone up the hills to Falicon, returning by Le Ray, and then say, if you dare, Nice is anything on earth but gloriously beautiful.

VII

THE RIVIERA

In the days of the Doges--Origin of the name--The blue bay of Cannes--Ste. Marguerite and St. Honorat--Historical a.s.sociations--The Rue L'Antibes--The rock of Monaco--”Notre Dame de la Roulette”--From Monte Carlo to Mentone--San Remo--A romantic railway.

”Oh, Land of Roses, what bulbul shall sing of thee?” In plain prose, how describe the garden of Europe? The Riviera! Who knows, save he who has been there, the vague sense of delight which the very name recalls to the poor winter exile, banished by frost and cold from the fogs and bronchitis of more northern climes? What visions of gray olives, s.h.i.+mmering silvery in the breeze on terraced mountain slopes! What cataracts of Marshal Niels, falling in rich profusion over gray limestone walls! What aloes and cactuses on what sun-smitten rocks! What picnics in December beneath what cloudless blue skies! But to those who know and appreciate it best, the Riviera is something more than mere scenery and suns.h.i.+ne. It is life, it is health, it is strength, it is rejuvenescence. The return to it in autumn is as the renewal of youth. Its very faults are dear to us, for they are the defects of its virtues. We can put up with its dust when we remember that dust means sun and dry air; we can forgive its staring white roads when we reflect to ourselves that they depend upon almost unfailing fine weather and bright, clear skies, when northern Europe is wrapped in fog and cold and wretchedness.