Riviera Towns Part 10

As you emerge from the Old Town, at the harbor, you pa.s.s by a large modern church in Byzantine style, whose portal shows to excellent advantage six porphyry columns from the nearby Boulouris quarries.

Along the sea is the Boulevard Felix-Martin, which runs into the Corniche de l'Esterel. For several miles you feel that there is nothing to detract from the spell of the sea. Elsewhere on the Riviera you have promenades embellished by great buildings and monuments and forts and exotic trees. You have coves and capes and villa-clad hills with the Alpine background. You climb cliffs and see the Mediterranean at bends, through trees and across luxurious gardens. Panorama after panorama with distractions galore react on you like a picture gallery.

But at Saint-Raphael the sea dominates. The Mediterranean alone holds you.

This is why you cannot endorse the bald statement flung at you by the famous sundial of the Rue de France at Nice:

"Io vado e vengo ogni giorno, Ma tu andrai senza ritorno."

It may be true enough of Nice that you will not go back. One has the confusion of human activities everywhere and tires of it everywhere.

But just the sea alone is always new. Of course in the end the immortal sun has the better of you. But as long as life does last the effort will be made to get back to the Boulevard Felix-Martin at Saint-Raphael. For there, better than anywhere else on the Riviera, one can look at the sea.

CHAPTER XV

THeOULE

From Cannes to Menton the Riviera is cursed with electric tram lines.

We were led beyond Cannes to the Corniche de l'Esterel by the absence of a tram line. We could not get away from the railway, however, without abandoning the coast. Is there any place desirable for living purposes in which the railway does not obtrude? When choosing a country residence, men with families, unless they have several motors and several chauffeurs, must stick close to the railway. Monsieur l'Adjoint was showing us the salon of his villa when a whistle announced the Vintimille express. He hastened to antic.i.p.ate the train by rea.s.suring us that there was a deep cut back of the villa and that the road-bed veered away from us just at the corner of the garden. It was in the neighboring villa that trains were really heard. We were to believe him--at that moment chandeliers and windows and two vases of dried gra.s.ses on the mantelpiece danced a pa.s.sing greeting to the train. Monsieur l'Adjoint thought that he had failed to carry the day.

But we live on a Paris boulevard, and know that noises are comparative.

Vintimille expresses were not going to pa.s.s all the time.

We were glad that the railway had not deterred us. It was good to be right above the water. Some people do not like the glare of sun reflected from the sea. But they are late risers. Parents of small children are accustomed to waking with the sun. On the first morning in the Villa etoile the baby chuckled early. Sun spots were dancing on the ceiling, and she was watching them. The breakfast on the terrace was no hurried swallowing of a cup of coffee with eyes fixed upon a newspaper propped against a sugar bowl. The agreement of the day before had been tripart.i.te. The proprietor was easily satisfied with bank notes. But the wife had not consented to leave the freedom of the hotel until it had been solemnly agreed that newspapers were to be refused entrance into the Villa etoile, and that watches were not to be drawn out (even furtively) from waistcoat pockets.

Unless agreements are fortified by favorable circ.u.mstances and constantly recurring interest, they are seldom lived up to. When promises are difficult to keep, where are the men of their word? Doing what one does not want to do is a sad business. That is why Puritanism is a.s.sociated with gloom. On the terrace of the Villa etoile no man could want to look at a newspaper or a watch. Across the Gulf of La Napoule lies Cannes. Beyond Cannes is the Cap d'Antibes. Mountains, covered with snow and coming down to the sea in successive chains, form the eastern horizon. Inland, Gra.s.se is nestled close under them.

Seaward, the Iles de Lerins seem to float upon the water. For on Sainte-Marguerite the line of demarcation between Mediterranean blue and forest green is sharp, and Saint-Honorat, dominated by the soft gray of the castle and abbey, is like a reflected cloud. Between Theoule and Cannes the railway crosses the viaduct of the Siagne.

Through the arches one can see the golf course on which an English statesman thought out the later phases of British Imperialism. To the west, the Gulf of La Napoule ends in the pine-covered promontory of the Esquillon. Except for a very small beach in front of the Theoule hotel, the coast is rocky. From February to May our terrace outlook competed successfully with duties elsewhere.

Young and old in Theoule have to make a daily effort to enjoy educational and religious privileges. We wondered at first why the school and church were placed on the promontory, a good mile and a half from the town. But later we came to realize that this was a salutary measure. The climate is insidious. A daily antidote against laziness is needed. I was glad that I volunteered to take the children to school at eight and two, and go after them at eleven and four, and that they held me to it. In order to reach a pa.s.sable route on the steep wall of rock and pine, the road built by the Touring-Club de France makes a bend of two kilometers in the valley behind Theoule. By taking a footpath from the hotel, the pedestrian eliminates the bend in five minutes. In spite of curves, the road is continuously steep and keeps a heavy grade until it reaches the Pointe de l'Esquillon.

I never tired of the four times a day. Between the Villa etoile and the town was the castle, built on the water's edge. After Louis XIV it became a soap factory, and was restored to its ancient dignity only recently. I ought not to say "dignity," for the restorer was a baron of industry, and his improvements are distressing. The entrance to the park created on the inner side of the road opposite the chateau is the result of landscape dentistry. The creator did not find that the natural rock lent itself to his fancies, and filled in the hollows with stones of volcanic origin. On the side of the hill, fountains and pools and a truly ma.s.sive flight of steps have been made. Scrawny firs are trying to grow where they ought not to. Quasi-natural urns overflow with captive flowers, geraniums and nasturtiums predominating.

Ferns hang as gracefully as s.h.i.+rtings displayed in a department store window. Stone lions defy, and terra cotta stags run away from, porcelain dogs. There are bowers and benches of imitation petrified wood.

American money may be responsible for the chateau garden, but the villas of Theoule are all French. Modern French artistic genius runs to painting and clothes. There is none left for building or house-furnis.h.i.+ng. French taste, as expressed in homes, inside and outside, is as bad as Prussian. We may admire mildly the monotonous symmetry of post-Haussmann Paris. When we get to the suburbs and to the provincial towns and to summer and winter resorts, we have to confess that architecture is a lost art in France. In America, especially in our cities, we have regrettable traces of mid-Victorianism, and we have to contend with Irish politicians and German contractors. In the suburbs, and in the country, however, where Americans build their own homes, we have become accustomed to ideas of beauty that make the results of the last sixty years of European growth painful to us. Our taste in line, color, decoration, and interior furnis.h.i.+ng is at hopeless variance with that of twentieth-century Europe. We admire and we buy in Europe that which our European ancestors created. Our admiration--and our buying--is confined strictly to Europe of the past. Present-day Europe displays German _Schmuck_ from one end to the other, and France is no exception.

On the walk to school you soon get beyond the chateau and the villas.

But even on the promontory there is more than the dodging of automobiles to remind one that this is the twentieth century. The Corniche de l'Esterel has been singled out by the moving-picture men for playing out-of-door scenarios. When the sun is s.h.i.+ning, a day rarely pa.s.ses without film-making. The man with a camera has the rising road and bends around which the action can enter into the scene, the forest up and the forest down, the Mediterranean and mountain and island and Cannes backgrounds. Automobile hold-ups with pistols barking, the man and the maid in the woods and on the terrace, the villain a.s.saulting and the hero rescuing the defenseless woman, the heroine jumping from a rock into the sea, and clinging to an upturned boat--these are commonplace events on the Corniche de l'Esterel.

The world of cinemas and motors does not rise early. On the morning walk, children and squirrels and birds were all one met. Children go slowly, and squirrels and birds belong to nature. There was always time to breathe in the forest and the sea and to look across to the mountains. When _cartables_ and _gouters_ were handed over at the school gate, parental responsibility ceased for three hours. One had the choice of going on around the point towards Trayas or down to the sea.

The people of Theoule say that Corsica, sixty miles away, can be seen from the Esquillon. All one has to do is to keep going day after day until "atmospheric conditions are favorable." The Touring-Club de France has built a Belvedere at the extremity of the Esquillon. Arrows on a dial indicate the direction of important places from Leghorn to Ma.r.s.eilles. The Apennines behind Florence, as well as Corsica, are marked as within the range of visibility. The Apennines had not been seen for years, but Corsica was liable to appear at any time. The first day the Artist went with me to the Esquillon, an Oldest Inhabitant said that we had a Corsica day. A milkwoman _en route_ reported Corsica in sight, and told us to hurry. Towards nine o'clock the sun raises a mist from the sea, she explained. In the belvedere we found a girl without a guide book who had evidently come over from Trayas. She was crouched down to dial level, and her eyes were following the Corsica arrow. She did not look up or move when we entered. Minutes pa.s.sed. There was no offer to give us a chance. We coughed and shuffled, and the Artist sang "The Little Gray Home in the West." I informed the Artist--in French--that a specialist had once remarked upon my hyperopic powers, and that if Corsica were really in sight I could not fail to see it.

Not until she had to shake the cramp out of her back did the girl straighten up.

"Corsica is invisible today," she announced.

"Yes," I answered sadly. "Ten minutes ago the mist began to come up.

You know, sun upon the water--"

A look in her eyes made me hesitate. "And all that sort of thing," I ended lamely.

"Nonsense," she said briskly. She surveyed the Artist from mustache to cane point and turned back to me. "You, at least," she declared, "are American, but of the unpractical sort. And you are as unresourceful as you are ungallant, Monsieur. How do I know? Well, you were complaining about my monopolizing the dial. There is a map on the tiles under your feet, and a compa.s.s dangles uselessly from your watch-chain. I wonder, too, if you _are_ hyperopic. You know which is the Carlton Hotel over there in Cannes. Tell me how many windows there are across a floor."

The atmosphere was wonderfully clear, and the Carlton stood out plainly. But I failed the test.

The girl laughed. I did not mind that. When the Artist started in, I turned on him savagely.

"Well, you count the Carlton windows," I said.

"No specialist ever told me I was hyperopic," he came back.

I had to save the day by answering that I was glad to be myopic just now. Who wanted to see Corsica any longer? The girl knew interesting upper paths on the western side of the promontory. She had as much time as we, or rather, I must say regretfully, she and the Artist had more time than I. For eleven o'clock came quickly, and I hurried off to fulfill my parental duty. The Artist told me afterwards that there was a fine _cuisine_ at the Trayas restaurant.

I did think of my compa.s.s one day: for I had sore need of it. But, as generally happens in such cases, I was not wearing it. Between Theoule and La Napoule, the nearest town on the way to Cannes, a tempting forest road leads back into the valley. A sign states that a curious view of a mountain peak, named after Marcus Aurelius, could be had by following the road for half a dozen kilometers. It was one of the things tourists did when they were visiting the Corniche for a day.

Consequently, when one was staying on the Corniche, it was always an excursion of the morrow. During the Artist's first week, we were walking over to Mandelieu to take the tram to Cannes one morning, and suddenly decided that the last thing in the world for sensible folks to do was to go to Cannes on a day when the country was calling insistently. We turned in at the sign. After we had seen the view, we thought that it would be possible to take a short cut back to Theoule.

The wall of the valley that shut us off from the sea must certainly be the big hill just behind the Villa etoile. If, instead of retracing our steps towards La Napoule, we kept ahead, and remembered to take the left at every cross path, we would come out at the place where the Corniche road made its big bend before mounting to the promontory. It was all so simple that it could not be otherwise. We were sure of the direction, and fairly sure of the distance, since we had left the motor road between Theoule and La Napoule.

There was an hour and a half before lunch. A lumber road followed the brook, and the brook skirted the hill beyond which was Theoule and the Villa etoile. It was a day to swear by, and April flowers were in full bloom. It was delightful until we had to confess that the hill showed no signs of coming down to a valley on the left. Finally, at a point where a path went up abruptly from the stream, we decided that it would be best to cut over the summit of the hill and not wait until the Corniche road appeared before us. In this way we would avoid the walk back from the hotel to our villa, and come out in our own garden. But on the Riviera nature has shown no care in placing her hills where they ought to be and in symmetrizing and limiting them. They go on indefinitely. So did we, until we came to feel that we would be like the soldiers of Xenophon once we spied the sea. But the cry "Thala.s.sa"

was denied us. Eventually we turned back, and tried keeping the hill on the right. This was as perplexing as keeping it on the left had been. A pair of famished explorers, hungry enough to eat canned tuna-fish and crackers with relish, reached a little town inland from Mandelieu about seven o'clock that night with no clear knowledge of from where or how they had come.

Between the town of Theoule and the belvedere of the Esquillon, down along the water's edge, one never tires of exploring the caves. Paths lead through the pines and around the cliffs. The Artist was attracted to the caves by the hope of finding vantage points from which to sketch Gra.s.se and Cannes and Antibes and the Alps and the castle on Saint-Honorat. But he soon came to love the copper rocks, which pine needles had dyed, and deserted black and white for colors. When the climate got him, he was not loath to join in my hunt for octopi. The inhabitants tell thrilling stories of the monsters that lurk under the rocks at the Pointe de l'Esquillon and forage right up to the town.

One is warned to be on his guard against long tentacles reaching out swiftly and silently. One is told that slipping might mean more than a ducking. Owners of villas on the rocks make light of octopi stories, and as local boomers are trying to make Theoule a summer resort, it is explained that the octopi never come near the beach. Even if they did, they would not be dangerous there. How could they get a hold on the sand with some tentacles while others were grabbing you?

I have never wanted to see anything quite so badly as I wanted to see an octopus at Theoule. Octopus hunting surpa.s.ses gathering four-leaf clovers and fis.h.i.+ng as an occupation in which hope eternal plays the principle role. I gradually abandoned other pursuits, and sat smoking on rocks by the half day, excusing indolence on the ground of the thrilling story I was going to get. I learned over again painfully the boyhood way of drinking from a brook, and lay face downward on island stones. With the enthusiastic help of my children, I made a dummy stuffed with pine cones, and let him float at the end of a rope. Never a tentacle, let alone octopus, appeared. I had to rest content with Victor Hugo's stirring picture in "The Toilers of the Sea."

A plotting wife encouraged the octopus hunts by taking part in them, and expressing frequently her belief in the imminent appearance of the octopi. She declared that sooner or later my reward would come. She threw off the mask on the first day of May, when she thought it was time to return to work. She announced to the Artist and me that the octopi had gone over to the African coast to keep cool until next winter, and that we had better all go to Paris to do the same. We were ready. Theoule was still lovely, and the terrace breakfasts had lost none of their charm. But one does not linger indefinitely on the Riviera unless _dolce far niente_ has become the princ.i.p.al thing in life.