Riviera Towns Part 9

Since the River Argens began to flow, it has been depositing silt against the eastern sh.o.r.e of the Gulf of Frejus, at the point of which stands St Raphael. Consequently the road, sentineled by linden trees, crosses a rich plain, and is more than a mile from the sea when it reaches the city of Julius Caesar. The upper ends of the mole of the ancient port, high and dry like s.h.i.+ps at low tide, join the walls of the ca.n.a.l. You have to look closely to distinguish the ca.n.a.l and the depression of the basin into which it widens near the town. For where land has encroached upon sea, vegetable gardens and orchards have been planted. Inland, the arches from the aqueduct of the Siagne shed their bricks in wheat fields and protrude from clumps of hazels. As it enters the city, the road turns back on itself and mounts to the market-place. The sharp outward bend of the elevation above the narrow stretch of lowland suggest that there was a time, long before Roman days, when Frejus, like the towns of the Corniche de l'Esterel, was built on a promontory.

Frejus belongs to no definite period. It is not Roman, medieval, modern.

It is not a watering-place fas.h.i.+onable or unfas.h.i.+onable, a manufacturing town prosperous or struggling, a port bustling or sleepy, a fis.h.i.+ng-village or a flower-gathering center. Frejus suggests no marked racial characteristics in architecture or inhabitants. It is neither distinctly Midi nor distinctly Italian--as those terms are understood by travelers. Frejus is unique among the cities of the Cote d'Azur because it has no unmistakable _cachet_. Frejus suggests Rome, the Middle Ages, the twentieth century. Frejus embraces pleasure-seeking, industries, fish, flowers, and soldiering. Mermaids, delightfully reminiscent of the Lido and Abbazia in garb, dive from the end of the mole into a safe swimming-pool; children of the proletariat in coa.r.s.e black _tabliers_, who have not left sandals and white socks on the beach behind them, fish for crabs; naval aviators start hydroplanes from an aerodrome beside the Roman amphitheater; fishermen, of olive Mediterranean complexion, dry copper-tinted nets on the beach, laying them, despite the scolding of the Senegalese guards, upon piles of granite and cement blocks with which laborers are building a new pier.

We had come to the beach for an after-luncheon smoke, and when we were not looking at the Senegalese and workmen, our eyes wandered from hydroplanes and machine-gun-armed motor-boats to the mermaids on the Roman mole. Not till we ran out of tobacco and the mole ran out of mermaids did we realize that Frejus was still unexplored and unsketched.

We gave ourselves a six o'clock rendezvous on the beach. The Artist started to seek Roman ruins, while I turned towards the market-place, cathedral bound. Sea-level villas came first, and then a quarter of sixteenth-century houses, many of which showed on the ground floor medieval foundations. In two places I got back to the Romans. A cross section of thin flat bricks with generous interstices of cement in the front wall of a greengrocer's opposite, indicated the line of the Roman fortification. Walking around the next parallel street, I managed to get into a garden where a long piece of the wall remained.

I came out to the St. Raphael carriage road at a corner where arose a huge square tower of the Norman period. Almost to its crumbling top, houses had been built against it on two sides. The angle formed by the alley through which I came and the main street had fortunately kept the other two sides clear. The tower was the home of a wine and coal merchant, who had laid in a supply of cut wood on his roof to the height of several feet above the irregular parapet. Outside one of the narrow vertical slits, which in ages past had served as vantage point for a vizored knight fitting arrow to bow, hung a parrot cage. "Coco" was chattering Ma.r.s.eilles sailor French.

A single gargoyle remained. It was a panther, elongated like a dachshund. He was desecrated and humiliated by having tied around his middle the end of the clothesline that stretched across the alley. This proved, however, that he still held firmly his place. The panther, ignoring change of fortune, looked down as of yore, snarling, and with whiskers stiffened to indicate that if he had been given hind legs, they would be ready for a spring. So worn was the gargoyle that ears and chin and part of forehead had disappeared. But you can see the snarl just as you can see the Sphinx's smile. When a thing is well done, it is done for all time. If a poor workman had fas.h.i.+oned that gargoyle, there would have been no panther and no snarl when it was put up there. But a master worked the stone, and what he wrought is ineradicable. It will disappear only with the stone itself. When we speak of ruins, we mean that a part of the material used in expressing a conception has not resisted climate and age and earthquake and vandalism. Armless, Venus de Milo is still the perfect woman. Headless, Nike of Samothrace is still symbolic of the glory of prevailing.

In the morning, before reaching St. Raphael, we pa.s.sed an African soldier limping along the dusty road. He was dispirited even to the crumpled look of his red fez, and the sun, s.h.i.+ning mercilessly, glinted from his rifle-barrel to the beads of perspiration on the back of his neck. We were going fast, and had just time to wave gayly to cheer him up. He did not return our salute. This struck us as strange. Fearing that he might be ill, we made the _cocher_ turn round, and went back to pick him up.

He declared that a sprained ankle made it impossible for him to keep up with his regiment, which had been marching since early morning. He was grateful for the lift, and beamed when we a.s.sured him that we could take him as far as St. Raphael. At that time we were not thinking of going to Frejus, the garrison town of the African troops. When we overtook the regiment and reached his company, we tried to intercede with the French sergeant. The sergeant was adamant and positive.

"A thousand thanks, but the man is shamming. He is lazy. He must get out."

We had to give up our soldier. The sergeant knew his men, and justice is the basic doctrine which guides the discipline of the French colonial army. The regiment of Algerians must have stopped for lunch or maneuvers. For they were just coming through the Place du Marche when I reached there. Only the colonel was on horse. At the turn of the road, the captains stood out of rank to watch their companies wheel. Our soldier of the morning pa.s.sed. He had forgotten his limp. The sergeant recognized me, and pointed to the soldier. His left upper eyelid came down with a wink, as if to say, "Don't I know them!"

There is a spirit of _camaraderie_ between officers and men in Frejus that one never sees in native regiments of the British army. The French have none of our Anglo-Saxon feeling of caste and race prejudice, which makes discipline depend upon aloofness. French officers can be severe without being stern: and they know the difference between poise and pose.

We Anglo-Saxons need to revise radically our judgment of the French in regard to certain traits that are the _sine qua non_ of military efficiency. Energy, resourcefulness, coolness, persistence, endurance, pluck--where have these pet virtues of ours been more strikingly tested, where have they been more abundantly found, than in the French army?

The sign of the French colonial army is an anchor, and Frejus is full of officers who wear it. They are mostly men of the Midi, Roman Gauls every inch of them. The Lamys, the Gallienis, the Joffres, the Fochs, the Lyauteys were born with a genius for leaders.h.i.+p in war. Their apt.i.tude for African conquest and their joy in African colonization are the heritage of their native land. The fortunes of southern France and northern Africa were inseparable through the ten centuries of the spread of civilization and the Latin and Teutonic invasions in the Western Mediterranean. The connection was unbroken from the time that Hannibal marched his African troops through Frejus to Italy until the Omayyads conquered Tunis, Algeria and Morocco. It is the most natural thing in the world to see African troops in Frejus. They belong here now, because since men began to sail in s.h.i.+ps, they have always been at home here as friends or enemies. Mediterranean Africa and Mediterranean France received simultaneously political, social and religious inst.i.tutions, and from the same source. As the Crescent wanes, Gaul is coming back into her own.

Frejus shopkeepers suffer from the proximity of the upstart St. Raphael.

Frejus keeps the bishop, but St. Raphael has taken the trade. There is now only one business street. It runs from the Place du Marche through the center of the city to the Place du Dome. You can get from one _place_ to the other in about five minutes. Few people were on this street in mid-afternoon. None were going into the shops. I chose the department store, and asked the only saleswoman in sight for a collar.

She brought down two styles, both of which were bucolic. Matched with a beflowered tie, either would have gone perfectly around the neck of a Polish immigrant in New York on his wedding day. I suggested that I be shown some other styles. The saleswoman gazed at me stonily.

"A bus leaves the corner below here for St. Raphael every hour. You are there in twenty minutes. Or you can go by train in six minutes."

Up went the boxes to their shelf. There was nothing for me to do but get out.

One says Place du Dome or Place de l'Hotel de Ville, depending upon whether sympathies are ultramontane or anti-clerical. For cathedral and city hall touch each other at right angles. LIBERTe-eGALITe-FRATERNITe is the legend in large letters on the cathedral wall: the one notice posted on the Hotel de Ville is a warning of the last day to pay taxes.

Two beggars stand guard at the cathedral portal: Senegalese with fixed bayonets flank the archway leading to the munic.i.p.al courtyard. The Hotel de Ville is a modern building, typical of French official taste of the present day: the cathedral is an edifice of several epochs, with a brick facade reminiscent of Bologna. The episcopal palace, adjacent to the cathedral, is part of the same structure. But it is used for government offices, and the entrance to its upper floor is by a staircase from the vestibule of the cathedral. The _Service de Sante Munic.i.p.ale_ occupies the rooms along the portico that faces the cloister. The cure of souls has been banished to a private house across the street.

The cathedral quarter is wholly Louis XVI and First Empire. If I had begun my ramble there, I should have found much to admire. But I had been spoiled by the Louis XIII quarter nearer the sea. Travel impressions are largely dependent upon itinerary. I am often able to surprise a compatriot whose knowledge of Europe is limited to one "bang-up trip, and there wasn't much we missed, y'know," by being able to tell him the order in which he visited places. It is an easy thing to do. You simply have to notice how the tourist compares cities and other "sights." He is blissfully ignorant of the fact that his positive judgments, his unhesitating preferences are accidental. They do not express at all his real tastes and his real appreciation of values.

However cultivated and intelligent an observer he may be, unless he has carefully weighed and made proper allowance for the influence of itinerary, his judgments and preferences are not to be taken seriously.

For years I honestly believed that the Rue de la Porte Rosette was one of the finest streets in the world. I told my friends of it. But when Alexandria was revisited, the Rue de la Porte Rosette was a shabby thoroughfare. After a year in the interior of Asia Minor, the Rue de la Porte Rosette was the first street through which I drove in coming back to European civilization. The next time I saw it I was fresh from years of constant residence in Paris. In my memory, Sofia is a gem of an up-to-date city, while Bucharest is a poor imitation of the occidental munic.i.p.ality. The chances are more than even that my comparative estimate of the two Balkan capitals is wholly wrong. For each time I have visited Sofia, it was in coming from Turkey, while stops at Bucharest have followed immediately after Buda-Pest and Odessa.

I wandered through the cathedral quarter with less enthusiasm than was its due, and soon decided to rejoin the Artist. He was not in the neighborhood of any of the Roman ruins. He was not sitting behind an _aperitif_ on a cafe terrace. He was not watching soldiers play football in the courtyard of the barracks. He was not sketching the Norman tower.

He was not exploring alleys of the medieval quarter. He was not looking at hydroplanes over the fence of the aerodrome. My quest had led me unconsciously back to the beach. There was still an hour before our rendezvous. But where we had stretched in the sand after lunch was a delightful spot, and I had remembered to have my pouch filled at a tabac.

I was not going to feel bored waiting for him. Where the laborers were working on the pier, the black soldier guards called out to me to beware of danger. Not being skilled in dodging construction machinery I gave it a wide berth. The place of our siesta had to be reached by going through ruins and climbing over a dune. The Artist was there.

"You know," he explained, ignoring with the sweep of his hand the Roman mole where a new bevy of mermaids had appeared, "the progress of aviation has fascinated me ever since that July day at Rheims when Wright went up and stayed up. Just look what those fellows are doing!"

Hydroplanes were appearing from the aerodrome. When they struck the water there was a hiss, which grew in volume and acuity as they skimmed the waves. After a few hundred yards, the machines rose as easily as from land, circled up to the clouds and into them. Coming down, the aviators practiced dipping and swerving by following and avoiding the purposely irregular course of motor-boats. An officer, who spoke to us to find out, I suppose, who we were and why we were there, remarked that the aviators were beginners. We were astonished. If this was learning to fly, what was flying?

"Our boys need little teaching to learn to fly," he explained. "That comes naturally. What they are learning is how to use their machines for fighting. Science and training and practice come in there. A world-old game is before you. It is only the medium that is new."

Words of wisdom. A bit of aqueduct led us to Frejus in the hope of tasting the charm of a more ancient past than we had found in other Riviera cities. We were not disappointed. The charm was there. But we would not have found it, had we tried to dissociate it from the present, had we ignored or deplored its setting. Nothing that lives a.s.similates what is foreign to its nature: nothing that lives survives dissection.

We took Frejus as Frejus was, and not as we wanted it to be or thought it must be. We took the aerodrome with the hippodrome, the coal merchant with the Norman tower, the parrot with the gargoyle, the Hotel de Ville with the cathedral, and the mermaids with the mole.

CHAPTER XIV

SAINT-RAPHAEL

On the terrace of our little home at Theoule, a lover of the Riviera read what I had written about Frejus.

"If you have any idea of making a book out of your Riviera articles,"

she said positively, "do not think you can dismiss the Esterel and Saint-Raphael in so cavalier a fas.h.i.+on. That may be all right for Lester Hornby and you and serve as a good introduction to a story on Frejus, but in your project of a book on Riviera towns--"

There is no need to say more. I looked over to the hills of the Esterel and felt sorry I had neglected them. I thought of past experiences, and agreed that there was something more to write about the French end of the Riviera. And then we put our heads together over a time table, planned to go to Agay by train, and walk on the rest of the way to Saint-Raphael. If the weather was good, we should climb Mont Vinaigre, and see the Esterel from its highest point.

"I don't care whether it affords good subjects for Lester or not,"

declared my boss. "I've done the trip, and I know it will be fun--and remember what Horatio was told!"

Humankind and human habitation had occupied the Artist and myself on almost every day afield from, Theoule. Of course we had taken in the scenery, sketched it and spoken about it, but only as a background or accompaniment. From Cannes to Menton it is the human side of the Riviera that gets you. Nature is a sort of musical accompaniment to the song of human activity. Between Cannes and the Italian frontier, where the railway does not skirt the coast, you have the tramway. It is with you always, night and day, and makes itself heard at every curve. (The road is all curves!) As a result of the tramway, or perhaps as its cause, the Cannes-Menton stretch of the Riviera is solidly built up. Where the towns do not run into each other, an unbroken line of villas links them up. It is all the city--you cannot get away from that.

The road we follow to Frejus was opened in 1903, a gift to the nation from the initiative and enterprise of the Touring-Club de France. The building of a tram line was fortunately forbidden. But with the railway and rapidly-developing use of the automobile, the little villages of the Esterel coast are being rapidly built up. Around the cape from Theoule, Le Trayas will soon rival Saint-Raphael as a center for Esterel excursions. Then we have Antheor, Agay, and Boulouris before reaching the long and charming villa-covered approach to Saint-Raphael.

But we do not need to worry yet about what is going to happen. The blessed fact remains that the Esterel, between Theoule and Saint-Raphael, is not yet closely populated like the rest of the Riviera. The tramway has not come. The railway frequently goes out of sight, if not out of hearing, for a mile or two. You have nature all by herself, with no houses, no human beings, no human inventions. The interior of the Esterel is as refres.h.i.+ngly different from the hinterland of the rest of the Riviera as most of the coast. There are no cities and towns back on the hills, no railways and tramways, no fine motor roads to make the pedestrian's progress a disagreeable and almost continuous pa.s.sage through clouds of dust. The Esterel is hills and valleys, streams and forests and birds. You do not even have poles and wires to remind you of the world you have left for the moment.

The only way one comes to know this country is to have a villa on its fringe, as we did, and get lost in it every time you try to explore it.

But such good fortune does not fall to everyone--nor the time--so it is comforting to point out that much of interest in the Esterel can be visited by motorists from the Corniche. Between La Napoule and Agay, the Touring-Club de France has put sign-posts at every little path leading from the Corniche back into the interior. Some paths, also, where the road mounts on Cap Roux, lead down to grottoes on the water's edge or out to cliffs. Each sign gives the attraction and the distance. In our walks from Theoule we explored most of these, but discovered that one must not have an objective for lunch. For there is no connection between the number of kilometers and the time you must take. A map and compa.s.s are wise precautions. Some paths are scarcely marked at all, and when you have to slide down the side of a volcanic hill into a ravine and try to guess where you are supposed to go next, a woodsman's instinct is needed. The excursions are surer because more frequented, but none the less charming, after you have rounded the cape and crossed the little River Agay.

Agay, the Agathon of Ptolemy, boasts of the only harbor on the Esterel.

On one side is the Pointe d'Antheor and on the other Cap Dramont.

Right behind the harbor rises the Rastel d'Agay, a jagged ma.s.s of copper rock a thousand feet high, climbing which is an excellent preparation for and indication of what one may expect in Esterel exploration. The way is not made easy for you as it is in the eastern end of the Riviera. But unless you strike an exceptionally warm day you have the will for pus.h.i.+ng on afoot that is completely lacking at Monte Carlo and Menton.

The most ambitious and most interesting excursion into the Esterel that can be made in a day's walk is to go to Saint-Raphael from Agay by way of Mont Vinaigre. You must make an early start and be ready to put in from five to six hours if you want to eat your lunch on the highest peak of the Esterel. It took us from seven o'clock to noon, and we kept going steadily. Crossing the railway, we struck out to the right of the Agay through forests of pine and cork to Le Gratadis, then along the Ravin du Pertus, pus.h.i.+ng through the underbrush in blossom and skirting the many walls of rock that served to indicate where the path was not. It would have been easier to have made the round trip from Saint-Raphael. But we should not have the full realization of the wild beauty of the Esterel nor that joyful feeling of reaching _astra per aspera_. The way down to Saint-Raphael, after descending to Le Malpey, less than an hour from the summit, is by a carriage road.

We wished we could have seen the stars from Mont Vinaigre. There was a belvedere, and if we had only brought our blankets! But however warm the day, the nights are cool, especially two thousand feet up. Only those who have slept out at night in Mediterranean countries know how cold it can get. The top of Mont Vinaigre, almost in the center of the Esterel, affords a view of the ensemble of volcanic hills crowded together by themselves that makes you realize why it is so easy to get lost in the valleys between them. The forests are thick and the ravines go every which way. Inland the Esterel is separated from the foothills of the Maritime Alps by the valleys of the Riou Blanc and Siagne through which runs the main road to Gra.s.se, with a branch down the Siagne to Mandelieu. On the northern slope of the mountain is the road from Frejus to Cannes, which leaves the Esterel at Mandelieu. It is one of the oldest roads in France. Several Roman milestones have recently been unearthed here. In these hills the Romans found coal and copper, and from the quarries along the coast at Boulouris and on Cap Dramont the quarries of blue porphyry are still worked.

In mining possibilities the whole region is as rich as it was twenty centuries ago; but, as in many other parts of France, little has been done to take advantage of them. Some years ago an American friend of mine, motoring with his wife from Frejus to Cannes, discovered coal fields, formed a company, and is now drawing a revenue from hills whose former owners knew them only as preserves for shooting wild boar and other wild game. Within her own boundaries France has coal enough for all her needs if only she would mine it. But the French love to put their money into safe bonds of their own and foreign governments. The woolen stocking does not give up its h.o.a.rded coins for such enterprises as mines and domestic industries. Daughter's _dot_ must be in a form acceptable to the prospective bridegroom's family. And then the French do not breed the new generation sufficiently large to furnish laborers for developing the natural resources of the country. They are hostile to immigration. When the war came Asia and Africa were called upon to man munition plants.

After the lesson of the war the French have tried to make their own country give up more of its wealth. However, though they are now more skeptical than ever of investing abroad, they still pursue an aggressive foreign policy to open up and protect fields of capital far from home. On the edge of the Esterel, a dozen miles away, at Frejus, Saint-Raphael and Cannes, the people have lost much money in Russian and Turkish bonds, Brazilian railways and coffee plantations. Their sons go to Algeria and Morocco to seek a fortune. Is this why only the coming of tourists and residents from a less hospitable clime has wrought any change in the country during the nineteenth century? From the standpoint of natural production the Riviera is relatively less important, less self-supporting than before the railway came.

By the forester's house of Le Malpey, after an hour's descent, we strike the carriage road. An hour and a half brings us to Valescure, an English colony built in pine woods. Another half hour and we are at Saint-Raphael.

The next morning we discovered that Saint-Raphael had its Old Town, which escaped us on our trip to Frejus. Only the new name of the main street--Rue Gambetta--indicated that we were in France of the Third Republic. But, as in Gra.s.se, we felt that we were really in France of all the centuries. There was none of that unmistakably Italian atmosphere that still makes itself felt in Nice, once you wander into quarters east of the Place Ma.s.sena. The thick walls of the old church--far too ma.s.sive for its size--bear witness to the period when Mediterranean coast town church was sanctuary more than in name. To the church the people fled when the Saracen pirates came, and while the priests prayed they acted on the adage that G.o.d helps those who help themselves, pouring molten lead from the roof and shooting arbalests through _meurtrieres_ that can still be distinguished despite bricks and plaster. This is the Saint-Raphael that Napoleon knew when he returned from Egypt and, fifteen years later, sailed for his first exile at Elba.

But we found much that was attractive in the new Saint-Raphael, which is as French as the old. The English keep themselves mostly at Valescure. Tourists come on _chars-a-bancs_ for lunch, and hurry back to Nice. Saint-Raphael has developed as a French watering place. It does not have the protection of the high wall of the Maritime Alps.

When the mistral, bane of the Midi, is not blowing, however, you wonder whether the native-born have not picked out for a seash.o.r.e resort a more delightful bit of the Riviera coast than foreigners. A Frenchman once told me that Saint-Raphael was the logical Riviera town for the French simply because the night train from Paris landed a traveler there in time for noon lunch.

"This fact alone," he declared to me, "would induce me to choose Saint-Raphael in preference to Cannes and Nice. You know that when twelve o'clock has struck the day is ruined for a Frenchman if he is not reasonably sure of being able to sit down pretty soon to a good hot meal. The P.-L.-M. put Cannes and Nice just a little bit beyond our limit."