THE RIVIERA OF THE

CORNICHE ROAD

A RIVIERA GARDEN.

The Riviera of the

Corniche Road

BY

SIR FREDERICK TREVES, BART.

G.C.V.O., C.B., LL.D.

Serjeant-Surgeon to His Majesty the King; Author of “The

Other Side of the Lantern,” “The Cradle of the Deep,”

“The Country of the Ring and the Book,” “Highways

and By-ways of Dorset,” etc. etc.

Illustrated by 92 Photographs by the Author

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD

London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne

1921

Preface

This book deals with that part of the French Riviera which is commanded by the Great Corniche Road—the part between Nice and Mentone—together with such places as are within easy reach of the Road.

I am obliged to the proprietors of the Times for permission to reprint an article of mine contributed to that journal in March, 1920. It appears as Chapter XXXVII.

I am much indebted to Dr. Hagberg Wright, of the London Library, for invaluable help in the collecting of certain historical data.

FREDERICK TREVES.

Monte Carlo,

Christmas, 1920

THE RIVIERA OF THE

CORNICHE ROAD

I
EARLY DAYS IN THE RIVIERA

THE early history of this brilliant country is very dim, as are its shores and uplands when viewed from an on-coming barque at the dawn of day. The historian-adventurer sailing into the past sees before him just such an indefinite country as opens up before the eye of the mariner. Hills and crags—alone unchangeable—rise against the faint light in the sky. The sound of breakers on the beach alone can tell where the ocean ends and where the land begins; while the slopes, the valleys and the woods are lost in one blank impenetrable shadow.

As the daylight grows, or as our knowledge grows, the forms of men come into view, wild creatures armed with clubs and stones. They will be named Ligurians, just as the earlier folk of Britain were named Britons. Later on less uncouth men, furnished with weapons of bronze or iron, can be seen to land from boats or to be plodding along the shore as if they had journeyed far. They will be called Phœnicians, Carthaginians or Phocæans according to the leaning of the writer who deals with them. There may be bartering on the beach, there may be fighting or pantomimic love-making; but in the end those who are better armed take the place of the old dwellers, and the rough woman in her apron of skins walks off into the wood by the side of the man with the bronze knife and the beads.

There is little more than this to be seen through the haze of far distant time. The written history, such as it is, is thus part fiction, part surmise, for the very small element of truth is based upon such fragments of evidence as a few dry bones, a few implements, a bracelet, a defence work, a piece of pottery.

The Ligurians or aborigines formed themselves, for purposes of defence, into clans or tribes. They built fortified camps as places of refuge. Relics of these forts or castra remain, and very remarkable relics they are, for they show immense walls built of blocks of unworked stone that the modern wall builder may view with amazement. Nowhere are these camps found in better preservation than around Monte Carlo.

In the course of time into this savage country, marching in invincible columns, came the stolid, orderly legions of Rome. They subdued the hordes of hillmen, broke up their forts, and commemorated the victory by erecting a monument on the crest of La Turbie which stands there to this day. The Romans brought with them discipline and culture, and above all, peace. The natives, reassured, came down from their retreats among the heights and established themselves in the towns which were springing up by the edge of the sea. The Condamine of Monaco, for example, was inhabited during the first century of the present era, as is made manifest by the relics which have been found there.

With the fall of the Roman Empire peace vanished and the whole country lapsed again into barbarism. It was overrun from Marseilles to Genoa by gangs of hearty ruffians whose sole preoccupation was pillage, arson and murder. They uprooted all that the Romans had established, and left in their fetid trail little more than a waste of burning huts and dead men.

These pernicious folk were called sometimes Vandals, sometimes Goths, sometimes Burgundians, and sometimes Swabians. The gentry, however, who seem to have been the most persistent and the most diligent in evil were the Lombards. They are described as “ravishing the country” for the immoderate period of two hundred years, namely from 574 to 775. How it came about that any inhabitants were left after this exhausting treatment the historian does not explain.

At the end of the eighth century there may possibly have been a few years’ quiet along the Riviera, during which time the people would have recovered confidence and become hopeful of the future. Now the Lombards had always come down upon them by land, so they knew in which direction to look for their troubles, and, moreover, they knew the Lombards and had a quite practical experience of their habits. After a lull in alarms and in paroxysms of outrage, and after what may even be termed a few calm years, something still more dreadful happened to these dwellers in a fool’s paradise. Marauders began to come, not by the hill passes, but by sea and to land out of boats. They were marauders, too, of a peculiarly virulent type, compared with whom the Lombards were as babes and sucklings; for not only were their actions exceptionally violent and their weapons unusually noxious, but they themselves were terrifying to look at, for they were nearly black.

These alarming people were the Saracens, otherwise known as the Moors or Arabs. They belonged to a great race of Semitic origin which had peopled Syria, the borders of the Red Sea and the North of Africa. They invaded—in course of time—not only this tract of coast, but also Rhodes, Cyprus, France, Spain and Italy. They were by birth and inheritance wanderers, fighters and congenital pirates. They spread terror wherever they went, and their history may be soberly described as “awful.” They probably appeared at their worst in Provence and at their best in Spain, where they introduced ordered government, science, literature and commerce, and left behind them the memory of elegant manners and some of the most graceful buildings in the world.

As early as about 800 the Saracens had made themselves masters of Eze, La Turbie and Sant’ Agnese; while by 846 they seem to have terrorised the whole coast from the Rhone to the Genoese Gulf, and in the first half of the tenth century to have occupied nearly every sea-town from Arles to Mentone. Finally, in 980, a great united effort was made to drive the marauders out of France. It was successful. The leader of the Ligurian forces was William of Marseilles, first Count of Provence, and one of the most distinguished of his lieutenants was a noble Genoese soldier by name Gibellino Grimaldi. It is in the person of this knight that the Grimaldi name first figures in the history of the Ligurian coast.

As soon as the Saracens had departed the powers that had combined to drive them from the country began to fight among themselves. They fought in a vague, confused, spasmodic way, with infinite vicissitudes and in every available place, for over five hundred years. The siege of Nice by the French in 1543 may be conveniently taken as the end of this particular series of conflicts.

It was a period of petty fights in which the Counts of Provence were in conflict with the rulers of Northern Italy, with the Duke of Milan, it may be, or the Duke of Savoy or the Doge of Genoa. It was a time when town fought with town, when Pisa was at war with Genoa and Genoa with Nice, when the Count of Ventimiglia would make an onslaught on the Lord of Eze and the ruffian who held Gorbio would plan a descent upon little Roquebrune. This delectable part of the continent, moreover, came within the sphere of that almost interminable war which was waged between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. In the present area the Grimaldi were for the Guelphs and the Pope, and the Spinola for the Ghibellines and the Emperor. The feud began in the twelfth century and lasted until the French invasion in 1494.

This period of five hundred years was a time of interest that was dramatic rather than momentous. So far as the South of France was concerned one of the most beautiful tracts of country in Europe was the battle-ground for bands of mediæval soldiers, burly, dare-devil men carrying fantastic arms and dressed in the most picturesque costumes the world has seen.

It was a period of romance, and, indeed—from a scenic point of view—of romance in its most alluring aspect. Here were all the folk and the incidents made famous by the writers of a hundred tales—the longbowman in his leather jerkin, the man in the slashed doublet sloping a halberd, the gay musketeer, the knight in armour and plumes, as well as the little walled town, the parley before the gate, the fight for the drawbridge and the dash up the narrow street.

It was a period when there were cavalcades on the road, glittering with steel, with pennons and with banners, when there were ambushes and frenzied flights, carousing of the Falstaffian type at inns, and dreadful things done in dungeons. It was a time of noisy banquets in vaulted halls with dogs and straw on the floor; a time of desperate rescues, of tragic escapes, of fights on prison roofs, and of a general and brilliant disorder. It was a delusive epoch, too, with a pretty terminology, when the common hack was a palfrey, the footman a varlet, and the young woman a damosel.

The men in these brawling times were, in general terms, swashbucklers and thieves; but they had some of the traits of crude gentlemen, some rudiments of honour, some chivalry of an emotional type, and an unreliable reverence for the pretty woman.

It was a time to read about rather than to live in; a period that owes its chief charm to a safe distance and to the distortion of an artificial mirage. In any case one cannot fail to realise that these scenes took place in spots where tramcars are now running, where the char-à-banc rumbles along, and where the anæmic youth and the brazen damosel dance to the jazz music of an American band.

When the five hundred years had come to an end there were still, in this particular part of the earth, wars and rumours of wars that ceased not; but they were ordinary wars of small interest save to the student in a history class, for the day of the hand-to-hand combat and of the dramatic fighting in streets had passed away.

So far as our present purpose is concerned the fact need only be noted that the spoiled and petted Riviera has been the scene of almost continuous disturbance and bloodshed for the substantial period of some seventeen hundred years, and that it has now become a Garden of Peace, calmed by a kind of agreeable dream-haunted stupor such as may befall a convulsed man who has been put asleep by cocaine.

II
THE CORNICHE ROAD

IT is hardly necessary to call to mind the fact that there are several Corniche roads along the Riviera. The term implies a fringing road, a road that runs along a cornice or ledge (French, Corniche; Italian, Cornice).

The term will, therefore, be often associated with a coast road that runs on the edge or border of the sea or on a shelf above it.

There are the Chemin de la Corniche at Marseilles which runs as far east as the Prado, the Corniche d’Or near Cannes, the three Corniche Roads beyond Nice, and—inland—the Corniche de Grasse.

The bare term “The Corniche Road” is, however, generally understood to refer to the greatest road of them all, La Grande Corniche.

AT THE BEND OF THE ROAD.

Of all the great roads in Europe it is probable that La Grande Corniche—which runs from Nice eastwards towards Italy—is the best known and the most popular. Roads become famous in many ways, some by reason of historical associations, some on account of the heights they reach, and others by the engineering difficulties they have been able to surmount. La Grande Corniche can claim none of these distinctions. It is comparatively a modern road, it mounts to little more than 1,700 feet, and it cannot boast of any great achievement in its making. It passes by many towns but it avoids them all, all save one little forgotten village outside whose walls it sweeps with some disdain.

It starts certainly from Nice, but it goes practically nowhere, since long before Mentone is in view it drops into a quite common highway, and thus incontinently ends. It is not even the shortest way from point to point, being, on the contrary, the longest. It cannot pretend to be what the Italians call a “master way,” since no road of any note either enters it or leaves it.

In so far as it evades all towns it is unlike the usual great highway. It passes through no cobbled, wondering street; breaks into no quiet, fountained square; crosses no market-place alive with chattering folk; receives no blessing from the shadow of a church. Nowhere is its coming heralded by an avenue of obsequious trees, it forces its way through no vaulted gateway, it lingers by no village green, it knows not the scent of a garden nor the luscious green of a cultivated field. Neither the farmer’s cart nor the lumbering diligence will be met with on this unamiable road, nor will its quiet be disturbed by the patter of a flock of sheep nor by a company of merry villagers on their way to the fair.

La Grande Corniche is, in fact, a modern military road built by the French under Napoleon I in 1806. It was made with murderous intent. It was constructed to carry arms and men, guns and munitions and the implements of war. It was a road of destruction designed to convey bloodshed and desolation into Italy and beyond. He who conceived it had in his mind the picture of a road alive, from end to end, with columns of fighting men marching eastwards under a cloud of angry dust with the banner of France in the van; had in his ears the merciless tramp of ten thousand feet, the clatter of sweating cavalry, the rumble of unending cannon wheels. It was a picture, he thought, worthy of the heart-racking labour that the making of the road involved.

But yet, in spite of all this, the popularity of the road is readily to be understood. It is cut out, as a mere thread, upon the side of a mountain range which is thrown into as many drooping folds as is a vast curtain gathered up into a fraction of its width. It is never monotonous, never, indeed, even straight. It winds in and out of many a valley, it skirts many a fearful gorge, it clings to the flank of many a treacherous slope. Here it creeps beneath a jutting crag, there it mounts in the sunlight over a radiant hill or dips into the silence of a rocky glen.

It has followed in its making any level ledge that gave a foothold to man or beast. It has used the goat track; it has used the path of the mountaineer; while at one point it has taken to itself a stretch of the ancient Roman road. It is a daring, determined highway, headstrong and self-confident, hesitating before no difficulty and daunted by no alarms, heeding nothing, respecting nothing, and obedient only to the call “onwards to Italy at any cost!”

From its eyrie it looks down upon a scene of amazing enchantment, upon the foundations of the everlasting hills, upon a sea glistening like opal, upon a coast with every fantastic variation of crag and cliff, of rounded bay and sparkling beach, of wooded glen and fern-decked, murmuring chine. Here are bright villas by the water’s edge, a white road that wanders as aimlessly along as a dreaming child, a town or two, and a broad harbour lined with trees. Far away are daring capes, two little islands, and a line of hills so faint as to be almost unreal. It is true, indeed, as the writer of a well known guide book has said, that “the Corniche Road is one of the most beautiful roads in Europe.”

Moreover, it passes through a land which is a Vanity Fair to the frivolous, a paradise to the philanderer, and a garden of peace to all who would escape the turmoil of the world. It is a lazy, careless country, free from obtrusive evidence of toil and labour, for there are neither works nor factories within its confines. Here the voice of the agitator is not heard, while the roar of political dispute falls upon the contented ear as the sound of a distant sea.

The Grand Corniche is now a road devoted to the seeker after pleasure. People traverse it, not with the object of arriving at any particular destination, but for the delight of the road itself, of the joy it gives to the eye and to the imagination. Its only traffic is what the transport agent would call “holiday traffic”; for when the idle season ends the highway is deserted. In earlier days there would rumble along the road the carriage and four of the traveller of great means; then came the humbler vehicle hired from the town; then the sleek motor; and finally, as a sign of democratic progress, the char-à-banc, the omnibus, and the motor-brake.

No visitor to the Riviera of any self-respect can leave without traversing the Corniche Road. Mark Twain says that “there are many sights in the Bermudas, but they are easily avoided.” This particular road cannot be avoided. The traveller who returns to his home without having “done” La Grande Corniche may as well leave Rome without seeing the Forum.

The most picturesque section of the road is that between Nice and Eze. Starting from Nice it winds up along the sides of Mont Vinaigrier and Mont Gros which here form the eastern bank of the Paillon valley. The hills are covered with pine and olive trees, vines and oaks. There is soon attained a perfect view over the whole town of Nice, when it will be seen how commanding is the position occupied by the Castle Hill. Across the valley are Cimiez and St. Pons. At the first bend, as the height is climbed, is a tablet to mark the spot where two racing motorists were killed. When the road turns round the northern end of Mont Gros a fine view of the Paillon valley is displayed. This valley is much more attractive at a distance than near at hand. By the river’s bank on one side is St. André with its seventeenth-century château; while on the other side is the Roman station of La Trinité-Victor, a little place of a few houses and a church, where the old Roman road comes down from Laghet. High up above St. André, at the height of nearly 1,000 feet, is the curious village of Falicon. Far away, at a distance of some seven miles, is Peille, a patch of grey in a cup among the mountains. Northwards the Paillon river is lost to view at Drap.

When the road has skirted the eastern side of Mont Vinaigrier the Col des Quatre Chemins is reached (1,131 feet). Here are an inn and a ridiculous monument to General Massena. The hills that border on the road are now bleak and bare. Just beyond the col is a fascinating view of Cap Ferrat and Cap de St. Hospice. The peninsula is spread out upon the sea like a model in dark green wax on a sheet of blue. The road now skirts the bare Monts Pacanaglia and Fourche and reaches the Col d’Eze (1,694 feet), where is unfolded the grandest panorama that the Corniche can provide. The coast can be followed from the Tête de Chien to St. Tropez. The wizened town of Eze comes into sight, and below it is the beautiful Bay of Eze, with the Pointe de Cabuel stretched out at the foot of Le Sueil.

The view inland over the Alps and far away to the snows is superb. To the left are Vence and Les Gorges du Loup, together with the town of St. Jeannet placed at the foot of that mighty precipice, the Baou de St. Jeannet, which attaining, as it does, a height of 2,736 feet is the great landmark of the country round. Almost facing the spectator are Mont Chauve de Tourette (2,365 feet) and Mont Macaron. The former is to be recognised by the fort on its summit. They are distant about five miles. To the right is Mont Agel with its familiar scar of bare stones. Some two kilometres beyond Eze the Capitaine is reached, the point at which the Corniche Road attains its greatest height, that of 1,777 feet.

The track now very slowly descends. When La Turbie (1,574 feet) is passed a splendid view is opened up of Monaco and Monte Carlo, of the Pointe de la Vieille, of Cap Martin, and of the coast of Italy as far as Bordighera. Roquebrune—which can be seen at its best from the Corniche—is passed below the town, and almost at once the road joins the sober highway that leads to Mentone and ends its romantic career on a tramline.

III
NICE: THE PROMENADE DES ANGLAIS

NICE is a somewhat gross, modern seaside town which is beautiful in its situation but in little else. It lies at the mouth of a majestic valley and on the shores of a generous bay, open to the sun, but exposed at the same time to every villainous wind that blows. It is an unimaginative town with most excellent shops and a complete, if noisy, tramway system. It is crowded, and apparently for that reason popular. It is proud of its fine sea front and of the bright and ambitious buildings which are ranged there, as if for inspection and to show Nice at its best.

The body of the town is made up of a vast collection of houses and streets of a standard French pattern and little individuality. Viewed from any one of the heights that rise above it, Nice is picturesque and makes a glorious, widely diffused display of colour; but as it is approached the charm diminishes, the dull suburbs damp enthusiasm, and the bustling, noisy, central streets complete the disillusion. On its outskirts is a crescent of pretty villas and luxuriant gardens which encircle it as a garland may surround a plain, prosaic face. The country in the neighbourhood of this capital of the Alpes Maritimes is singularly charming, and, therefore, the abiding desire of the visitor to Nice is to get out of it.

Along the sea front is the much-photographed Promenade des Anglais with its line of palm trees. It is marked with a star and with capital letters in the guide books and it is quite worthy of this distinction. It appears to have been founded just one hundred years ago to provide work for the unemployed. To judge from the crowd that frequents it, it is still the Promenade of the Unemployed.

The Promenade has great dignity. It is spacious and, above all, it is simple. As a promenade it is indeed ideal. It is free from the robust vulgarity, the intrusions, and the restlessness of the parade in an English popular seaside resort. There are no penny-in-the-slot machines, no bathing-houses daubed over with advertisements, no minstrels, no entertainments on the beach, no importunate boatmen, no persistent photographers. If it gives the French the idea that it is a model of a promenade of the English, it will lead to an awakening when the Frenchman visits certain much-frequented seaside towns in England.

A little pier—the Jetée-Promenade—steps off from the main parade. On it is a casino which provides varied and excellent attractions. The building belongs to the Bank Holiday Period of architecture and is accepted without demur as exactly the type of structure that a joy-dispensing pier should produce. It is, however, rather disturbing to learn that this fragile casino, with its music-hall and its refreshment bars, is a copy of St. Sophia in Constantinople. That mosque is one of the most impressive and most inspiring ecclesiastical edifices in the world, as well as one of the most stupendous. Those who know Constantinople and have been struck by the lordly magnificence of its great religious fane will turn from this dreadful travesty with horror. It is a burlesque that hurts, as would the “Hallelujah Chorus” played on a penny whistle.

It is along the Promenade des Anglais—the Promenade of the Unemployed—that the great event of the Carnival of Nice, the Battle of Flowers, is held every year. The Carnival began probably as the modest festa of a village community, a picturesque expression of the religion of the time, a reverent homage to the country and to the flowers that made it beautiful. It seems to have been always associated with flowers and one can imagine the passing by of a procession of boys and girls with their elders, all decked with flowers, as a spectacle both gracious and beautiful.

It has developed now with the advancing ugliness of the times. The simple maiden, clad in white, with her garland of wild flowers, has grown into a coarse, unseemly monster, blatant and indecorous, surrounded by a raucous mob carrying along with it the dust of a cyclone. The humble village fête has become a means of making money and an opportunity for clamour, licence and display. Reverence of any kind or for anything is not a notable attribute of the modern mind; while with the advance of a pushing democracy gentle manners inevitably fade away.

It is pitiable that the Carnival has to do with flowers and that it is through them that it seeks to give expression to its loud and flamboyant taste. It is sad to see flowers put to base and meretricious uses, treated as mere dabs of paint, forced into unwonted forms, made up as anchors or crowns and mangled in millions. The festival is not so much a battle of flowers as a Massacre of Flowers, a veritable St. Bartholomew’s Day for buds and blossoms.

NICE: THE OLD TERRACES.

The author of a French guide book suggests that the visitor should attend the Carnival “at least once.” He makes this proposal with evident diffidence. He owns that the affair is one of animation incroyable, that the streets are occupied by une cohue de gens en délire and recommends the pleasure seeker to carry no valuables, to wear no clothes that are capable of being spoiled, no hat that would suffer from being bashed in, and to remember always that the dust is énorme.

Those who like a rollicking crowd, hustling through streets a-flutter with a thousand flags and hung with festoons by the kilometre, and those who have a passion for throwing things at other people might go even more than once. They will see in the procession much that is ludicrous, grotesque and puerile, an exaggerated combination of a circus car parade and a native war dance, as well as a display of misapplied decoration of extreme ingenuity.

On the other hand, the flower lover should escape to the mountains and hide until the days of the Carnival are over, and with him might go any who would prefer a chaplet of violets on the head of a girl to a laundry basket full of peonies on the bonnet of a motor.

On that side of the old town which borders upon the sea are relics which illustrate the more frivolous mood of Nice as it was expressed before the building of the Promenade des Anglais. These relics show in what manner the visitor to Nice in those far days sought joy in life. Parallel to the beach is the Cours Saleya, a long, narrow, open space shaded by trees. It was at one time a fashionable promenade, comparable to the Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells. It is now a flower and vegetable market. On the ocean side of this Cours are two lines of shops, very humble and very low. The roofs of these squat houses are level and continuous and so form two terraces running side by side and extending for a distance of 800 feet.

These are the famous Terrasses where the beaus and the beauties of Nice promenaded, simpered, curtsied or bowed, and when this walk by the shore was vowed to be “monstrous fine, egad.”[^[1]] The terraces are now deserted, are paved with vulgar asphalt and edged by a disorderly row of tin chimneys. On one side, however, of this once crowded and fashionable walk are a number of stone benches, on which the ladies sat, received their friends, and displayed their Paris frocks. The terrace is as uninviting as a laundry drying ground and these grey, melancholy benches alone recall the fact that the place once rippled with colour and sparkled with life as if it were the enclosure at Ascot.

IV
NICE: THE OLD TOWN

LOOKING down upon the city from Mont Boron it is easy to distinguish Nice the Illustrious from Nice the Parvenu. There is by the sea an isolated green hill with precipitous flanks. This is the height upon which once stood the ancient citadel. On one side is a natural harbour—the old port—while on the other side is a jumble of weather-stained roofs and narrow lanes which represent the old town. The port, the castle hill, with the little cluster of houses at its foot, form the real Nice, the Nice of history.

Radiating from this modest centre, like the petals of a sunflower spreading from its small brown disc, are the long, straight streets, the yellow and white houses and the red roofs of modern Nice. This new town appears from afar as an immense expanse of bright biscuit-yellow spread between the blue of the bay and the deep green of the uplands. It presents certain abrupt excrescences on its surface, like isolated warts on a pale face. These are the famous hotels. This city of to-day is of little interest. It commends itself merely as a very modern and very prosperous seaside resort. Within the narrow circuit of the old town, on the other hand, there is much that is worthy to be seen and to be pondered over.

It is said that Nice was founded by the Phocæans about the year 350 B.C., and that the name of the place, Nicæa, the city of victory, records the victory of these very obscure people over the still more obscure Ligurians. The Romans paid little heed to Nice. They passed it by and founded their own city, Cemenelum (now Cimiez), on higher ground away from the sea. Nice was then merely the port, the poor suburb, the fishers’ town. After Cimiez came to an end Nice began to grow and flourish. It was, in the natural course of events, duly sacked or burned by barbarous hordes and by Saracens, and was besieged as soon as it had walls and was besiegable. It took part in the local wars, now on this side, now on that. It had, in common with nearly every town in Europe, its periods of pestilence and its years of famine.

In the thirteenth century it fell into the hands of the Counts of Provence, and at the end of the fourteenth century it came under the protection of the Dukes of Savoy. Like many a worthier place it was shifted to and fro like a pawn on a chess-board. It had for years a strong navy and the reputation of being a terror to the Barbary pirates. These tiresome men from Barbary interfered with the pursuits of Nice, which consisted largely of robbery on the high seas. Nice did not object to the Barbary men as pirates but as poachers on the Nice grounds. The picture drawn by one writer who represents Nice in the guise of an indignant moralist repressing piracy because of its wickedness, may be compared with the conception of Satan rebuking sin. In 1250 Charles of Anjou, Prince of Provence, built a naval arsenal at Nice. It occupied the area now covered by the Cours Saleya but was entirely swept away by a storm in 1516.

In 1548 Nice—then a town of Savoy—was attacked by the French and sustained a very memorable siege, which is dealt with in the chapter which follows. After this it became quite a habit with the French to besiege Nice; for they set upon it, with varying success, in 1600, again in 1691, in 1706, and again in 1744. Finally, after changes of ownership too complex to mention, Nice was annexed to France, together with Savoy, in the year 1860.

In Bosio’s interesting work[^[2]] there is a plan of the city of Nice published in 1610. Although bearing the date named it represents the disposition of the city as it existed at a much earlier period. It shows that the town was situated on the left or east bank of the Paillon and that it was divided into two parts, the High Town and the Low Town. The former occupied the summit of the Castle Hill, was strongly fortified and surrounded by substantial walls. On this plateau were the castle of the governor, the cathedral, the bishop’s palace, the Hôtel de Ville, and the residences of certain nobles. The Low Town, at the foot of the hill, was occupied by the houses and shops of merchants, by private residences, and the humbler dwellings of sailors, artisans and poor folk. In the earliest days the High Town, or Haute Ville, alone existed; for Nice was then a settlement on an isolated hill as difficult of access as Monaco. In the fifteenth century the castle was represented only by the old keep or donjon, a structure, no doubt, massive enough but not adapted for other than a small garrison. It was Nicode de Menthon who enlarged the fortress of Nice and greatly increased the defences of the town during the century named.

As years progressed the military needs of the time caused the High Town, as a place of habitation, to cease to exist; for the whole of the top of the hill was given up to fortifications, bastions, gun emplacements, magazines, armouries and barracks. It is said by Bosio that the private houses and public buildings within the walls of the High Town were abandoned in 1518 to be replaced by the military works just named. The whole of these works were finally levelled to the ground in the year 1706 by order of Louis XIV.

The Low Town, la Ville Basse, was bounded on the south by the sea, on the east by the Castle Hill, and on the west by a line running from the shore to the Paillon and roughly represented in position and direction by the present Rue de la Terrasse. To the north the town extended as far as the Boulevard du Pont Vieux. The town was surrounded by ramparts and bastions. On the ruins of the bastions Sincaire and Païroliera the Place Victor[^[3]] (now the Place Garibaldi) was constructed in 1780. The position of the two bastions on the north is indicated roughly by the present Rue Sincaire and Rue Pairollière. On one side of the Rue Sincaire there still stands, against the flank of the hill, a solid and lofty mass of masonry which is a relic of the defences of old days.

There were four gates to the old town, Porte de la Marine, Porte St. Eloi, Porte St. Antoine, and the Païroliera Gate. The St. Eloi and the Païroliera gates were broken down during the great siege of 1543, and the others have since been cleared away. Of these various gates that of St. Antoine was the most important. It was at this gate that criminals were pilloried. A faint trace of the old walls is still to be seen near the end of the Fish Market.

The Bellanda Tower was built in 1517 by de Bellegarde, the then Governor of Nice. It served to protect the city from the sea. The tower now exists as a low round work which has been incorporated in the grounds of an hotel and converted into a “belvedere.” It might, however, be readily mistaken for a stone water-tank. There was another tower, called the Malavicina, which was constructed to defend the town upon the land side; but of this erection no trace remains. A little suburb, or small borough, existed just outside the old town and on the other side of the river. It was called St. Jean Baptiste, and was connected with the town by a bridge in front of the St. Antoine Gate. Its position is indicated by the present Quai St. Jean Baptiste.

The old town of Nice is small and well circumscribed. It occupies a damp and dingy corner at the foot of the Castle Hill. It seems as if it had been pushed into this corner by the over-assertive new town. Its lanes are so compressed and its houses, by comparison, so tall that it gives the idea of having been squeezed and one may imagine that with a little more force the houses on the two sides of a street would touch. It is traversed from end to end by an alley called the Rue Droite. This was the Oxford Street of the ancient city. A series of narrower lanes cross the Rue Droite; those on one side mount uphill towards the castle rock, those on the other incline towards the river.

The lanes are dark, dirty and dissolute-looking. The town is such a one as Gustave Doré loved to depict or such as would be fitting to the tales of Rabelais. One hardly expects to find it peopled by modern mechanics, tram conductors, newspaper boys and honest housewives; nor do electric lights seem to be in keeping with the place. Its furtive ways would be better suited to men in cloaks and slouched hats carrying rapiers, and at night to muffled folk groping about with lanterns. One expects rather to see quaint signboards swinging over shops and women with strange headgear looking out of lattice windows. In the place of all this is modern respectability—the bowler hat, the stiff collar and the gramophone.

The only thing that has not changed is the smell. It may be fainter than it was, but it must be centuries old. It is a complex smell—a mingling of cheese and stale wine, of salt fish and bad health, a mouldy and melancholy smell that is hard to bear even though it be so very old. The ancient practice of throwing all refuse into the street has drawbacks, but it at least lacks the insincere delicacy of the modern dustbin.

Strange and interesting industries are carried on in doorways and on the footpath. Intimate affairs of domestic life are pursued with unblushing frankness in the open and with a singular absence of restraint. Each street, besides being a public way, is also a laundry, a play-room for children and a fowl run.

The houses are of no particular interest, for, with a few exceptions, they have been monotonously modernised. The lanes are so pinched that the dwellings are hard to see as a whole. If the visitor throws back his head and looks in the direction in which he believes the sky to be, he will be aware of dingy walls in blurred tints of pink or yellow, grey or blue with green sun-shutters which are swinging open at all angles. From any one of the windows may protrude a mattress—like a white or red tongue—or a pole may appear from which hang clothes to dry, or, more commonly still, a female head will project. Women talk to one another from windows all day long. Indeed, social intercourse in old Nice is largely conducted from windows. If one looks along a lane, these dark heads projecting at various levels from the houses are like hobnails on the sole of a boot. The sun-shutters, it may be explained, are not for the purpose of keeping out the sun, but serve as a protection from the far more piercing ray of the neighbour’s eye.

A picturesque street is the Rue du Malonat. It mounts up to the foot of the Castle Hill by wide, low steps like those on a mule-path. Poor as the street may be, there is in it an old stone doorway, finely carved, which is of no little dignity. At the bottom of the lane is a corner house with three windows furnished with grilles. This is said to have been at one time the residence of the Governor of Nice. The house in the Rue de la Préfecture (No. 20) where Paganini died is featureless but for its old stone entry, and its ground floor has become a shop where knitted goods are sold.[^[4]]

In the Rue Droite (No. 15) is an amazing house which one would never expect to find in a mean street. It is the palace of the great Lascaris family. Theodore Lascaris, the founder of the family, is said to have been driven from his Byzantine throne in 1261 and to have taken refuge in Nice. There he built himself a palace. It could not have been erected in the Rue Droite, as so many writers repeat, since the Lower Town as a retreat for ex-emperors, had no existence at this period. The descendants of the exile, however, continued to live in Nice for some centuries, and the present building dates, with little doubt, from the early part of the seventeenth century.

The street is so narrow that it is difficult to appreciate the fine façade of this palace; but by assuming the attitude of a star-gazer it is possible to see that the great house of four stories would look illustrious even in Piccadilly. It has a very finely carved stone doorway which leads into a vaulted hall. In the road outside the door are heaps of vegetable refuse, a pyramid of mouldy lemons and a pile of pea husks. From the upper windows hang bedding and clothes to dry. It is quite evident that the exposed garments do not belong to the family of an ex-emperor. On the main floor, or piano nobile, are seven large and ornate windows, each provided with a balcony.

From the hall a stone staircase ascends in many flights. It has a vaulted ceiling, supported by large stone columns. On the wall are niches containing busts of indefinite men and some elaborate work in plaster. The staircase on one side is open to a well all the way and so the lights and shadows that cross it are very fascinating. Still more fascinating is it to recall for a moment the people who have passed up and down the stair and upon whom these lights and shadows have fallen during the last three hundred years. Among them would be the old count on his way to the justice room, the faltering bride whose hand has rested on this very balustrade, the tired child crawling up to bed with a frightened glance at the fearsome busts upon the wall.[^[5]]

The rooms on the piano nobile have domed ceilings, which are either covered with frescoes or are richly ornamented by plaster work. There is a great display on the walls of gilt panelling and bold mouldings. The rooms are dark and empty and so dirty that they have apparently not been cleaned since the Lascaris family took their departure. Apart from the filth and the neglect the place provides a vivid realisation of the town house of a nobleman of Nice in the olden days.

NICE: RUE DU SENAT.

A stroll through the town will reveal many reminiscences of the past, which, although trivial enough, are still very pleasant to come upon amidst squalid surroundings. For instance over the doorway of a house in the Rue Centrale are carved, in a very boyish fashion, the letters I.H.S. with beneath them the sacred heart, the date 1648 and the initials of the owner of the building. Then again in the Rue Droite (No. 1), high up on the plain, deadly-modern wall of a wine-shop, is one very exquisite little window whose three arches are supported by two graceful columns. It is as unexpected as a plaque by Della Robbia on the outside of a gasometer.

There are several churches in the old town but they cannot claim to be notable. The cathedral of Sainte Réparate stands in an obscure and meagre square. It became a cathedral in 1531 but was reconstructed in 1737 and its interior “restored” in 1901. Outside it is quite mediocre, but within it is so ablaze with crude colours, so laden with extravagant and restless ornament, so profuse in its fussy and irritating decoration that it is not, in any sense, a sanctuary of peace. The old town hall of Nice in the Place St. François is a small, simple building in the Renaissance style which can claim to be worthy of the Nice that was.

There are two objects outside the old town which the visitor will assuredly see—the Pont Vieux and the Croix de Marbre. The former which dates from 1531 is a weary-looking old bridge of three arches, worn and patched. Any charm it may have possessed is destroyed by the uncouth structure of wood and iron which serves to widen its narrow mediæval way. The cross stands in the district once occupied by the convent of Sainte Croix which was destroyed during the siege of 1543. The monument serves to commemorate the meeting of peace held in 1538 by Pope Paul III, François I and the Emperor Charles V. The cross, which is very simple, rises under a canopy of old, grey stone, supported by pillars with very primitive capitals. The cross was hidden away during the Revolution but was replaced in 1806 by the then Countess de Villeneuve. The venerable monument, standing as it does in a busy street through which the tramcars rumble, looks singularly forlorn and out of place.

The Castle Hill is now merely a wooded height which has been converted into a quite delightful public park. Among the forest of trees are many remains of the ancient citadel, masses of tumbled masonry, a half-buried arch or a stone doorway. There are indications also of the foundations of the old cathedral. The view from the platform on the summit is very fine, while at the foot are the jumbled roofs of old Nice. It is easy to appreciate how strong a fortress it was and how it proved to be impregnable to the forces of Barbarossa in the siege of 1543. It is a hill with a great history, illumined with great memories, but these are not encouraged by the stall for postcards and the refreshment bar which now occupy the place of the old donjon.

V
THE SIEGE OF NICE

NICE, as has been already stated, was many times besieged. If there be a condition among towns that may be called “the siege habit” then Nice had acquired it. The most memorable assault upon the place was in 1543. It was so gallant an affair that it is always referred to as the siege of Nice.

It was an incident of the war between Charles V and François I, King of France. A treaty had been entered into between these two sovereigns which is commemorated to this day by the Croix de Marbre in the Rue de France. Charles V thought fit to regard this obligation as “a scrap of paper” and declared war upon the French king. The French at once started to attack Nice which was conveniently near to the frontier and at the same time an important stronghold of the enemy.

Now in these days business entered largely into the practical affairs of warfare. A combatant must obviously have a fighting force. If he possessed an inadequate army he must take means to supplement it. He must hire an army on the best terms he could and in accord with the hire-system arrangement of the time. Professional warriors were numerous enough and were as eager for a temporary engagement as are “supers” at a pantomime. They could not be obtained through what would now be called a Registry Office; but there were contractors or war-employment agents who could supply the men en masse.

François I, when the war began, found himself very ill provided with fighting men and especially with seamen and ships, for Nice was a port. He naturally, therefore, applied to the nearest provider of war material and was able to secure no less a man than Barbarossa the pirate.

It is necessary to speak more fully about this talented man; for in all popular accounts of the great siege of Nice two persons alone are pre-eminent; two alone occupy the stage—a pirate and a laundress, Barbarossa and Segurana. Hariadan Barbarossa was a pirate by profession, or as some would style him who prefer the term, a corsair. His sphere of activity was the Mediterranean and especially the shores of Africa. He had done extremely well and, as the result of diligent robbery with violence pursued for many years, he had acquired territory in Tunis where he reigned as a kind of caliph. He was not a Moor nor was he black. He was a native of Mitylene. The name Barbarossa, or Redbeard, had been given him apparently in part on account of his hair and in part from the fact that his real name was unpronounceable. His exploits attracted the attention of the Sultan of Turkey who was so impressed with his ability that he took him into his service and made him Grand Admiral of the Ottoman fleet. It was, therefore, with Turkish ships and with Turkish men that Barbarossa came to the aid of the King of France.

The leader of the French troops was the Comte de Grignan. He seems, however, to have been a person of small importance. Barbarossa was the commanding figure, the leader and the hero of the drama.

The governor of Nice was a grey-headed warrior, one Andrea Odinet, Count of Montfort. Barbarossa commenced operations on August 9th but before his attack was delivered he sent a formal message to the governor demanding the surrender of the town. The governor replied enigmatically that his name was Montfort. Barbarossa probably perceived that the name was appropriate, for the hill held by the enemy was strong. He further informed the pirate that his family motto was “Bisogno tenere,” which may be rendered “I am bound to hold on.” Having furnished these biographical details he suggested that the Turkish admiral had a little more to do than he could manage.

The position of the town, with its walls, its bastions and its gates, has been already set forth in the preceding chapter. The main assault was made on the north side of Nice, the special object of attack being the Païroliera bastion which faced the spot now occupied by the Place Garibaldi. The batteries opened fire and poured no fewer than three hundred shots a day upon the unhappy city. This cannonade was supplemented by that of one hundred and twenty galleys which were anchored off the foot of Mont Boron.

By August 15th a breach was made in the Païroliera bastion, and the Turks and the French moved together to the assault. They were thrown back with fury. They renewed the attack, but were again repulsed and on the third violent onrush were once more hurled back. At last, wearied and disheartened, they retired, having lost heavily in men and having suffered the capture of three standards.

The poor, battered town of Nice, with its small garrison, could not however endure for long the incessant rain of cannon balls, the anxiety, the perpetual vigil and the bursts of fighting; so after eleven days of siege the lower town capitulated, leaving the haute ville, or Castle Hill, still untaken.

Barbarossa appears to have dealt with that part of the city which he had captured in quite the accepted pirate fashion and with great heartiness. He destroyed as much of it as his limited leisure would permit, let loose his shrieking Turks to run riot in the streets, set fire to the houses and took away three thousand inhabitants as slaves. Barbarossa—whatever his faults—was thorough.

There yet remained the problem of the upper town on the Castle Hill. It was unshaken, untouched and as defiant as the precipice on which it stood; while over the tower of the keep the banner of Nice floated lazily in the breeze as if it heralded an autumn fête day. The Turkish batteries thundered not against walls and bastions but against a solid and indifferent rock. To scale the side of the cliff was not within the power of man. The garrison on the height had little to do but wait and count the cannon balls which smashed against the stone with as little effect as eggshells against a block of iron.

NICE: A STREET IN THE OLD TOWN.

The view is generally accepted that little is to be gained by knocking one’s head against a stone wall. The general in command of the French was becoming impressed with this opinion and was driven to adopt another and more effective method of destroying Nice. In his camp were certain traitors, deserters and spies who had sold themselves, body and soul, to the attacking army. Conspicuous among these was Gaspard de Caïs (of whom more will be heard in the telling of the siege of Eze), Boniface Ceva and a scoundrel of particular baseness named Benoit Grimaldo, otherwise Oliva. These mean rogues assured the French general that Nice could be taken by treachery. They had co-conspirators in the town who were anxious to help in destroying the place of their birth and were masters of a plan which could not fail. Three Savoyard deserters offered their services as guides; and one day, as the twilight was gathering, Benoit Grimaldo, the three guides, and a party of armed men started out cheerfully for the Castle Hill. On gaining access to the town they were to make way for the body of the troops. The French to a man watched the hill for the signal that would tell that the impregnable fortress had been entered and, with arms in hand, were ready to spring forward to victory.

Unfortunately one of the deserters had a conscience. His conscience was so disturbed by qualms that the man was compelled to sneak to his colonel and “tell him all.” It thus came to pass that Benoit and his creeping company were met by a sudden fusillade which killed many of them. The survivors fled. Grimaldo jumped into the sea and saved himself by swimming. Later on—it may be mentioned—he was taken by some of his old comrades of the Castle Hill and was hanged within sight of his own home.

In this way did the siege of Nice come to an end, leaving the city untaken and the flag still floating over the gallant height; while the discomfited pirate sailed away for other fields of usefulness.[^[6]]

It is necessary now to turn to the case of the laundress who shared with Barbarossa the more dramatic glories of the siege. She is said, in general terms, “to have fought valiantly and to have inspirited the defenders by her example.” As to her exact deeds of valour there is some obscurity in matters of detail and some conflict of evidence as to the scope and purpose of her military efforts. If her capacity for destroying Turks may be measured by the capacity of the modern laundress for destroying linen she must have been an exceedingly formidable personage. The story, as given by Baring-Gould, is as follows:[^[7]]

“Catherine Segurane, a washerwoman, was carrying provisions on the wall to some of the defenders when she saw that the Turks had put up a scaling ladder and that a captain was leading the party and had reached the parapet. She rushed at him, beat him on the head with her washing bat and thrust him down the ladder which fell with all those on it. Then hastening to the nearest group of Nicois soldiers she told them what she had done, and they, electrified by her example, threw open a postern, made a sortie, and drove the Turks back to the shore.”

Apart from the fact that the picture of a washerwoman strolling about in the firing line with a laundry implement in her hand is hard to realise, it must be added that certain French accounts and the story of Ricotti differ materially from the narrative given. Ricotti speaks of Segurana as a poor lady of Nice, aged thirty-seven, who was so ill-looking that she went by the nickname of Donna Maufaccia or Malfatta which may be rendered as Madame Ugly Face. She is said to have been possessed of rare strength, to have been masculine in bearing and ingrate or unpleasing in her general aspect. She is described as having performed some feat of strength with a Turkish standard that she had seized with her own hands. According to one account she threw the standard into the moat and according to another she planted it upside down on the top of Castle Hill—a somewhat childish display of swagger.

From the rather ridiculous elements furnished by the various records a composite story comes together which is as full of charm as a beautiful allegory. It tells of no Joan of Arc with her youth, her handsome face, her graceful carriage, her shining armour and her powerful friends. It tells of a woman in a lowly position who was no longer young, who was ugly and, indeed, unpleasant to look upon, who was the butt of her neighbours and was branded with a cruel nickname by her own townfolk. When the city was attacked and in the travail of despair this despised woman, this creature to laugh at, came to the front, fought with noble courage by the side of the men, shared their dangers and displayed so fine and so daring a spirit that she put heart into a despairing garrison, put life into a drooping cause and made victorious what had been but a forlorn hope. It was the fire and patriotism and high resolve that she aroused that saved the city she loved and earned for her the name, for all time, of the Heroine of Nice. Poor Madame Ugly Face the butt of the town!

VI
CIMIEZ AND ST. PONS

BEHIND the city of Nice rises the well known hill of Cimiez, on the gentle slope of which stand the great hotels. On the summit of the hill was the Roman town of Cemenelum, which is said to have numbered 30,000 inhabitants and which was at the height of its glory before Nice itself came into being. Through Cemenelum passed the great Roman road which ran from the Forum of Rome to Arles. It approached Cimiez from Laghet and La Trinité-Victor and traces of it are still indicated in this fashionable colony of gigantic hotels and resplendent villas.

Few remains of the Roman settlement are now to be seen; for the Lombards in the sixth century did their best to destroy it and after their cyclonic passage the town became little more than a quarry for stones. In the grounds of the Villa Garin is a structure of some size which is assumed by the learned to have been part of a temple of Apollo, together with minor fragments of walls which are claimed to have belonged to the Thermæ.

The most important ruin in Cimiez is that of the amphitheatre. It is a mere shell, but its general disposition is very clear. In addition to a lower tier of seats there are remains of the upper rows which are supported, as in the Coliseum, on arches. The vaulted porch at the main entrance is in singular preservation. The arena measures 150 feet in one axis and 115 feet in the other. It is, therefore, small and in the form of a broad oval. A great deal of the structure is buried in the ground, so that it is estimated that the original floor of the arena lies at least ten feet below the existing surface. The ruins, much overgrown with grass and brambles, have an aspect of utter desolation. It is said that the natives call the spot il tino delle fate, or the fairies’ bath. If this be so there is assuredly more sarcasm in the conceit than poetic merit, for the sorry parched-up ruin would better serve as a penitentiary for ghosts. Through the centre of the amphitheatre passed at one time the road from Cimiez to Nice. It is now closed and the present road, with its tramlines, runs outside the walls of the venerable building.

CIMIEZ: THE ROMAN AMPHITHEATRE

Near the amphitheatre and on the crest of the hill is the monastery of St. Francis of Assisi. It lies in a modest square, shaded by old ilex trees. At one end of the square is the cross of Cimiez. It stands aloft on a twisted column of marble. Upon the cross is carved the six-winged seraph which appeared to St. Francis in a vision. This marvellous work of art dates from the year 1477. The cross, like the column, is all white and, standing up as it does against the deep green background of a solemn elm, it forms an object of impressive beauty. Crosses in the open are to be found throughout the whole of France, but there is no cross that can compare with this.

The monastery was founded in 1543. The façade of the chapel, with its bell towers on either side and its central gable over a pointed window, is very simple. It is rather spoiled by a heavy arcade which, being recently restored is harsh and crude. The interior of the chapel is gracious and full of charm. It consists of a square nave flanked by narrow aisles. The roof, vaulted and groined, is decorated with frescoes and is supported by square columns of great size. At the far end, in a deep and dim recess, is the altar. This chancel is cut off from the church by a balustrade of white marble. Behind the altar is a high screen of daintily carved wood, gilded and relieved by three niches. It is a work of the sixteenth century.

Many churches offend by lavish and obtrusive ornament, by glaring colours, by reckless splashes of bright gold, by excessive detail, all of which give a sense of restlessness and discord. Such churches may not unfitly be spoken of as “loud.” If that term be appropriate, then this little shrine may be described as the chapel of a whisper. Its fascination lies in its exquisite and tender colouring which conveys a sense of supreme quietude and peace. It is difficult to say of what its colouring consists for it is so delicate and so subdued. There is a gentle impression of faint tints, of the lightest coral pink, of white, of grey, of a hazy blue. The general effect is that of a piece of old brocade, the colours of which are so faded and so soft that all details of the pattern have been lost. The light in the church is that of summer twilight. The altar is almost lost in the shadow. The screen behind it is merely such a background of old gold as that upon which the face of a saint was painted in the early days of art. The marble rail is a line of white and in the gloom of the chancel is the light of one tiny red lamp—a mere still spark.

In two of the side chapels are paintings by Ludovici Bréa of Nice of about the year 1512. By the side of the church is the monastery which is now deserted. A corridor leads to a little courtyard, with a well in the centre, and around it a plain white-walled cloister. Beyond this is an enclosed garden shut in also by a cloister of pale arches in the shadows of which are the doors of the monastery cells. The garden is in a state of utter neglect; but in it still flourish palms and bamboos, orange trees and a few despondent flowers.

That side of the hill of Cimiez which looks towards the east is somewhat steep, and the zigzag road which traverses it leads down to the broad, open valley of the Paillon river. Near the foot of the hill and on a little promontory just above the level floor of the valley stands the Abbey of St. Pons. The name, St. Pons, is given to the district around which forms a scattered suburb of Nice. The place is still green, for it abounds with gardens and orange groves; but it is being “developed” and is becoming a semi-industrial quarter, very devoid of attraction. There are factories in St. Pons, together with workshops and depressing houses, a tramline and—across the river—a desert of railway sidings. It possesses many cafés which, on the strength of a few orange trees, a palm or two and an arbour, make a meretricious claim to be rural. From all these objects the abbey is happily removed; but its position is neither so romantic nor so picturesque as its past history would suggest.

The present abbey church is a drab, uninteresting building with a prominent tower. It was built about the end of the sixteenth century. The monastery is occupied by an asylum for the insane. The Abbey of St. Pons is of great antiquity, since it dates from the eighth century and it is claimed that Charlemagne sojourned there on two occasions. It stands on the site of ancient Roman buildings, for numerous remains of that period have been unearthed, among which are an altar to Apollo, many sarcophagi and some inscribed stones.

There was also a convent at St. Pons long centuries ago. Its precise position is a matter of doubt; for, so far as I can ascertain, no trace of the building can now be pointed out with assurance. In the history of St. Pons this convent plays a conspicuous, if momentary part. The episode is deplorable for it concerns the dramatic circumstances under which the convent came to an end.

CIMIEZ: THE MARBLE CROSS.

CIMIEZ: THE MONASTERY WELL.

VII
HOW THE CONVENT OF ST. PONS CAME TO AN END

ON a kindly afternoon in St. Martin’s summer, when the shadows were lengthening and the beech woods were carpeted with copper and gold, a party of gallants were making their way back to Nice after a day’s ramble among the hills. It was in the year 1408, when this poor worried world was still young and thoughtless. They were strolling idly down the valley of St. Pons, loath to return to their cramped, dull palaces on the Castle Hill, when a storm began to rumble up from the south and the sky to become black and threatening. Slashed doublets and silken hose and caps of miniver are soon made mean by the rain; so the question arose as to a place of shelter.

At the moment when the first large ominous drops were falling the little party chanced to be near by the convent of St. Pons. It is a bold thing for a company of gay young men to approach a retreat of nuns; but the wind was already howling, the blast was chill and these youths were bold. The door was opened, not by an austere creature with a repellent frown, but by a comely serving sister of joyous countenance. The youths, adopting that abject humility which men assume when they find themselves where they ought not to be, begged meekly for shelter from the rain. Without demur and, indeed, with effusion the fair janitor bade them welcome and asked them to come in. The young men, whose faces until now were solemn, as was befitting to a sacred place, began to smile and to appear normal. The serving sister, with a winning curtsey, said she would call the abbess.

At this announcement the smile vanished from the lips of the refugees. An abbess was a terrible and awe-inspiring thing, something that was stout and red, imperious and chilling, inclined to wrath and very severe in all matters relating to young men. A few turned as if to make for the outer door; while one—who had held an outpost in a siege—whispered to his friend “Now we are in for it!” After a period of acute suspense an inner door opened and the abbess appeared. She was stout, it is true; but it was a very comfortable, embrace-inviting stoutness. She was red; but it was the ruddy glow of a ripe apple. Her face was sunny, her mouth smiling and her manner warm. In age she was just past the meridian. She was, indeed, the embodiment of St. Martin’s summer.

She greeted the new-comers with heartiness; laughed at their timidity; asked them what they were frightened at and told them, with no conventual restraint, that she was delighted to see them. When one mumbled something about being driven in by the rain she said, with a coy glance at her guests, that rain was much wanted just then about the convent. She put them at their ease. She chattered and warbled as one who loves to talk. Her voice rippled through the solemn hall like the song of a full-breasted thrush. She asked them their names and what they were doing. She wanted to hear the lighter gossip of Castle Hill and to be told of the scrapes in which they were involved and of the bearing of their lady loves. She twitted a handsome knight upon his good looks and caused a shy seigneur to stammer till he blushed.

It must not be supposed that she was an ordinary abbess or a type of the reverend lady who should control the lives and mould the conduct of quiet nuns. Indeed the recorder of this chronicle viewed her with disapproval and applied harsh terms to her; for in his description of this merry, fun-loving and comfortable person he uses such disagreeable expressions as mondaine and bonne viveuse.[^[8]]

As the rain was still beating on the convent roofs and as the young men had travelled far the abbess invited them into the refectory, a white, hollow room with bare table and stiff chairs. Here wine was placed before them, of rare quality and in copious amount; while—sad as it may be to tell the truth—nuns began to sidle timidly into the room, one by one. Whatever might be the comment the fact cannot be concealed that the grim refectory was soon buzzing with as merry a company as ever came together and one very unusual within the walls of a convent.

The time was drawing near for the evening service. Whether the abbess invited the young men to join in the devotions proper to the house, or whether the young men, out of politeness, suggested that they should attend I am unable to state, for the historian is silent upon this point.

The service proceeded. The male members of the congregation were, I am afraid, inattentive. They were tired; they had passed through an emotional adventure and wine is soporific. They lolled in their seats; some rested their heads on the bench before them; some dozed; some even may have slept.

In a while the nuns began the singing of the “De Profundis” (Out of the Depths). As they sang one voice could be heard soaring above the rest, a voice clear and beautiful, vibrating with tenderness, with longing and with infinite pathos. The young men remained unmoved save one. This one, who had been lounging in a corner, suddenly awoke and was at once alert, startled and alarmed. He clutched the seat in front of him as if he would spring towards the spot whence the music came. His eyes, fixed on the choir, glared as the eyes of one who sees a ghost. His countenance bore the pallor of death. He trembled in every fibre of his body.

He knew the voice. It was to him the dearest in the world. It was a voice from “out of the depths,” for it belonged to one whom he believed to be dead. He could not see the singer; but he could see, as in a dream, the vision of a piteous face, a face with eyes as blue as a summer lake, with lips whimsical, tantalising and ineffable; could see the tender cheek, the chin, the white forehead, the waving hair. He knew that she who sang was no other than Blanche d’Entrevannes, whom he had loved and to whom he was still devoted.

But a few years past he had held her in his arms, had kissed those lips, and had thrilled to the magic of that voice. Her father had frowned upon their hopes and had forbidden their union. The lad had been called away to the wars. When he returned he had sought her out and was told that “she is dead.” He haunted every spot where they had wandered together, only to learn the truth that “no place is so forlorn as that where she has been,” and only to hear again that she was dead.

Blanche was not dead, but, believing their case to be hopeless, she had entered the convent of St. Pons and, in a few days’ time, would take the veil.

After the service the youth—whose name was Raimbaud de Trects—disappeared to find the singer at any cost. The search was difficult. At last he met a sympathetic maid who said that Blanche d’Entrevannes was indeed a novice in the convent and who, with little pressing, agreed to convey a message to her. The message was short. It told that he was there and begged her to fly with him that night. The answer that the maid brought back was briefer still, for it was a message of two words—“I come.”

The rain continued to pour, the harsh wind blew and the gallant knights were still in need of shelter. How they spent the night and how they were disposed of I do not know, for the strict narrative avoids all reference to that matter.

By the morning the storm had passed away and as the sun broke out the young men reluctantly prepared to take their leave. The abbess would not allow them to go without one final ceremony. They must all drink the stirrup cup together, “to speed the parting guest,” as was the custom of the time. It was an hilarious ceremony and one pleasant to look upon. In the road before the convent gate stood the cheery abbess in the light of the unflinching day. In her hand she raised a brimming goblet and her sleeve falling back revealed a white and comely arm. Around her was a smiling company of young men whose many-coloured costumes lit up the dull road and the old grey-tinted rocks. Behind her were the nuns in a semicircle of sober brown, giggling and chatting, nudging one another and a little anxious about their looks in the merciless morning light. It was a noisy gathering but very picturesque; for the scarlet and blue of the knights’ doublets and the glint of steel made a pretty contrast with the row of white faces in white coifs and the cluster of dark-coloured gowns. It was like a bunch of flowers in an earthenware bowl.

The abbess, beaming as the morning, was about to speak when something terrible came to pass. There appeared in the road the most dread-inspiring thing that the company of knights and nuns could have feared to see. It was not a lion nor was it a dragon. It was a bishop. It was not one of those fat, smiling bishops with flabby cheeks and ample girth, whose loose mouth breathes benevolence and whose hands love to pat curly heads and trifle with pretty chins. It was a thin bishop with a face like parchment and the visage of a hawk. He was frenzied with rage. He stamped and shrieked. He foamed at the mouth. His arm seemed raised to strike, his teeth to bite.

A word must here be said to explain how it was that the prelate had “dropped in” at this singularly unfortunate moment, since bishops are not usually wandering about in valleys at an early hour on November mornings. It came about in this way. The old almoner of the place, alarmed and horrified at the conduct of the abbess and the irreverent and indeed ribald “goings-on” at this religious house, had hurried during the night to the bishop and had given him an insight into convent life as lived at St. Pons. He begged the bishop to do something, and this the bishop did.

The arrival of the prelate at the convent gate had the effect of a sudden thunder-clap on a clear day. The abbess dropped her cup; the knights doffed their caps; the maids, peeping behind corners, fell out of sight; while the nuns stood petrified like a row of brown stones.

The great cleric screamed out his condemnation of the abbess, of the nuns, of the convent and of everything that was in it. He shrieked until he became inarticulate and until his voice had sunk to a venomous whisper like the hiss of a snake. He dismissed the young gallants with a speech that would have withered a worm. Turning to the women he said even more horrid things. He expelled the abbess and the nuns from St. Pons and ordered them to repair at once to the convent of St. Pierre d’Almanarre near Hyères, a convent notable for the severity of its rules. Here, as the historian says, they would be able “to expiate their sins with austerities to which they had long been strangers.”

It was in this way that the convent of St. Pons came to an end; for the desecrated building was never occupied from that day. No nun ever again paced its quiet courtyard; no pigeons came fluttering to the sister’s hand nor did the passer-by hear again the sound of women singing in the small grey chapel. In the course of centuries the building fell into ruin and, year by year, the scandalised walls crumbled away, while tender rosemary and chiding brambles crept over the place to cover its shame.

On this eventful morning the bishop’s efforts did not end when he had sentenced the lady abbess and had swept the convent from the earth. He proceeded, before he left, to pronounce over the assembly the anathema of the Church. He cursed them all from the abbess standing with bowed head to the scullion gaping from the kitchen door. He cursed the nuns, the novices, the lay helpers and the maids, and had there been a jackdaw in the building, as at Rheims, he would, no doubt, have included the bird in his anathema. So wide and so comprehensive a cursing, delivered before breakfast, had never before been known.

Two of the party—and two only—escaped the curse of the Church, Raimbaud de Trects and Blanche d’Entrevannes. It was not until the morning, when the whole of the company were assembled about the convent gate, that the two were missed.

The historian, in his mercy, adds this note at the end of his narrative: “In the parish register of the village of Entrevannes, in the year 1408, there stands the record of the marriage of the chevalier Raimbaud de Trects to the noble lady Blanche d’Entrevannes.”

VIII
VENCE, THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH

VENCE is a very ancient place with a history of some merit. It is said to have been, in its earliest days, the stronghold of a native tribe. Since it stands on a hill convenient in position this statement may probably be allowed. It had the usual infantile troubles of growing towns in this area. It was occupied in turn by the Phœnicians, Phocæans and Gauls, and was ravaged, in due course and in appropriate manner, by both Saracens and Lombards. It played but a minor part in those later turmoils which rent the rest of Provence, and was indifferently moved by the upheaval and the downfall of neighbouring principalities and powers. Vence, however, had concerns and troubles of its own, achievements to be proud of and dissensions to deplore; for it was, first and foremost, a religious town, and both its greatness and its trials had an origin in religion.

When the Romans came they established on this secluded spot an imperial city. It seems to have been not so much a military station as an outpost of the picturesque faith of Rome, a kind of Canterbury in the backwoods of Provence. They called the place Ventium, and some indication of its ancient boundaries can still be traced. It is known to the historian by its temples. How many of these buildings existed is a matter of doubt, but certain it is that the pious Roman, toiling up to Ventium from the coast, would see afar off, standing up against the hills, the white columns of the temples to Cybele and to Mars. Of these shrines no vestige now remains. The stones have been scattered and have become mere material in the mason’s hands. Some have helped to build a Christian church, others to found a city wall or to give dignity to the house of a mediæval burgher.[^[9]]

There are many Roman inscriptions still in Vence. They have been found in all sorts of odd places, on street walls, in gardens, in cellars, as well as on certain stones in the old church. From these fragments, as disjointed and as incongruous as the mutterings of a sleeping man, a broken history of Ventium, in the years before and just after Christ, has been pieced together.

The inscriptions are, in a general way, commemorative. There is one, for instance, to Lucius Veludius Valerianus, decurion of Vence, to record the fact that he had filled the functions both of magistrate and of priest. With his name is associated very prettily that of his wife Vibia, for she no doubt shared both his honours and his trials. Vibia, we may suppose, had left the gay and resplendent city of Rome to follow her adventurous husband into the wilds of Gaul, and was not a little proud of the position he had made in the lonely and solemn city. One might guess that it was Vibia who suggested the inscription. It is notable, moreover, that the most prominent word in the whole tablet and the one in the largest letters is UXORI (wife). Indeed, this word occupies an entire line to itself. It would seem as if Vibia wished to make it emphatic that she was a wife, and not otherwise.

If any of the inhabitants of the old town could come back to life again I should especially like to witness the meeting, in the main street, between Vibia and her successor in office, the mayoress of Vence of to-day. They would be a strange couple, strange in dress, in bearing and in speech, as odd as if a person wore on one foot a dainty Roman sandal and on the other an American boot. The two ladies would have, however, this in common—the country they gazed across would be as familiar to the one as to the other.

There is among the many writings in stone one which refers to the goddess Cybele and the ceremony of the Taurobolium. This pagan ceremony was both a sacrifice and an act of purification. Its symbolism is of interest when viewed in connection with that of the Christian church which directly followed upon the old faith. A bull was sacrificed to the goddess. The animal was placed upon a grating or latticed stage over a pit. In the pit crouched the penitent. The blood of the bull, as it poured over the body of the penitent, washed away all sin, all impurities and stains, and gave to the man thus made regenerate a new and holier life.[^[10]]

Vence was at an early period converted to Christianity. The identity of the missionary who brought about this change is not clearly established; but the work is generally ascribed to St. Trophime. The body of St. Trophime lies in the old cathedral of Arles, in that church which bears his name. Among the ruins of the abbey of Montmajour, near Arles, is his cell, a little rock sanctuary buried in the very bowels of the earth.

A bishopric was founded in Vence as early as 374. The city became a prominent and influential centre and its bishops were, with scarcely an exception, illustrious men. Most of these prelates are buried in the cathedral of the town. The tombs of two of the very earliest, viz. St. Veran and St. Lambert, occupy chapels in that sanctuary.

A famous ecclesiastic was Bishop Godeau. He was born in 1605 and took orders when he was thirty years old. He was a man of great learning and one of the founders of the French Academy. He was highly esteemed, not only by the people of Provence but also by the Papal Court and the counsellors of the king. “The epitaph of Bishop Godeau,” writes Hare, “commemorates the favourite of Richelieu, who obtained his good graces by dedicating to him a paraphrase of the Psalms, which begins with the words ‘Benedicite omnia opera Domini,’ on receiving which the powerful cardinal said, ‘Monsieur l’Abbé, vous me donnez Benedicite, et moi je vous donner Grasse.’ The Pope afterwards allowed Godeau to hold the bishopric of Vence with that of Grasse.”[^[11]]

The worthy bishop died as he would have wished to die. In Holy Week in the year 1672 he was singing the Tenebræ before the altar of his cathedral of Vence.[^[12]] The Tenebræ represent a very beautiful service of the Catholic Church. A candlestick bearing fifteen candles is placed in the sanctuary. These are lit when the service begins. At the end of each Psalm or Canticle one of the candles is extinguished to express the desertion of Our Lord by His apostles and disciples. At last only one candle remains. It signifies the Light of the World, and when it is taken down and placed behind the altar it serves to symbolise the burial of the Redeemer of Mankind. On the occasion of the celebration at Vence as the last candle was being extinguished the good bishop fell dead upon the altar steps.

VENCE: THE EAST GATE AND OUTER WALL

Bishop Surian who succeeded to the see in 1727 had a somewhat romantic career. He began life as a shepherd boy. Finding this existence intolerable he ran away from home with the very inadequate sum of 35 sous in his pocket. Falling in with men who perceived his ability he was educated by them and admitted, in due course, to the priesthood. It is said that he lived as frugally when he was a bishop as he did when he was tending sheep on the hillside.

On the outbreak of the French Revolution, the bishop of Vence, Bishop Pisani, fled and joined that vast body of some 4,000 priests who left the country in order to avoid the penalties which the Revolution imposed. Pisani was the last bishop of Vence, for the see was never restored.

In early days Vence belonged to the bishops, the Church being the ruling power in the pious town. When Vence came into the possession of the Villeneuves—the lords of Villeneuve-Loubet—the seigniorial rights over Vence were divided between the bishopric and the Villeneuve family. The Villeneuves fled from France at the time of the Revolution and although they returned when the Terror had passed away it was only to rid themselves of their lands in Provence and seek a habitation elsewhere.

Vence being a devout town and one prominent in all ecclesiastical affairs it is no matter of surprise that it became deeply disturbed by the “new religion” as taught and stoutly maintained by the Huguenots. It is further no matter of surprise that the dissenters made this stronghold of the Church a special object of attack and that Vence became a conspicuous scene of their protestings.

The position assumed some gravity when the Huguenots did more than protest against forms of worship and took to arming themselves with weapons of war. They went further. They became clamorous and threatening and made it clear that they were no longer to be put off by mere academic arguments or quotations from the Fathers. Moreover this conflict between the Protestant and the Catholic involved certain political issues which were outside the burning questions of creed; and thus it was that men were drawn into the quarrel to whom matters of State were more important than matters of doctrine.

The trouble came to a head in 1560. The bishop at the time was a Grimaldi, while the castle of Villeneuve was possessed by his uncle, a Lascaris. On the Catholic side, therefore, Vence was solid and prepared to take prompt action to crush the revolt. A body of some three hundred men was raised to deal with the Huguenots, but, in spite of the all-pervading power of the Church there were Huguenots in Vence and the vicinity and they, in turn, raised men to support their cause. A Huguenot gentleman, with the pleasant name of René de Cypières, also collected a squadron of forty horse to help those who espoused the reformed faith.

Vence thus became in this fair area of France the Defender of the Faith. The governor of the town issued an order forbidding the citizens to harbour or conceal a Huguenot in any house, garden or vineyard. The bishop denounced the Protestants as “vagabonds and seditious men.” What terms the Huguenots, on the other hand, applied to the bishop are not known, but they were certainly not lacking in invective for the contest was bitter.

Life in the cathedral town must have been very unpleasant about this period. So keen was the dispute that everyone must, of necessity, have taken sides. Friends broke from one another after an intimacy of a lifetime; lovers parted; the Catholic wife left the husband who had turned Huguenot; while families who were united by ties that had endured for generations now found themselves scowling at one another from opposite camps. Children were forbidden to speak to old playmates, and the little girl who had been so sweet to her boy friend now put out her tongue at him when they passed in the street.

In 1562 there seems to have been a lull in this unhappy quarrel and even a sign of tolerance, if not of peace; for the Huguenots, although forbidden the righteous city of Vence, were allowed to hold meetings without its walls.

The fire was, however, only smouldering. The truce was little more than a pretence. The quiet in the streets was ominous. Although the sun shone upon the faithful town a black cloud that betokened a storm was rising in the south. In 1582, with a rumble of thunder and a darkening sky, the tempest burst. A Huguenot army was advancing upon Vence.

It is necessary to pause here for a moment to record the fact that ten years before this time Vence was approached by a far more terrible and crafty enemy than the Huguenot; for in the year 1572 the army of the Black Death marched into the town. It crept through the open gates, for no one saw it. It set out to strangle and kill without remonstrance, for no one heard its footsteps. It spared neither the armed nor the helpless. It struck down the captain of the guard as he strutted on parade as well as the child who toddled up the cathedral steps to peep in at the door. It felled the lusty armourer at his forge and the maiden singing over her needlework.

As many as could flee from the town fled, including the bishop who sought refuge in St. Paul du Var. Grass grew in the empty streets, the silence of which was broken only by the rumble of a cart laden with dead and the tolling of a weary bell. The passer-by, with his cloak drawn over his face, slunk down a by-way when he saw another coming. The shops were closed; the market-place still, or traversed by a starving dog seeking his master whom he would never find. Here a door would be standing open, day after day, because the very last dweller in the house had crawled out into the street to die, while from an open window would hang the head of a woman whose last cry for help had been unheeded.

One would have supposed that this common disaster would have made for peace, but it only served to deepen the dissent; for the Catholics ascribed the visitation to the heresies of the Huguenots, while they, in turn, regarded the Black Death as a mission from God to punish the Church for its misdeeds.

The position of affairs when the war burst upon Vence in 1582 was as follows: That corner of Provence to the west which bordered on Marseilles, and which would be behind a line drawn—let us say—from Aix-en-Provence to Brignolles, was in the hands of the Church party. On the east the Duke of Savoy, with 2,000 men, was moving from the Italian frontier to the support of his friends at Marseilles. His concern in the conflict was based upon political rather than upon religious grounds. He was, in fact, taking advantage of the discord that raged on his borders. Between these two forces was the open country, in the centre of which was Vence.

Now the Huguenot army was advancing from the south, from the shelter of the Esterel mountains. It was led by a very remarkable man, by name Lesdiguières. He was young, brilliant, daring and ever victorious. Nothing could stand in his way; nothing, indeed, dared stand in his way, for his very name inspired terror.

He had two things to accomplish—one was to cut off the advancing army of the Duke of Savoy and prevent it from reaching Marseilles, and the other was to destroy the city of Vence, the outpost of Marseilles and the holder of the pass.

Vence stood alone in the way as the Defender of the Faith. It was the centre stone of the position. So long as Vence held it was well for those who were fighting the battle of the Church. If the faithful city fell the outlook was unthinkable.

Lesdiguières the invincible appeared before Vence, surrounded it with his troops and his cannon and laid siege to it. It must have been a terrific conflict, for so much depended upon the issue, and the Vençois were well aware what would happen to them and their town if once the Huguenot captain got possession of the gates.

Beyond the fact that the loss on the side of the besiegers was very great, no details as to the actual storming of the city nor of the deeds of the defenders have survived. What is known is that the great adventure failed. The doughty Lesdiguières, hitherto invincible, raised the siege and retired again to the south beyond the Esterels.

Vence was saved, the prestige of the Church upheld, and a turn was given to events which can only be appreciated by imagining what would have been the history of Provence, and possibly of France, had the faithful city fallen.

Many of the Huguenot leaders and adherents rejoined the Church of Rome, old family feuds were forgotten, old friends shook hands again who had shunned one another for years, the Huguenot lover became Catholic and led his bride to the very altar he had fought to destroy. Even that hardy fighting man, the fierce, impetuous Lesdiguières, came back to the Church of Rome. He was, it is true, long in coming, for his reconciliation was not made until forty years had passed after the great failure of his life before the walls of Vence.

VENCE: THE CHURCH AND COURT OF BISHOP’S PALACE.

IX
VENCE, THE TOWN

ON the bend of a pleasant road some thirteen miles from Nice stands Vence, 1,065 feet above the level of the Mediterranean. It is a little place of about three thousand inhabitants, on the crown of a hill in a land of hills. Behind it rise precipitous heights which shield it from the north, while in front of it is an undulating country of pine wood and dale that rolls lazily to the sea. Vence consists of two parts, the old town and the new. The old town is a mere appendage to the new, and may be compared to an ancient reliquary attached to a gaudy piece of electro-plate in the modern taste.

The old town was entirely surrounded by ramparts built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. On the summit of these was a broad way, where the defenders mustered when the town was attacked. Upon the northern front a considerable portion of the ancient ramparts still exists, while the terrace that capped them has become a modest promenade. Within and above the ramparts rose the town, like a castle of stone elliptical in shape. To the outer world it presented only a lofty and continuous wall, entered by certain gates, and strengthened here and there by towers. The wall represented the backs of the outer houses welded together in one unbroken barrier. The fronts of these houses looked into narrow streets, but the outer wall was blank and blind, being pierced only by a few small windows, high above the reach of attack, and by long, narrow, vertical slits as the ground was neared.

These ancient windows and these slits in the wall are still to be seen, but the enceinte has been broken in many places by casual windows of recent date and even by doors. Still, the walls of Vence—as viewed from the north of the town—have an aspect which has altered but little during the last four hundred years. They have aged, of course, but the gates are there and the towers still stand.

It is on the southern side of Vence that the hand of the town-improver has fallen most heavily, but even here the ruin wrought by “reconstruction” has not obliterated the ancient landmarks. The Boulevard Marcelin-Maurel, where the tramways run, follows the course of the southern ramparts. The wall on this side has been battered in to provide up-to-date houses and up-to-date shops, but yet the line of the old enceinte remains unshaken, for the hustling, irreverent tram is compelled to humbly follow the curve of the town wall as laid down six centuries ago.

On reaching Vence by the Nice road the first gate that is come upon is the Signadour Gate, which stands almost on the tramlines. It is a gate of the fourteenth century, with a pointed arch, and it opens at the base of a rough, old tower. Some way to the right of it is the East Gate, which is much more ample, has a rounded arch, and passes directly through the outer wall into the mysterious shadows of the town. It is credited to the eighteenth century.[^[13]] At the opposite end of Vence is the Portail du Peyra, guarded by a very massive square tower of great height. The gate belongs to the days of the good King René, who died in 1480, and the tower to the seventeenth century. The gate has evidently been much restored and, indeed, reconstructed. It leads into the Place du Peyra, a quiet square shaded by a chestnut tree and charmed by the babble of a fountain in the form of a vase, from which issues four streams. The name of this ancient lounging place has been recently (and rather precipitately) changed to Place Wilson. A very picturesque little gate, called the Portail Levis, opens on to the ramparts towards the north. It has a pointed arch of the fourteenth century and a channel in the masonry for a portcullis. It leads into the Rue de la Coste, one of the oldest of the old lanes of the town. In the Boulevard Marcelin-Maurel (which, as already stated, is laid on the site of the mediæval ramparts) is a modern gate, with the date 1863. It has been driven through the houses which here form the enceinte of the town and opens almost directly into the church square.

The church at Vence has many peculiarities, not the least being the way in which it has hidden itself from the eyes of the world. It is so surrounded by parasitic buildings that nothing of it can be seen from the outside except a gable end, which projects fortuitously into another square. Indeed, the only outward and visible sign of the church is a door, surmounted by an image of the Virgin, jammed in between a café and a blank wall. The blank wall belongs to a seminary, one of the buildings with which the church is encrusted. This building directly faces the new mairie, a very startling and effusive erection which stands where once stood a wing of the bishop’s palace. Between the schoolhouse and the exuberant mairie are two dark, picturesque arches under a house. They represent what remains of the court of the palace, while the building above them is a part of the palace itself. The other side of this old house, having been left undisfigured, serves to show how stately a structure was this évêché of the fifteenth century.

Now, on that wall of the seminary which immediately faces the unblushing mairie will be found the Roman inscriptions to which reference has been made in the previous chapter (inscriptions dealing with the Taurobolium and with Valerianus and his wife Vibia). Here also are preserved certain carved tablets showing an interlacement of grapes and roses, mingled with confused birds; while above is a smaller stone on which is depicted an archaic eagle of doubtful anatomy. These carvings are generally described as Merovingian (A.D. 500-750), but the author of the Vence Handbook inclines to the view that they are Romano-Byzantine, and suggests that they may have belonged to a church that stood on this spot in the fifth century.

A Christian church of some kind has existed at Vence since the fourth century, for the first bishop of Vence, St. Eusebius, held office in the year 374. The present church dates from the tenth century, although that which now stands belongs to a period between the twelfth and the fifteenth. On entering the building there is at once a sense of being in a place of great antiquity. No church in this part of France conveys so striking an impression of old age. It is dark and crypt-like and, above all, primitive. On each side of the nave are immense square pillars supporting round arches. The pillars are without capitals and without a trace of ornament. There are two side aisles roofed over by a wide gallery which looks into the nave through the line of arches. The galleries were erected in the fifteenth century to accommodate an increasing congregation. On each side of these aisles is still another aisle, which is narrow and dark and in which are the chapels. The church, therefore, is represented by a nave and four aisles.

VENCE: OLD HOUSE IN THE PLACE GODEAU.

VENCE: RUE DE LA COSTE.

The side chapels are all old and beautifully decorated. One chapel contains the body of St. Veran, who died in 492. The tomb—which forms also the altar—is a Roman sarcophagus. It presents some mysterious carving which is thus described in the Vence Handbook: In the centre are the busts of a man and a young woman enclosed in a large sea-shell. Below is a bird and three naked children playing. The rest of the surface is occupied by the waves of the sea. It may be conjectured that it was the last resting-place of a lover of the sea, who would wish to sleep with the waves about him, with a bird in the blue and with children at play on the sand. The high altar is of marble of many colours and the tabernacle is surmounted by angels’ heads in white. By the altar are the tombs of the Villeneuves, the Lords of Vence.

The west end of the church presents a very large gallery or tribune, which was placed there at the close of the fifteenth century. Here are the famous choir stalls which were transferred from the choir at the same period. These stalls, fifty-one in number, are of dark oak and are most elaborately wrought. Besides much architectural detail there are innumerable carvings of animals and plants, of human figures and of vague incidents. Some details, as the writer of the Handbook says, are serious, others are amusing, and a few are not “très convenables.” These exquisite stalls were the work of Jacques Bellot of Grasse. He commenced the work, according to Mr. Kaye,[^[14]] in 1455, when he was twenty-five years of age, and completed it in 1495. He was, therefore, twenty-five when the work began and sixty-five when it was finished.

In this gallery also is a very fine lectern, which is claimed to be even an earlier work than the stalls. In one of the chapels of the church (the Chapelle des Saints-Anges) is the wondrously carved door of the prévôté or chapter house. This work is older than the stalls and is generally ascribed to the artist who fashioned the lectern. Certain Roman figures or statuettes are to be found in the church, one let into the pillar before the chapel of St. Veran, and another, that of a senator, in the wall between this chapel and that of the Sacred Heart.

Behind the church is a poor, distracted-looking square, once the cemetery, now the Place Godeau. It is shaded by three large chestnut trees and contains some ancient houses, one notably with a two-arched Romanesque window and another with the date 1524 carved above the doorway. In the centre is a disconsolate column of bluish granite to which is ignominiously fixed a brass water-tap. This column seems to have wandered from some museum and to have lost both its way and its label. There are those who affirm that it was a gift of the Phocæans to the ancient town, others that it came from the temple of Mars; while those who range less far believe it to be a Roman boundary stone or borne. From this Place can be seen the great watch tower of Vence, often called the tower of the castle. It is square and very severely plain, and contains the belfry and a too modern clock. The tower belongs to the fifteenth century, or to even an earlier period. From this square can also be seen a little lancet window of the church which is perhaps the oldest of its present lights.

The town of old Vence is small and cramped. Around the church, crushed in between it and the city wall, is a maze of small streets. They still maintain the lines they followed long before the day when—in England—Elizabeth was queen. They are narrow, of course, and dark and crowded with houses of great age, houses of such antiquity that no modern mask can hide the hollow eyes or the shrunken cheeks. There are among them handsome windows and fine entries, good mason’s work and some decoration pitiable in its playfulness.

The place is almost empty. Certain houses are deserted; a few are ruinous, and in these the black, blank windows glare like the eye-sockets of a skull. Many show the tottering deformities of age and have become crippled, wizened and bent.

This almost silent city once held seven thousand people. Its streets were then crowded, full of life and colour, of fair women and stalwart men. The wayfarer would need squeeze himself into a doorway to allow the lady in a litter to pass by, or to make room for a company of young gallants rollicking along arm in arm, or for the wedding party on its way to the cathedral close. The place is now hushed like a house of mourning, while in many a lane there may be no one to be seen.

He who strolls alone through the city of Vence may find himself carried back into the past by some nightmare witchery, and imagine that he wanders in a strange country, amid the scenes of a half-forgotten tale. There is about the streets the faint, musty smell that clings to the leaves of an ancient missal or that hovers about the worm-eaten chest stuffed with lumber. To read the life of the town as it was in earlier times is like the turning over of a bundle of old letters that are fragmentary and partly illegible, that are strange in both the wording and the script, but that show now and then a sudden light that illumines the figure of a man or a woman who stands out amidst the gloom—alive.

X
GRASSE

GRASSE lies on a green slope at the foot of sheltering hills and in full view of the sea. From its height of one thousand feet a glorious stretch of undulating country sweeps down to the Mediterranean, some seven or eight miles to the south. The position of the town is suggestive of great ease. It is comparable to that of a man stretched out on a bank in the sun, with his hands under his head, his hat tilted over his eyes and with a rock behind him to ward away unkindly winds. It is a gentle and contented place, quiet and yet busy in its own peculiar way.

The history of Grasse is modest and unemotional. It has always been a shy town, glad to be left alone and to keep itself untroubled by the world. It does not pretend to be very old. It is said that Roman coins have been discovered in Grasse, but this means little, for that imperious but careless people appear to have dropped money here and there all over the country. One wonders whether, when England is dug up by archæologists two thousand years hence, half-crowns and coppers will be found among the ruins of its towns in anything like the profusion with which the currency of Rome was scattered.

Grasse appears to emerge into the light of history some time in the twelfth century in association with Raymond Berenger and his famous seneschal Romée de Villeneuve. Its reputation has been largely commercial. Terrin in the “Précis de l’Histoire de Provence”[^[15]] says that “this town in the twelfth century supplied the whole of France, Italy and Spain with its famous leather, soap and oil skilfully purified”; while another author goes further and affirms “that the whole of Europe obtained its soap from Grasse.”

Grasse began its career in the twelfth century as a little republic in alliance—for purposes of mutual protection—with Pisa. This form of government was maintained until 1226. When wars were raging in the country around and towns were being besieged, looted or burnt, Grasse remained unmoved. It looked on from a distance, lifted its hands in horror and went on with its soap-making. It was never a quarrelsome town and never ambitious of power. It was more keenly concerned with the purity of its oils and the sweetness of its scents. It took a motherly interest in its unfortunate neighbours and became a place of refuge for troubled people along the ever-troubled coast.

GRASSE: THE DE CABRIS HOUSE.

It was fortified, but not in too serious or too aggressive a way. It was besieged, but always in a comparatively gentle manner, without unnecessary noise and battering of walls and doors and with casualties that may almost be called complimentary. One siege in November, 1589, is very fully described in the diary of a besieged resident, a certain Monsieur Rocomare. Mr. Kaye quotes this record at some length. The attacking general appears to have been wounded early in the fray and to have “fallen into convulsions.” “Whereby,” says M. Rocomare, “the whole camp was thrown into confusion.” The siege proceeded in spite of the general’s fit. When things were not going well with the town the people of Grasse proposed—as they always did—a treaty. It was accepted. By this agreement the men-at-arms of Grasse and as many townsfolk as wished were allowed to leave the city with the honours of war and with all their baggage. Unfortunately the attacking army, demoralised, it may be, by the sight of their general in convulsions, broke their compact, seized all the baggage and horses and killed no fewer than seventeen persons. The besiegers occupied the town and M. Rocomare had billeted upon him a cornet, six soldiers, ten serving men, some horses and a mule. This forced entertainment cost him 260 golden crowns; but, worst of all, the ungrateful cornet, on taking leave of his host, robbed him of his cattle and of “other things.”

In the bitter religious wars of the time which rent and racked the whole adjacent country, Grasse took but little part. It was appropriately shocked at the spectacle of Christians fighting and then went on with its soap-making. The people of Grasse, however, had their local religious quarrels which seem to have been concerned not with matters of doctrine, but rather with questions of fees and emoluments and especially with burial fees. In these disputes over money “the clergy,” as Mr. Kaye remarks, “seemed strangely to have forgotten their high calling,” for they actually fought for the possession of coffins containing the dead, and there must have been regrettable scenes in the graveyard when the clerics and their subordinates were engaged in what was practically a tug-of-war over a coffin.

The more direct afflictions of Grasse arose from the passage through the town of foreign troops. Over and over again the Cours or the Place Neuve was occupied by bodies of armed men, who, although they had no especial reason for hostile action against Grasse, yet behaved in a very trying and unseemly manner. They would march up to the town and, without adequate explanation, would demand a war bonus of as much as 36,000 livres or more. They would billet themselves in the town, would smash windows, break tiles and carry off doors. For what purpose an army on the march should need doors is not made clear; but that the intruders should cause a rise in the cost of living is intelligible. A writer who was in the town on the occasion of one of these visits says, with disgust, that wine cost 40 centimes a pint, brown bread 25 centimes a pound, and eggs actually 15 centimes each. He adds a remark which shows how, even in little things, history may be anticipated, for he says: “All our fruit trees have been burned save a few olive trees which have been saved from the violence of the Germans.”

The old town of Grasse is very picturesque and abounding in interest. Being placed upon a slope, it comes to pass that its ways are steep. The houses are tall and the lanes are narrow, so the place is full of shadows. The streets ramble and wind about in that leisurely manner which is characteristic of Grasse, until they become a veritable tangle. The stranger wandering through Grasse is apt, after traversing many streets, to find himself in the exact spot whence he started. It is not wise to ask one’s way in Grasse, but merely to drift about, from lane to lane, until the object sought is stumbled on. It will be met with in time. There are various old houses to be seen which appertain to many periods. Some of them are disguised by modern plaster and paint, some have been “restored” to the point of extinction, while not a few are represented only by fragments. They illustrate the effect of putting new wine into old bottles: “the bottles break and the wine runneth out and the bottles perish.”

Of the old ramparts which surrounded the town in the fourteenth century but a trace or two remain, although the line they pursued can still be followed. The Boulevard du Jeu de Ballon represents the western side of the enceinte, and the Passage Mirabeau its southern part. Where the two met was the Porte du Cours. The eastern flank is indicated by the Place Neuve and La Roque and the rounded northern end by the Rue des Cordeliers and the Avenue Maximin Isnard. Of the seven original gates two only survive—the Porte Neuve (rebuilt in 1793) and the Porte de la Roque.

The chief feature of Grasse is the Cours, a charming promenade just outside the confines of the old town. It is here that the band plays and here that the idler can enjoy the superb view which opens out to the sea and admire—if he will—the statue to Fragonard which adorns the spot. Leading down from the Cours into the old town is the Rue du Cours, a narrow lane of little shops. The first house in this street—a corner house, No. 2—was the town mansion of the Marquis de Cabris and his startling wife Louise. Some account of this mercurial lady is given in the chapter which follows. The de Cabris came from the delightful village of Cabris, five miles from Grasse. There stands what remains of their castle, which was reduced to a heap of ruins at the time of the Revolution.

The house in the Rue du Cours is a plain building of four stories, rising from a base of stone. It is of considerable size and the back of it forms a large block in the Passage Mirabeau. Its portal is prim and severe and in a strict classical style. So dull is this entry that it is hard to picture the frivolous and beautiful Louise standing on the door step, buttoning up her gloves and meditating some fresh devilment. It is a house that no one could associate with the thrilling scandal which buzzed about it when the mocking laughter of the little marquise could be heard ringing from the solemn windows. The house is now occupied by offices and flats of the gravest respectability. As if some odour of old days still clung to it, the walls, I noticed, were blazing with red and yellow posters vaunting the attractions of a play dealing with the allurement of women.

GRASSE: THE CATHEDRAL.

Almost opposite to the de Cabris mansion, and at the extreme end of the Boulevard du Jeu de Ballon, is the ancient house of the de Pontevès family. It is a huge, square building, severely plain and free from any pretence at decoration. It has on one side a little walled garden which abuts on the Cours. The house has had a gloomy history. It was at one time the headquarters of the executive council of Var. During the time of the Terror (1793-4) it became the seat of the Revolutionary Tribunal. It has sheltered Fréron—he who had the audacity to seek the hand of Pauline Bonaparte—as well as Robespierre, who was himself guillotined in 1794. In its salon the wretched victims denounced by the Revolution were tried, cursed at, and condemned, and through its gate they were marched to their death by the guillotine. The guillotine stood in the Cours on the spot now occupied by the statue to Fragonard. The prisoners who looked out of the west windows of the house would see this fearful instrument only a few yards distant and would see also the howling, savage mob that surged around it. Yet between the condemned and their place of death was the comfort of the little quiet garden shut in with its high wall. Thirty people in all were guillotined at Grasse during the Terror, and among them a poor nun over seventy years of age, whose name, by a strange coincidence, was de Pontevès.

When peace was restored to France the Hôtel de Pontevès became the municipal library and later on (in 1811) it was swept and garnished and made ready to receive the Princess Pauline Bonaparte, the sister of Napoleon I. This beautiful woman, the “Venus victrix” of Canova, was at the moment forlorn and unhappy. She had been deserted by her second husband, the Prince Borghese, and banished from the Court by her brother on account of her disrespectful bearing towards the Empress. She was, moreover, ill and weary both in body and mind, and yet she was only thirty-one. “Out of consideration for the distinguished invalid the silence of the early morning was disturbed neither by the ringing of bells nor by the cries of milk-sellers in the streets; even the mules went without their tinkling sonnailles.”[^[16]] One may imagine that Pauline sat often in the little garden with the high wall, and that her sedan chair would now and then be carried to the Cours so that she might by chance get a glimpse of the beloved island of Corsica where she was born.

Near the Cours is the Boulevard Fragonard. In the house (No. 4) of the Marquis de Villeneuve-Bargemon will be seen the beautiful carved door that came from the old hotel of the Marquis de Gourdon. It was by the removal of the Gourdon mansion in 1858 that the present Place du Marché was made. No. 15 Boulevard Fragonard—with its curious iron window cages—was the residence of the famous painter after whom the Boulevard is named. The place of his birth was No. 2 Rue de la Font Neuve.

Turning out of the Rue du Cours is the Rue Tracastel with its vaulted arch beneath an old tower. It is by way of this lane that the cathedral square may be reached. The church, which is the most beautiful building in Grasse, was completed in the twelfth century. It is small and low and its western façade, which looks upon the square, is very simple. The large pointed doorway is approached by an exquisite double flight of steps with a white balustrade. The doors themselves are finely carved and bear the date 1722. There are two lancet windows on this front and traces of two doors of the same date as the principal one. The walls are of light yellow-grey stone. The church within is as gracious as its western front. The nave is surmounted by a handsome groined roof with square ribs, supported by heavy pillars without capitals. The arches of the nave are occupied by galleries with marble railings which are quite modern and painfully out of keeping with the rest of the building. The south transept is occupied by the chapel of the Holy Sacrament, which is said to have existed since 1448. It is a beautiful chapel, but a little marred by the too elaborate ornament of a later date. There are many pictures of interest in the church, the most notable being Fragonard’s “Washing of the Disciples’ Feet,” painted in 1754.

The church contains numerous treasures among which is a reliquary of St. Honorat, shaped like a house and carved out of a solid block of walnut some three feet in length. It dates from the middle of the fifteenth century.[^[17]]

The belfry of the church is in the form of a tall, white tower, square and severely simple. It is one of the landmarks of Grasse. It dates from 1368, but was shattered by lightning in 1742 and rebuilt at that period.

Close to the cathedral is the tower of Grasse, the Tour du Puy, an ancient watch tower raised on Roman foundations. It too is square and plain, but almost black in colour and very menacing by reason of its great height and its massive strength. It is a veritable bully of a tower and forms a harsh contrast with the pale, delicately moulded and fragile-looking little church. It has certain modern windows, made still more incongruous by sun-shutters and by the ancient Romanesque windows which find a place by the side of them.

There is a marble tablet on the Tour du Puy which is of some interest. It is to the immortal memory of Bellaud de la Bellaudière. The holder of this most sonorous name was a poet. He was born in 1532. He appears to have played in Grasse the parts of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; for when he was not engaged in writing emotional ballads he occupied himself with thieving. He did well in both of these pursuits. As a poet he was honoured by this tablet on the tower; as a robber he came to the gallows and was hanged by the neck.

The Rue Droite, the main highway of old Grasse, is a narrow lane of small shops that continues the Rue du Cours. It is not so straight as its name suggests, being, indeed, a little unsteady. It contains many old houses of interest with fine stone doorways, some with a rounded and others with a pointed arch. Over one entry is the date 1527. At No. 24 lived Doria de Roberti who in 1580 had the distinction of being both physician to the king and perfumer to the queen, a position which, at the present day, would be one of great professional perplexity. The house is not worthy of one who is described as “the earliest known perfumer”; for it is quite modern in aspect and is given up jointly to a café and to a shop where ready-made clothes for women are sold. No. 28 is a fine house, with an ancient doorway which is said to have borne the date 1622; while the portal of No. 32 has a dignity which—as is often the case—the rest of the building does not maintain.

From the Rue Droite the interesting Rue de l’Oratoire leads, after some vacillation, to the Place aux Aires. This is a very charming little square, occupied in the centre by a double row of trees and, at the far extremity, by a fountain. The end of the tiny Place which faces the fountain has an interest which is not apparent to the eye. It is occupied by three quite modest houses, numbered 37, 39 and 41. No. 37 is a ladies’ hat shop, No. 39 is a draper’s with the inviting name “Au grand Paris” and No. 41 is tenanted by a butcher. These three humble shops represent the spot upon which stood no less a building than the palace of Queen Jeanne and, indeed, in the house No. 41 can be seen her kitchen stairs—a poor relic but the only one. In the chapter which follows some account is given of this remarkable and alarming woman and of certain things that she did.