The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins

VI
NICE

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

Who loves not Nice, knows it not. Who knows it, loves it. I admit it is windy, dusty, gusty. I allow it is meretricious, fashionable, vulgar. I grant its Carnival is a noisy orgy, its Promenade a meeting place for all the wealthiest idlers of Europe or America, and its clubs more desperate than Monte Carlo itself in their excessive devotion to games of hazard. And yet, with all its faults, I love it still. Yes, deliberately love it; for nothing that man has done or may ever do to mar its native beauty can possibly deface that beauty itself as God made it. Nay, more, just because it is Nice, we can readily pardon it these obvious faults and minor blemishes. The Queen of the Riviera, with all her coquettish little airs and graces, pleases none the less, like some proud and haughty girl in court costume, partly by reason of that very finery of silks and feathers which we half-heartedly deprecate. If she were not herself, she would be other than she is. Nice is Nice, and that is enough for us.

Was ever town more graciously set, indeed, in more gracious surroundings? Was ever pearl girt round with purer emeralds? On every side a vast semicircle of mountains hems it in, among which the bald and naked summit of the Mont Cau d’Aspremont towers highest and most conspicuous above its darkling compeers. In front the blue Mediterranean, that treacherous Mediterranean all guile and loveliness, smiles with myriad dimples to the clear-cut horizon. Eastward, the rocky promontories of the Mont Boron and the Cap Ferrat jut boldly out into the sea with their fringe of white dashing breakers. Westward, the longer and lower spit of the point of Antibes bounds the distant view, with the famous pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame de la Garoupe just dimly visible on its highest knoll against the serrated ridge of the glorious Esterel in the background. In the midst of all nestles Nice itself, the central gem in that coronet of mountains. There are warmer and more sheltered nooks on the Riviera, I will allow: there can be none more beautiful. Mentone may surpass it in the charm of its mountain paths and innumerable excursions; Cannes in the rich variety of its nearer walks and drives; but for mingled glories of land and sea, art and nature, antiquity and novelty, picturesqueness and magnificence, Nice still stands without a single rival on all that enchanted coast that stretches its long array of cities and bays between Marseilles and Genoa. There are those, I know, who run down Nice as commonplace and vulgarized. But then they can never have strayed one inch, I feel sure, from the palm-shaded trottoir of the Promenade des Anglais. If you want Italian mediævalism, go to the Old Town; if you want quaint marine life, go to the good Greek port of Limpia; if you want a grand view of sea and land and snow mountains in the distance, go to the Castle Hill; if you want the most magnificent panorama in the whole of Europe, go to the summit of the Corniche Road. No, no; these brawlers disturb our pure worship. We have only one Nice, let us make the most of it.

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

For there are at least three distinct Nices, Greek, Italian, French; each of them beautiful in its own way, and each of them interesting for its own special features. To the extreme east, huddled in between the Mont Boron and the Castle Hill, lies the seafaring Greek town, the most primitive and original Nice of all; the home of the fisher-folk and the petty coasting sailors; the Nicæa of the old undaunted Phocæan colonists; the Nizza di Mare of modern Italians; the mediæval city; the birthplace of Garibaldi. Divided from this earliest Nice by the scarped rock on whose summit stood the château of the Middle Ages, the eighteenth century Italian town (the Old Town as tourists nowadays usually call it, the central town of the three) occupies the space between the Castle Hill and the half dry bed of the Paillon torrent. Finally, west of the Paillon, again, the modern fashionable pleasure resort extends its long line of villas, hotels, and palaces in front of the sea to the little stream of the Magnan on the road to Cannes, and stretches back in endless boulevards and avenues and gardens to the smiling heights of Cimiez and Carabacel. Every one of these three towns, “in three different ages born,” has its own special history and its own points of interest. Every one of them teems with natural beauty, with picturesque elements, and with varieties of life, hard indeed to discover elsewhere.

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

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

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

One of the most beautiful and unique features of Nice at the present day is the Castle Hill a mass of solid rearing rock, not unlike its namesake at Edinburgh in position, intervening between the Port and the eighteenth century town, to which latter I will in future allude as the Italian city. It is a wonderful place, that Castle Hill – wonderful alike by nature, art, and history, and I fear I must also add at the same time “uglification.” In earlier days it bore on its summit or slopes the château fort of the Counts of Provence with the old cathedral and archbishop’s palace (now wholly destroyed), and the famous deep well, long ranked among the wonders of the world in the way of engineering. But military necessity knows no law; the cathedral gave place in the fifteenth century to the bastions of the Duke of Savoy’s new-fangled castle; the castle itself in turn was mainly battered down in 1706 by the Duke of Berwick; and of all its antiquities none now remain save the Tour Bellanda, in its degraded condition of belvedere, and the scanty ground-plan of the mediæval buildings.

Nevertheless, the Castle Hill is still one of the loveliest and greenest spots in Nice. A good carriage road ascends it to the top by leafy gradients, and leads to an open platform on the summit, now converted into charming gardens, rich with palms and aloes and cactuses and bright southern flowers. On one side, alas! a painfully artificial cataract, fed from the overflow of the waterworks, falls in stiff cascades among hand-built rockwork; but even that impertinent addition to the handicraft of nature can hardly offend the visitor for long among such glorious surroundings. For the view from the summit is one of the grandest in all France. The eye ranges right and left over a mingled panorama of sea and mountains, scarcely to be equaled anywhere round the lovely Mediterranean, save on the Ligurian coast and the neighborhood of Sorrento. Southward lies the blue expanse of water itself, bounded only in very clear and cloudless weather by the distant peaks of Corsica on the doubtful horizon. Westward, the coast-line includes the promontory of Antibes, basking low on the sea, the Iles Lérins near Cannes, the mouth of the Var, and the dim-jagged ridge of the purple Esterel. Eastward, the bluff headland of the Mont Boron, grim and brown, blocks the view towards Italy. Close below the spectator’s feet the three distinct towns of Nice gather round the Port and the two banks of the Paillon, spreading their garden suburbs, draped in roses and lemon groves, high up the spurs of the neighboring mountains. But northward a tumultuous sea of Alps rises billow-like to the sky, the nearer peaks frowning bare and rocky, while the more distant domes gleam white with virgin snow. It is a sight, once seen, never to be forgotten. One glances around entranced, and murmurs to oneself slowly, “It is good to be here.” Below, the carriages are rolling like black specks along the crowded Promenade, and the band is playing gaily in the Public Garden; but up there you look across to the eternal hills, and feel yourself face to face for one moment with the Eternities behind them.

One may descend from the summit either by the ancient cemetery or by the Place Garibaldi, through bosky gardens of date-palm, fan-palm, and agave. Cool winding alleys now replace the demolished ramparts, and lovely views open out on every side as we proceed over the immediate foreground.

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

The Italian city, which succeeds next in order, is picturesque and old-fashioned, but is being daily transformed and Gallicized out of all knowledge by its modern French masters. It dates back mainly to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the population became too dense for the narrow limits of the small Greek town, and began to overflow, behind the Castle Hill, on to the eastern banks of the Paillon torrent. The sea-front in this quarter, now known as the Promenade du Midi, has been modernized into a mere eastward prolongation of the Promenade des Anglais, of which “more anon;” but the remainder of the little triangular space between the Castle Hill and the river-bed still consists of funny narrow Italian lanes, dark, dense, and dingy, from whose midst rises the odd and tile-covered dome of the cathedral of St. Réparate. That was the whole of Nice as it lived and moved till the beginning of this century; the real Nice of to-day, the Nice of the tourist, the invalid, and the fashionable world, the Nice that we all visit or talk about, is a purely modern accretion of some half-dozen decades.

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

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

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

The Promenade is, of course, during the season the focus and center of fashionable life at Nice. Here carriages roll, and amazons ride and flâneurs lounge in the warm sunshine during the livelong afternoon. In front are the baths, bathing being practicable at Nice from the beginning of March; behind are the endless hotels and clubs of this city of strangers. For the English are not alone on the Promenade des Anglais; the American tongue is heard there quite as often as the British dialect, while Germans, Russians, Poles, and Austrians cluster thick upon the shady seats beneath the planes and carob-trees. During the Carnival especially Nice resolves itself into one long orgy of frivolous amusement. Battles of flowers, battles of confetti, open-air masquerades, and universal tom-foolery pervade the place. Everybody vies with everybody else in making himself ridiculous; and even the staid Briton, released from the restraints of home or the City, abandons himself contentedly for a week at a time to a sort of prolonged and glorified sunny southern Derby Day. Mr. Bultitude disguises himself as a French clown; Mr. Dombey, in domino, flings roses at his friends on the seats of the tribune. Everywhere is laughter, noise, bustle, and turmoil; everywhere the manifold forms of antique saturnalian freedom, decked out with gay flowers or travestied in quaint clothing, but imported most incongruously for a week in the year into the midst of our modern work-a-day twentieth-century Europe.

Only a comparatively few winters ago fashionable Nice consisted almost entirely of the Promenade des Anglais, with a few slight tags and appendages in either direction. At its eastern end stood (and still stands) the Jardin Public, that paradise of children and of be-ribboned French nursemaids, where the band discourses lively music every afternoon at four, and all the world sits round on two-sou chairs to let all the rest of the world see for itself it is still in evidence. These, and the stately quays along the Paillon bank, lined with shops where female human nature can buy all the tastiest and most expensive gewgaws in Europe, constituted the real Nice of the early eighties. But with the rapid growth of that general taste for more sumptuous architecture which marks our age, the Phocæan city woke up a few years since with electric energy to find itself in danger of being left behind by its younger competitors. So the Niçois conscript fathers put their wise heads together, in conclave assembled, and resolved on a general transmogrification of the center of their town. By continuously bridging and vaulting across the almost dry bed of the Paillon torrent they obtained a broad and central site for a new large garden, which now forms the natural focus of the transformed city. On the upper end of this important site they erected a large and handsome casino in the gorgeous style of the Third Republic, all glorious without and within, as the modern Frenchman understands such glory, and provided with a theater, a winter garden, restaurants, cafés, ball-rooms, petits chevaux, and all the other most pressing requirements of an advanced civilization. But in doing this they sacrificed by the way the beautiful view towards the mountains behind, which can now only be obtained from the Square Masséna or the Pont Vieux farther up the river. Most visitors to Nice, however, care little for views, and a great deal for the fitful and fearsome joys embodied to their minds in the outward and visible form of a casino.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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