CHAPTER IV.

HYÈRES AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD

Just off the coast road from Toulon to Hyères is the tiny town of La Garde. The commune boasts of twenty-five hundred inhabitants, most of whom evidently live in hillside dwellings, for the town proper has but a few hundreds, a very few, judging from its somnolence and lack of life. More country than town, the district abounds in lovely sweeps of landscape. Pradet, another little village, lies toward the coast, and, amid the dull grays of the olive-trees, gleams the white tower of a chapel which belongs to the modern château. The chapel, which bears the sentimental nomenclature of “La Pauline,” is filled by a wonderful lot of sculptures from the chisel of Pradier. Decidedly it is a thing to be seen and appreciated by lovers of sculptured art, even though its modern château is painful in its bald, pagan architectural forms.

Beyond La Garde lies the plain of Hyères, and offshore the great Golfe de Giens, well sheltered and surrounded by the peninsula of the same name, one of the beauty-spots of the Mediterranean scarcely known and still less visited by tourists. Directly off the tip end of the peninsula of Giens is a little group of rocky isles known as the Iles d’Hyères. They are indescribably lovely, but the seafarers of these parts of the Mediterranean dread them in a storm as do Channel sailors the Casquets in a fog.

The chief of these isles is Porquerolles, and it possesses a village of the same name, which has never yet been marked down as a place of resort. To be sure, no one, unless he were an artist attached to the painting of marines, or an author who thought to get far from the madding throng, would ever come here, anyway. The village is not so bad, though, and it is as if one had entered a new world. There is an inn where one is sure of getting a passable breakfast of fish and eggs; a “Grande Place” which, paradoxically, is not grand at all; and a humble little church which is not bad in its way. Two or three cafés, a bake-shop, and a Bureau des Douanes, of course, complete the business part of the place. Each little _maisonette_ has a terrace overshadowed with vines, and, all in all, it is truly an idyllic little settlement. The isle culminates in a peak five hundred feet or so high, on the top of which is seated a fortification called Fort de la Repentance.

The entire isle, with the exception of that portion occupied by the fort and its batteries, belongs to a M. and Madame de Roussen, who are known to readers of French novels under the names of Pierre Ninous and Paul d’Aigremont. The proprietors have charmingly ensconced themselves in a delightful residence, which, if it does not rise to the dignity of a château, has as magnificent a stage setting as the most theatrical of the châteaux of the Loire; only, in this case, it is a seascape which confronts one, instead of the sweep of the broad blue river of Touraine.

Two hundred and fifty inhabitants live here, but away in the west there was formerly a colony of a thousand or more workmen engaged in the manufacture of soda. For more reasons than one--the principal being that the sulphurous fumes from the works were having an ill effect on the verdure--the establishment was purchased by the present proprietors of the isle.

The village has somewhat of the airs of its bigger brothers and sisters elsewhere in that its streets are lighted at night; the wharves are as animated as those of a great world-town, particularly on the arrival of the boat from Toulon; and the market-women sit about the street corners with their wares picturesquely displayed before them as they do in larger communities.

Truly, Porquerolles is unspoiled as yet, and the marvel is that it has not become an “artist’s sketching-ground” before now. It has many claims in this respect besides its natural beauties and attractions, one, not unappreciated by artists, being that it is not likely to be overrun by tourists. The reason for this is that the _Courrier des Iles d’Hyères_, as the diminutive steamer which arrives three times a week is called, is subsidized by the ministry for war, and the captain has the right to refuse passage to civilians when his craft is overloaded with travelling soldiers and sailors, whom the French government, presumably from motives of economy, prefers to move in this way from point to point among the various forts along the coast.

Four or five other islets make up the group which geographers and map-makers know as the Iles d’Hyères, but which the sentimental Provençaux best like to think of as the Iles d’Or; but their characteristics are quite the same as Porquerolles. There is here a picturesque fort called Alicastre, derived from Castrum Ali, a souvenir, it is said, of a Saracen chief who once entrenched himself here. Local report has it that the Man in the Iron Mask was imprisoned here at one time, but the nearest that history comes to this is to place his imprisonment at Ste. Marguerite and the Château d’If.

From the sea, as one comes by boat from Toulon, the Presqu’ile de Giens looks as though it were an island and had no connection with the land, for the neck connecting it with the mainland is invisible, both from the eastward and the westward, while the rocks of the tip end of the peninsula are abruptly imposing as they rise from the sea-level to a moderate but jagged height.

As one approaches closer he notes the capricious scallops of the shore-line of this bizarre but beautiful jutting point, and congratulates himself that he did not make his way overland.

A little village is in the extreme south, its whitewashed houses shepherded by a little church and the ruins of an old fortress-château. The town is as nothing, but the view is most soothing and tranquil in its impressive beauty and quiet charm. Nothing is violent or exaggerated, but the components of many ideal pictures are to be had for the turning of the head. Giens is another “artist’s sketching-ground” which has been wofully neglected.

The eastern shore is less savage and there are some attempts at agriculture, but on the whole Giens and its peninsula are but a distant echo of anything seen elsewhere. The quadrilateral walls of the old château, a semaphore, and a coast-guard station form, collectively, a beacon by sea and by land, and, as one makes his way to the mainland along the narrow causeway, he is reminded of that sandy ligature which binds Mont St. Michel with Pontorson, on the boundary of Brittany and Normandy.

Hyères is no longer fashionable. One would not think this to read the alluring advertisements of its palatial hotels, which, if not so grand and palatial as those at Monte Carlo, are, at least, far more splendid than those “board-walk “ abominations of the United States, or the deadly brick Georgian façades which adorn many of the sea-fronts of the south coast of England. The fact is, that society, or what passes for it, flutters around the gaming-tables of Monte Carlo, though for motives of economy or respectability they may sojourn at Nice, Menton, or Cap Martin.

For this reason Hyères is all the more delightful. It is the most southerly of all the Riviera resorts, and, while it is still a place of villas and hotels, there is a restfulness about it all that many a resort with more lurid attractions entirely lacks.

Built cosily on the southern slope of a hill, it is effectually sheltered from the dread mistral, which, when it blows here, seems to come to sea-level at some distance from the shore. The effect is curious and may have been remarked before. The sea inshore will be of that rippling blue that one associates with the Mediterranean of the poets and painters, while perhaps a league distant it will roll up into those choppy whitecaps which only the Mediterranean possesses in all their disagreeableness. Truly the wind-broken surface of the Mediterranean in, or near, the Golfe de Lyon is something to be dreaded, whether one is aboard a liner bound for the Far East or on one of those abominable little boats which make the passage to Corsica or Sardinia.

Hyères in one of its moods is almost tropical in its softness with its famous avenue of palms which wave in the gentle breezes which spring up mysteriously from nowhere and last for about an hour at midday. Its avenues and promenades are delightful, and there is never a suggestion of the snows which occasionally fall upon most of the Riviera resorts at least once during a winter. The only snow one is likely to see at Hyères is the white-capped Alps in the dim northeastern distance, and that will be so far away that it will look like a soft fleecy cloud.

Hyères is beautiful from any point of view, even when one enters it by railway from Marseilles, and even more so--indescribably more so, the writer thinks--when approaching by the highroad, from Toulon or Solliès-Pont, awheel or “_en auto_.”

Of all the historical memories of Hyères none is the equal of that connected with St. Louis. None will be able to read without emotion the memoirs of Joinville, giving the details of the return of Louis IX. and his wife, Marguerite de Provence, from the Crusades. The account of their arrival “_au port d’Yeres devant le chastel_” is most thrilling. One readily enough locates the site to-day, though the outlines of the old city walls and the château have sadly suffered from the stress of time.

This was a great occasion for Hyères; the greatest it has ever known, perhaps. “They saluted the returning sovereign with loud acclamations, and the standard of France floated from the donjon of the castle as witness to the fidelity of the inhabitants for the sovereign.”

The “good King René,” in a later century, had a great affection for Hyères also, and was equally beloved by its inhabitants. One of his legacies to Jeanne de Provence were the salt-works of Hyères, which were even then in existence.

Hyères enjoyed a strenuous enough life through all these years, but the saddest event in its whole career was when the traitorous Connétable de Bourbon took the château and turned it over to France’s arch-enemy, Charles V.

Charles IX. visited Hyères and remained five days within its walls, “his progress having been made between two rows of fruit-bearing orange-trees, freshly planted in the streets through which he was to pass.” This flattery so pleased the monarch that he himself, so history, or legend, states, carved the following inscription upon the trunk of one of those same orange-trees, “_Caroli Regis Amplexu Glorior_.”

One of the most beautiful strips of coast-line on the whole Riviera lies between Hyères and Fréjus. A narrow-gauge railway makes its way almost at the water’s edge for the entire distance, and the coast road, a great departmental highway, follows the same route. The distance is too great--seventy-five kilometres or more--for the pedestrian, unless he is one who keeps up old-time traditions, but nevertheless there is but one way to enjoy this everchanging itinerary to the full, and that is to make the journey somehow or other by highroad. The automobile, a bicycle, or a gentle plodding burro will make the trip more enjoyable than is otherwise conceivable, even though the striking beauties which one sees from the slow-running little train give one a glimmer of satisfaction. Seventy-five kilometres, scarce fifty miles! It is nothing to an automobile, not much more to a bicycle, and only a two-days’ jaunt for a sure-footed little donkey, which you may hire anywhere in these parts for ten francs a day, including his keeper. No more shall be said of this altogether delightful method of travelling this short stretch of wonderland’s roadway, but the suggestion is thrown out for what it may be worth to any who would taste the joys of a new experience.

Close under the frowning height of Les Maures runs the coast road, for quite its whole length up to Fréjus, while on the opposite side, and beneath, are the surging, restless waves of the Mediterranean.

First one passes the Salines de Hyères, one of those great governmental salt-works which line the Mediterranean coast, and soon reaches La Londe, famous for its lead mines and the rude gaiety of its seven or eight hundred workmen, who on a Sunday go back to primitive conditions and eat, drink, and make merry in rather a Gargantuan manner. This will not have much interest for the lover of the beautiful, but up to this point he will have regaled himself with a promenade along a beautiful sea-bordered roadway, whose opposite side has been flanked with rose-laurel, palms, orange-trees, and many exotic plants and shrubs of semi-tropical lands.

From La Londe and its sordid industrialism one has twenty straight kilometres ahead of him until he reaches Bormes, a town which has been considered as a possible rival to Nice and Cannes, but which has never got beyond the outlining of sumptuous streets and boulevards and the erecting of two great hotels to which visitors do not come. It is an exquisite little town, the old bourg parallelled with the tracery of the new streets and avenues. Take it all in all, the site is about one of the best in the south for a winter station, though the non-proximity of the sea--a strong five kilometres away--may account for the slow growth of Bormes as a popular resort.

The old town is most picturesque, its tortuous, sloping streets ever mounting and descending and making vistas of doorways and window balconies which would make a scene-painter green with envy, everything is so theatrical. Like some of the little hill-towns of the country to the westward of Aix, Bormes is a reflection of Italy, although it has its own characteristics of manners and customs.

The country immediately around this little town of less than seven hundred souls is of an incomparable splendour. There is nothing exactly like it to be seen in the whole of Provence. In every direction are seen little scattered hamlets, or a group of two or three little houses hidden away amid groves of eucalyptus and thickets of mimosa, while the flanking panorama of Les Maures on one side, and the Mediterranean on the other, gives it all a setting which has a grandeur with nothing of the pretentious or spectacular about it. It is all focussed so finely, and it is so delicately coloured and outlined that it can only be compared to a pastel.

The Rade de Bormes, though it really has nothing to do with Bormes, a half a dozen kilometres distant, is another of those delightful bays which are scattered all along the Mediterranean shore. It has all the beauty which one’s fancy pictures, and the maker of high-coloured pictures would find his paradise along its banks, for there is a brilliancy about its ensemble that seems almost unnatural.

In 1482 St. François de Paule, called to France by the death of Louis XI., landed here. At the time Bormes was stricken with a plague or pest, and all intercourse with strangers was forbidden. But, when the saint demanded aid and refreshment after his long voyage, it was necessary to draw the cordon and open the gates of the town. In return for this hospitality, it is said by tradition, the holy man cured miraculously the sick of the town. The popular devotion to St. François de Paule exists at Bormes even up to the present day, in remembrance of this fortunate event.

The old town itself is built on the sloping bank of a sort of natural amphitheatre, in spite of which it is well shaded and shadowed by numerous great banks of trees, while in every open plot may be seen aloes, cactus, agavas, immense geraniums, and the Barbary fig.

The ruins of the feudal château of Bormes recall the memory of the Baroness Suzanne de Villeneuve, of Grasse and Bormes, who, in the sixteenth century, so steadfastly sought to avenge the assassination of her husband.

Bormes possesses one other historic monument in the Hermitage of Notre Dame de Constance, which, on a still higher hill, dominates the town, and everything else within the boundary of a distant horizon, in a startling fashion.

Below, on the outskirts, is an old chapel and its surrounding cemetery, which, more than anything else in all France, looks Italian to every stone.

One other shrine, this time an artistic one as well as a religious one, gives Bormes a high rank in the regard of worshippers of modern art and artists. On the little Place de la Liberté is the Chapelle St. François de Paule, where is interred the remains of the painter Cazin.

In spite of the fact that it is far from the sea, Bormes has its “_faubourg maritime_,” a little port which has an exceedingly active commerce for its size. In reality the word _port_ is excessive; it is hardly more than a beach where the fishermen’s boats are hauled up like the dories of down-east fishermen in New England. There is an apology for a dike or mole, but it is unusable. This will be the future _ville de bains_ if Bormes ever really does become a resort of note. Its assured success is not yet in sight, and accordingly Bormes is still tranquil, and there are no noisy trams and hooting train-loads of excursionists breaking the stillness of its tranquil life.