CHAPTER V.

ST. TROPEZ AND ITS “GOLFE”

From Bormes the route runs close to the shore-line up to the Baie de Cavalaire, where it cuts across a ten-kilometre inland stretch and comes to the sea again at St. Tropez.

The blue restless waves, the jutting capes, and the inlet bays and _calanques_ make charming combinations of land and sea and sky, and repeat the story already told. The route crosses many vine-planted hills and valleys, through short tunnels and around precipitous promontories, but always under the eyes is that divinely beautiful view of the waters of the Mediterranean. The traveller finds no villages, only little hamlets here and there, and innumerable scattered country residences.

At Cavalaire the mountains of the Maures become less abrupt, and surround the bay in a low semicircle of foot-hills, quite different from the precipitous “_corniches_” of the Estérel or the mountains beyond Nice.

The Baie de Cavalaire has nearly a league of fine sands; not so extensive that they are as yet in demand as an automobile race-track, but fine enough to rank as quite the best of their kind on the whole Mediterranean shore of France. There will never be a resort here which will rival Nice or Cannes; these latter have too great a start; but whatever does grow up here in the way of a watering-place--a railway station and a Café-Restaurant famous for its _bouillabaisse_ have already arrived--will surpass them in many respects.

The place has, moreover, according to medical reports, the least contrasting day and night temperature in winter of any of the Mediterranean stations. This would seem cause enough for the founding here of a great resort, but there is nothing of the kind nearer than the little village of Le Lavandou, passed on the road from Bormes, a hamlet whose inhabitants are too few for the makers of guide-books to number, but which already boasts of a Grand Hotel and a Hôtel des Étrangers.

At La Croix, just north of the Baie de Cavalaire, has grown up a little winter colony, consisting almost entirely of people from Lyons. It is here that formerly existed some of the most celebrated vineyards in Provence, the plants, it is supposed, being originally brought hither by the Saracens.

The sudden breaking upon one’s vision of the ravishing Golfe de St. Tropez, with its bordering fringe of palms, agavas, and rose-laurels, and its wonderful parasol-pines, which nowhere along the Riviera are as beautiful as here, is an experience long to be remembered.

The lovely little town of St. Tropez sleeps its life away on the shores of this beautiful bay, quite in idyllic fashion, though it does boast of a Tribunal de Pêche and of a few small craft floating in the gentle ripples of the _darse_, the little harbour enclosed by moles of masonry from the open gulf.

Up and down this basin are groups of fine parti-coloured houses, all with a certain well-kept and prosperous air, with nothing of the sordid or base aspect about them, such as one sees on so many watersides. A little square, or _place_, forms an unusual note of life and colour with its central statue of the great sailor, Suffren.

Only on this square and on the quays are there any of the modern attributes of twentieth-century life; the narrow but cleanly streets away from the waterside are as calm and somnolent as they were before the advent of electricity and automobiles; indeed, an automobile would have a hard time of it in some of these narrow _ruelles_.

The near-by panorama seen from the quays, or the end of the stone pier-head, is superb. The whole contour of the Golfe is a marvel of graceful curves, backed up with sloping, well-wooded hills and, still farther away, by the massive black of the Maures, the hill of St. Raphaël, and the red and brown tints of the Estérel, while still more distant to the northward, hanging in a soft film of vapour, are the peaks of the snowy Alps.

By following the old side streets, crowded with overhanging porches and projecting buttresses, with here and there a garden wall half-hiding broad-leafed fig-trees and palms, one reaches the Promenade des Lices, a remarkably well-placed and appointed promenade, shaded with great plane-trees, in strong contrast to the occasional pines and laurels.

St. Tropez’s history is ancient enough to please the most blasé delver in the things of antiquity. It may have been the Gallo-Grec Athenopolis, or it may have been the Phœnician Heraclea Caccabaria; but, at all events, its present growth came from a foundation which followed close upon the death of the martyr St. Tropez in the second century.

St. Tropez, in the days when sailing-ships had the seas to themselves, was possessed of a traffic and a commerce which, with the advent of the building of great steamships, lapsed into inconsequential proportions. The yards where the wooden ships were built and fitted out are deserted, and a part of the population has gone back to the land or taken to fishing; others--the young men--becoming _garçons de café_ or _valets de chambre_ in the great tourist hotels of the coast; or, rather, they did look upon these occupations as a bright and rosy future, until the coming of the automobile, since when the peasant youth of France aspires to be a chauffeur or _mécanicien_.

A new industry has recently sprung up at St. Tropez, the manufacture of electric cables, but it has not the picturesqueness, nor has it as yet reached anything like the proportions, of the old hempen cordage industry.

St. Tropez possesses its wonderful Golfe, its gardens, and its “_Petite Afrique_,” and is more and more visited by Riviera tourists; but it still awaits that great tide of traffic which has made more famous and rich many other less favoured Mediterranean coast towns. There is a reason for all this; principally that it faces the mistral’s icy breath, for the coast-line has here taken a bend and the Golfe runs inland in a westerly direction, which makes the town face directly north. As an offset to this the inhabitant points out to you that you may regard the sea without being troubled by the sun shining in your eyes.

At the head of the Golfe is La Foux. It sits in the midst of a sandy plain, surrounded by a border of superb umbrella-pines. The chief attraction for the visitor is the remarkable specimens of the little horses of Les Maures to be seen here. They are known as “_les Eygues_,” and have preserved all the purity of the type first brought from the Orient by the Saracens. Six centuries and more have not wiped out the Arab strain to anything like the extent that might be supposed, and accordingly the little horses of Les Maures are vastly more docile and agreeable playmates than the “_petits chevaux_” of the Casinos of Monte Carlo and Nice.

The umbrella or parasol pines of La Foux are famous throughout the whole Riviera. Elsewhere there are isolated examples, but here there are groves of them, all branching with a wide-spreading luxuriance which is quite at its best. It might seem as though they were planted by the hand of man, so decorative are they to the landscape from any point of view, but most of them are of an age that precludes all thought of this.

The giant of its race is directly on the bank of the Golfe, near the Château de Berteaux. Its branches extend out in every direction, like the ribs of a parasol or umbrella, and its trunk is thirty feet or more in circumference, while the shadow from its overhanging branches makes a great round oasis of shade in the brilliant Mediterranean sunlight. The tree and its position cannot be mistaken by travellers by road or rail, for the railway itself has a “_halte_” almost beneath its branches. All around these parasol-pines push themselves up through the sand which has been carried down into the headwaters of the Golfe by the Mole and the Giscle, torrents which at certain seasons bring down a vast alluvial deposit from the upper valleys of Les Maures.

It is not far from La Foux to the plain of Cogolin. A league or more behind one of the first buttresses of Les Maures, one enters the rich alluvial prairie of Cogolin. Sheep, goats, and cows, and the Arabian-blooded horses, which are so much admired at the _courses_ at La Foux, find welcome pasture here in these verdant fields.

Cogolin is not the capital of the Golfe country, that honour belonging to Grimaud, of which St. Tropez is virtually the port; still, Cogolin is quite a little metropolis, and is the centre of the liveliest happenings of all the region between Hyères and Fréjus. The town has two different aspects, one banal and modern, and the other picturesque and feudal, recalling the thirteenth-century days of the Grimaldis, who built the château of which the present belfry formed a part.

Cogolin is uninteresting enough in its newer parts, but as one ascends the slope of the hill on which the town is built it grows more and more picturesque until, when the lower town is actually lost sight of, it finally takes rank as a delightful old-world place, with scarce a note of the twentieth century about it, where they still bring water from the public fountain and most of the shops of the smaller kind transact their business on the sidewalk--where there is one.

There is a peculiar odour all over Cogolin, which comes from the manufacture of corks and queer-looking “whisk-brooms.” It’s not a bad or unhealthful smell, but it is peculiar, and many will not like it. From Cogolin all roads lead to the heart of the Maures, and the stream of carts loaded with great slabs of cork is incessant.

Here, as in many other parts of Les Maures, the manufacture of corks is an industry which furnishes a livelihood to many. The workrooms of the cork-makers, to attract clients or amuse the populace--the writer doesn’t know which--are often in full view from the street. Certainly it is amusing to see a workman stamp out, or cut out, the corks and drop them into a waiting basket, as if they were plums gathered from a tree. In the larger establishments, where the work is done by machinery, the process is more complicated, and less interesting, and the writer did not see that any better results were obtained.

The whole region of Les Maures is dominated by the _chêne-liège_, or the cork-oak. Usually they are great, straight-trunked trees with a heavy foliage. Some still possess their natural brown trunks, and some are a gray fawn colour, showing that they are already aged and have been many times robbed of their bark for the manufacture of floats for the fisherman’s nets and corks for bottles. The first coat which is stripped has no mercantile value, and the trunk is left to heal itself as best it may, the sap oozing out and forming another skin, which in due time forms the cork-bark of commerce.

The trees are stripped only in part at one time, else they would perish. The first marketable crop is gathered in ten or a dozen years, and it takes another decade before the same portion can be again obtained.

This cork-bark industry means a fortune to Les Maures and its rather scanty population. The discovery, or real development, of the industry was due to a lonesome shepherd, who, finding how soft and compressible the bark of the _chêne-liège_ really was, manufactured a few corks to pass the time while watching his flocks, taking them at the first opportunity to town, to see if he could find a market, which, needless to say, he did immediately. The account has something of a legendary flavour about it, but no doubt the discovery was made in just such a way.

Cogolin has another industry which, in its way, is considerable,--the manufacture of briar pipes, though mostly it is the gathering of the briar-roots which makes the industry, the actual fashioning of the pipes themselves being carried on most extensively at St. Claude in the Jura, to which point many train-loads of the roots are sent each year. Just why the industry should be carried on so far from the source of supply of the raw material is one of the problems that economists are trying always to solve, but the traffic clings tenaciously to the customs of old. When Les Maures goes in for the manufacture of briar pipes on a large scale there will be a new and increased prosperity for the inhabitants; this in spite of the growing consumption of the deadly cigarette, which, in France, is made of something which looks amazingly like cabbage-stalk--and a poor quality at that. The contempt for French tobacco is of long duration. It is recalled that a certain minister under Charles X. was invited to smoke smuggled tobacco at a friend’s house, and was implored to use his influence to the substituting of the same grade of tobacco for the poisonous cabbage-leaf then grown in France. His reply was appreciative but non-committal, and so the thing has gone on to this day, and the French public smokes uncomplainingly a very ordinary tobacco.

Three kilometres distant sits Grimaud, snug and serene on the terrace of a mountainside, overlooking Cogolin and the Golfe, and all its environment. The little town has all the characteristics of its neighbours, with perhaps a superabundance of shade-trees for a place which has not very ample streets and squares. At the apex of the ascending _ruelles_ is a cone which is surmounted by the pathetic ruins of the old château of the Grimaldi. Without grandeur and without life, this château is in strong contrast with the palace of the present members of the ancient house of Grimaldi, the Prince of Monaco and his family.

The ruins of Grimaud’s château are, to be sure, a whited sepulchre, and a dismal one, but the view from the platform is one of great beauty. Les Maures forms an encircling cordon, through which the brilliance of the Golfe breaks toward the south. In the twilight of an early June evening the effect will be surprising and grateful in its quiet grandeur; a welcome change after the refulgence of the Alpine glow of Switzerland and the gorgeous, bloody sunsets of the Mediterranean coast towns.

After a meditation here, one will be in the proper mood for the repose which awaits him at “Annibal’s” in the town below. It is not grand, this little hotel of M. Annibal, but it is typical of the _pays_, and you, as likely as not, ate your dinner on a little balcony overlooking a little tree-bordered _place_, which has already put you in a soulful mood. When you return from the château, you will need no sedative to make you sleep, and you will bless the good fortune which brought you thither--if you are a true vagabond and not a devotee of the “resorts.” The latter class are advised to keep away; Grimaud would “bore them stiff,” as a strenuous American, who was “doing” the Riviera on a motor-cycle, told the writer.

La Garde-Freinet next calls one, and it must not be ignored by any who would know what a real mountain town in France is like. It is different from what it is in Switzerland or the Tyrol; in fact, it is not like anything anywhere else. It is simply a distinctively French small town nestling in the heart of the Mediterranean coast range, and cut off from most of the distractions of civilization, except newspapers (twenty-four hours old) and the post and telegraph.

La Garde-Freinet sits almost upon the very crest of the Chaîne des Maures. The road from Grimaud, which is but a dozen kilometres or so, rises constantly through rocky escarpments like a route in Corsica, which indeed the whole region of Les Maures resembles.

All is solitude and of that quietness which one only observes on a lonely mountain road, while all around is a girdle of tree-clad peaks, not gigantic, perhaps, but sufficiently imposing to give one the impression that the road is mounting steadily all of the way, which, even in these days of hill-climbing automobiles, is something which is bound to be remarked by the traveller by road.

Finally one comes in sight of the old Saracen fortress of Fraxinet, or Freinet, from which the present town of something less than two thousand souls takes its name. It stands out in the clear brilliance of the Provençal sky, as if one might reach out his hand and touch its walls, though it is a hundred or more metres above the town, which finally one reaches through the usual narrow entrance possessed by most French towns whether they are of the mountain or the plain.

It was from just such fortified heights as this that the Saracens were able to command all Provence and the valley of the Rhône up to the Jura. Concerning these far-away times, and the exact movements of the Saracens, historians are not very precise, and a good deal has to be taken on faith; but where monuments were left behind to tell the story, albeit they were mostly fortresses, enough has come down to allow one to build up a fabric which will give a more or less just view of the extent of the Saracen influence which swept over southern Gaul from the eighth to the tenth centuries.

They made one of their greatest strongholds here on the Pic du Fraxinet (“the place planted with _frênes_”), and, in spite of the fact that they were sooner or later driven from their position, as history does tell in this case, their descendants, becoming Christians, were the ancestors of the present growers of mulberry-trees and cork-oaks, and tenders of silk-worms, which form the principal occupations of the inhabitants of La Garde-Freinet to-day.

Any one, with the least eye for the fair sex, will note the fact that the women of La Garde-Freinet--the _Fraxinétaines_ of the ethnologists--have a unique kind of beauty greatly to be admired. They are not as beautiful as the women of Arles, to whom the palm must always be given among the women of France; but they are well-formed, with beautiful hair, great, liquid black eyes, oval faces, and plump, well-formed arms, justifying, even to-day, the beauty which they are supposed to have acquired from their Moorish ancestors.

There are no monuments at La Garde-Freinet except the ruined, dominant fortress, but for all that the pilgrimage is one worth the making, if only for glimpses of those wonderfully beautiful women, or for the delightful journey thither.

From La Foux and Grimaud one rapidly advances toward the Estérel, that sheltering range of reddish, rocky mountains which makes Cannes and La Napoule what they are.

St. Tropez and its tall white houses are left behind, and the shores of the Golfe are followed until one comes to the most ancient town of Ste. Maxime. Unlike St. Tropez, Ste. Maxime, though only thirty minutes away by boat, across the mouth of the Golfe, has not the penetrating mistral for a scourge. On the other hand one does get the sun in his eyes when he wishes to view the sea, and has not that magically coloured curtain of the Estérel, with all its varied reds and browns, before his eyes. One cannot have everything as he wishes, even on the Riviera. If he has the view, he often has also the mistral; and, if he finds a place that is really sheltered from the mistral, it has a more or less restricted view, and a climate which the doctors and invalids call “relaxing,” whatever that arbitrary term may mean.

Here in the Golfe de St. Tropez, at St. Tropez, at La Foux, and at Ste. Maxime, one sees again those great _tartanes_ and _balancelles_, the great white-winged craft which fly about the Mediterranean coasts of France with all the idyllic picturesqueness of old.

There are still twenty kilometres before one reaches Fréjus, the first town of real latter-day importance since passing Toulon, and this, too, in spite of its great antiquity. Other of the coast towns have risen or degenerated into mere resorts, but Fréjus holds its own as the centre of affairs for a very considerable region.