CHAPTER VI.

FRÉJUS AND THE CORNICHE D’OR

Twenty kilometres beyond Ste. Maxime one comes to the Golfe de Fréjus and its neighbouring towns of Fréjus and St. Raphaël, the former the _ville commerçant_ and the latter the _ville d’eau_.

As with Arles, on the banks of the Rhône, one may well say of Fréjus that the town and its environs form a veritable open-air museum. It will be true to add also, in this case, that the museum has a far greater area than at Arles, for Fréjus, and the antiquities directly connected with it, cover a radius of at least forty kilometres.

The Romans, the great builders of baths and aqueducts, set a great store by water, and indeed classed it as among the greatest blessings of mankind. No labour was too great, and expense was never thought of, when it came to a question of building these great artificial waterways which, even unto to-day, are known as aqueducts the world over. One of their greatest works of the kind led to Fréjus, and two of its arches stand gaunt and grim to-day in the midst of a fence-paled field. There is also a sign attached to one of the fence-posts which reads as follows:

+-------------------+ | DEFENSE ABSOLUE | | DE PENETRER | | DANS LA PROPRIÉTÉ | +-------------------+

This sign-board does not look as durable as the moss-grown old arches over which it stands sentinel; perhaps some day the stress of time (or some other reason) will cause it to disappear.

The remains of this great aqueduct of other days prove conclusively the great regard and hope which the Romans must have had for the Forum Julii of Julius Cæsar, for all, without question, attribute the foundation of Fréjus to the conqueror of the Gauls.

The evolution of the name of Fréjus is readily enough followed, though the present name, coming down through Forojuliens and Frejules, is a sad corruption. Of this evolution the authorities are not very certain, and call it “_une tradition et non un fait historiquement prouvé_.” It is satisfying enough to most, however, so let it stand; and anyway we have the words of Tacitus, who said that his brother-in-law, Agricola, was born at “the ancient and illustrious colony of Forojuliens.”

Fréjus is prolific in quaint customs and legends too numerous to mention, though two, at least, stand out so plainly in the memory of the writer that they are here recounted.

On a certain occasion in August,--not the usual season for tourists, but genuine travel-lovers, having no season, go anywhere at any time,--as the town was entered by the highroad, our automobile was abruptly stopped at the _barrière_ by a motley crew clad in all manner of military costumes, like the armies of the South American republics. Firearms, too, were there, and when a grenadier of the time of Louis-Philippe let off a smoky charge of gunpowder under our very noses, it was a signal for a general _feu-de-joie_ which might have rivalled a Fourth of July celebration in the United States, for the disaster which it bid fair to bring in its wake. As a matter of fact, nothing happened, and we were allowed to proceed in peace, though the sleep-destroying cannonade was kept up throughout the night.

The occasion was nothing but the annual celebration of “_Les Bravadeurs_,” a survival of the days of Louis XIV., when the town, being left without a garrison, raised a motley army of its own to serve in place of the troops of the king.

There is a legend, too, concerning the landing of St. François de Paule here, which the native is fond of telling the stranger, but which needs something more than the proverbial grain of salt to go with it, because St. François is claimed to have first put foot on shore at various other points along the coast.

The story is to the effect that the ship which bore the holy man from the East having foundered, or not having been sufficiently sea-worthy to continue the voyage, St. François stepped overboard and walked ashore on the waves. He did not walk on the waves themselves in this case, but laid his mantle upon them and walked on that. What he did when he came to the edge of his mantle tradition does not state.

The ecclesiastical and political history of Fréjus is most interesting, though it cannot be epitomized here. Two significant Napoleonic events of the early nineteenth century stand out so strongly, however, that they perforce must be mentioned.

In 1809 Pope Pius VII. stopped at Fréjus when he was making his way to Fontainebleau, more or less unwillingly, as history tells. Five years later the Holy Father again stopped at Fréjus on his return to Italy, and Napoleon himself, on the 27th of the following April, awaiting the moment of his departure for Elba, occupied the very apartment that had received the pontiff.

Of the architectural and historical monuments of Fréjus one must at least take cognizance of the Baptistery, one of the few of its class out of Italy and dating from some period previous to the tenth century. Architecturally it is not a great structure, neither is it such in size; but its very existence here, well over into Gaul, marks a distinct era in the Christianizing and church-building efforts of those early times. The cathedral at Fréjus is by no means of equal archæological importance to this tiny Baptistery, though the bishopric itself was founded as early as the fourth century, and at least one of its early bishops became a Pope (Jean XXII., 1316-34).

Here, there, and everywhere around the encircling avenues of the town are to be seen the remains of the old city walls, which in later years, even in the middle ages, sunk more and more into disuse, from the fact that the city has continually dwindled in size, until to-day it covers only about one-fifth of its former area.

The old aqueduct of Fréjus, a relic of Roman days and Roman ways, is the chief monumental wonder of the neighbourhood. It has long been in a ruinous state of disuse, though its decay is merely that incident to time, for it was marvellously well built of small stones without ornament of any kind.

At Fréjus there are also remains of a Roman theatre, now nothing more than a mass of débris, though one easily traces its diameter as having been something approaching two hundred feet.

The arena of Fréjus is in quite as dismantled a state as the theatre, one of the principal roadways now passing through its centre, so that to-day the monument is hardly more than a great open _Place_ at the crossing of four roads. From the grandeur of the structure, as it must once have been, it is a monument comparable in many ways with those better preserved and more magnificent arenas at Arles and Nîmes.

From this résumé of some of the chief monuments of the Roman occupation one gathers that Fréjus was carefully planned as a great city of residence and pleasure; and so it really was, with the added importance which its position, both with regard to the routes by sea and land, gave to it in a commercial sense.

From Fréjus to St. Raphaël is a bare three kilometres. St. Raphaël boasts as many inhabitants as Fréjus, but it is mostly a city of pleasure, and has no monuments of a past age to suggest that even a reflected glory from Fréjus ever shone over its site. To-day the plain which lies between the two towns is dotted here and there with palatial residences: “_C’est tout palais_,” the native tells you, and he is not far wrong, but in a former day it was a broad bay, where floated the galleys of Cæsar and Augustus.

There was some sort of a feudal town here in the middle ages, but it never grew to historical or artistic importance, and the town was little known until the advent of Alphonse Karr and his fellows, who made of it, or at least intimated that it could be made, what it is to-day,--a “winter resort,” or, as the French have it, a “_station hivernale_.” It is a very simple expression, but one which leads to a certain amount of misunderstanding among the newcomers, who think that they have only to take up their residence, from November to March, anywhere along the shores of the Mediterranean east of Marseilles to swelter in tropical sunshine. This they will not do, and unless they keep indoors between five and seven in the evening on most days, they will get a chill which will not only go to the marrow, but as like as not will carry pneumonia with it; that is, if one dresses in what are commonly called “summer clothes,” the kind that are pictured in the posters which decorate the dull walls of the railway stations as being suitable for the life of the Riviera.

St. Raphaël is not wholly given up to pleasure, for it is a notable fact that in industrial enterprise it has already surpassed Fréjus, due principally to a vast traffic in bauxite, a clay from which aluminium is obtained, and there are always at its quays steamers from England, Germany, and Holland loading the reddish earth.

Nevertheless, St. Raphaël is in the main a city of villas, less pretentious than those of Cannes, but still villas in the general meaning of the word. There is one called locally (in Provençal) the “_Oustalet du Capelan_” (The House of the Curé), which was a long time occupied by Gounod. Lovers of the master and his works will make of it a musical shrine and place of pilgrimage. An inscription over the door recalls that in this house Gounod composed “Romeo et Juliette.”

The Maison Close, inhabited by Alphonse Karr, is literally a _maison close_, for it is surrounded by a high wall, and the most that one can see and admire is the suggestion of the wonderful garden behind. In Karr’s time it must have been a highly satisfactory retreat, and no wonder he found it not difficult to let the rush of the world go by with unconcern.

Hamon, the landscape painter, was another devotee of St. Raphaël, and he described it as “_la campagne de Rome au fond du Golfe du Naples_;” it needs not a great stretch of the imagination to follow the simile.

In spite of the expectations of a former generation of landlords and landowners, St. Raphaël, progressive as it has been, has never grown up on the lines upon which it was planned. The grand boulevards and avenues came as a matter of course, and the great hotels, and, ultimately, the inevitable casino and its attendant attractions; but, nevertheless, St. Raphaël has remained a _ville des villas_, and the population has mostly gone to the suburban hillsides, especially around Valesclure, where new houses are springing up like mushrooms, all built of that white sandstone which flashes so brilliantly in the sunlight against the background of the green-clad, reddish-brown Estérel.

The Estérel is a coast range of mountains as different from Les Maures, their neighbour to the westward, as could possibly be, in colour, in outline, and in climatic influences, and these to no little extent have a decided effect on the manners and customs of the people who live in the neighbourhood.

The contrast between the mountains of Les Maures and the Estérel is most marked. The former are more sober and less accentuated than the latter range, and there is more of the culture of the olive to be noted in the valleys, and of the oak on the hillsides. In the Estérel all is brilliant, with a colouring that is more nearly a deep rosy red than that of any other rock formation to be seen in France. Coupled with the blue of the Mediterranean, the reddish rocks, the green hillsides, and the delicate skies make as fantastic a colour-scheme as was ever conceived by the artist’s brush.

The Route d’Italie passes to the north of the Estérel crest, and is one of those remarkable series of roadways which cross and recross France, and may be considered the direct descendants of the military roads laid out by the Romans, and developed and perfected by Napoleon. To-day a generously endowed department of the French government tenderly cares for them, with the result that the roads of France have become one of the most precious possessions of the nation.

Until very recent times the great mountain and forest tract of the Estérel had remained unknown and untravelled, save so far as the railway followed along the coast, and the great Route d’Italie bounded it on the north, or at least bounded the mountain slopes.

All this has recently been changed, and, where once were only narrow foot-paths and roads, made use of by the shepherds and peasants, there are a broad and elegant highway flanking the indentations of the coast-line, and many interior routes crossing and recrossing one of the most lovely and unspoiled wildwoods still to be seen in France. There are other parts much more wild, the Cevennes or the Vivarais, for instance; but they have not a tithe of the grandeur and beauty of the red porphyry rocks of the Estérel combined with the blue waters of the Mediterranean and the forest-covered flanks of its mountain range.

From Fréjus, St. Raphaël, or La Napoule, or even Cannes, one may enter the Estérel and lose himself to the world, if he likes, for a matter of a week, or ten days, or a fortnight, and never so much as have a suspicion of the conventional Riviera gaieties which are going on so close at hand.

The “Corniche d’Or” of the Estérel, as the coast road is known, was only completed in 1893, and as a piece of modern roadway-making is the peer of any of its class elsewhere. The record of its building, and the public-spirited assistance which was given the project on all sides, would, or should, put to shame those road-building organizations of England and America which for the most part have aided the good-roads movement with merely an unlimited supply of talk about what was going to be done.

As a roadway of scenic surprises the “Corniche d’Or” of the Estérel is the peer of the better known rival beyond Nice, though it has nothing to excel that superb half-dozen kilometres just before, and after, Monte Carlo and Monaco.

The interior route of the Estérel, the Route d’Italie, mounts to an altitude of three hundred metres, while the “Corniche” is practically level, with no hills which would tire the least muscular cyclist or the weakest-powered automobile.

Since the beginning of the transformation of the Estérel two hundred and forty kilometres of new roadways have been laid out. After this great work was finished came the question of erecting sign-boards along the various _routes_ and _chemins_ and _carrefours_ and _bifurcations_, and the work was not treated in a parsimonious fashion. Within the first year of the completion of the road-building over two hundred important and legible signs were erected by the efforts of a wealthy resident of St. Raphaël, with the result that the value of the Estérel as a great “_parc nationale_” became apparent to many who had previously never even heard of it.

This delightful tract of unspoiled wildwood is bounded on the north by the Route d’Italie, while the ingeniously planned “Corniche” follows the coast-line all the way to Cannes, which is really the door by which one enters the Riviera of the guide-books and the winter tourists.

The “Corniche d’Or,” its inception and construction, was really due to the efforts of the omnific “Touring Club de France.” Formerly the way by the coast was but a narrow track, or a “_Sentier de Douane_.” To-day it is an ample roadway along its whole length, on which one has little fear of speeding automobiles for the simple reason that the jutting capes and promontories of porphyry rock are death-dealing in their abruptness and frequency, and no automobilist who is sane--let it be here emphasized--takes such dangerous risks.

The forest and mountain region of the Estérel between those two encircling strips of roadway is possessed of a wonderful fascination for those who are brain-fagged or town-tired; and to roam, even on foot, along these by-paths for a few days will give a whole new view of life to any who are disposed to try it. If one purchases the excellent map of the region issued by the “Touring Club de France,” or even the five-colour map of the “Service Vicinal” of the French government, he will have no fear of losing his way among the myriads of paths and roadways with which the whole region is threaded.

One first enters the “Route de la Corniche” by leaving St. Raphaël by way of the newly opened Boulevard du Touring Club, and soon passes two great projecting rocks known as the “Lion de Terre” and the “Lion de Mer.” They do not look in the least like lions,--natural curiosities seldom do look like what they are named for,--but they will be recognizable nevertheless. Throughout its length the road follows the shore so closely that the sea is always in sight.

Boulouris is a sort of unlovely but picturesque suburb of St. Raphaël, and from its farther boundary one is in full view of the “Sémaphore d’Agay,” perched high on a promontory a hundred and forty metres above the sea. The Sémaphore is an ugly but utilitarian thing, and the wireless telegraph has not as yet supplanted its functions in France.

From the same spot one sees the Tour du Dramont, a one-time refuge of Jeanne de Provence during a revolution among her subjects.

In following the road one does not come to a town or indeed a settlement of any notable size until he reaches Agay, on the other side of the promontory. The town lies at the mouth of a tiny river bearing the same name. It makes some pretence at being a resort, but it is still a diminutive one, and, accordingly, all the more attractive to the world-wearied traveller.

Three routes lead from Agay, one to Cannes by Les Trois Termes (twenty-nine kilometres), another by the Col de Belle Barbe, and another directly by the “Corniche.”

Near the Col de Belle Barbe is the Oratoire de St. Honorat and the Grotte de Ste. Baume. The latter is a place of pilgrimage for the devout of the region, and for those from farther abroad, but most of the time it is a mere rendezvous for curious sightseers.

The roadway continues rising and falling through the pines until it crosses the Col Lévêque (169 metres), when, rounding the Pic d’Aurele, it comes again to sea-level at Le Trayas.

From Agay the “Corniche” runs also by Le Trayas, and to roll over its smoothly made surface in a swift-moving automobile is the very poetry of motion, or as near thereto as we are likely to get until we adopt the flying-machine for regular travel. It is an experience that no one should miss, even if he has to hire a seat on the automobile omnibus which frequently runs between St. Raphaël and La Napoule and Cannes.

It is twenty kilometres from Agay to La Napoule, and is a good afternoon’s journey by carriage, or even on donkey-back. Better yet, one should walk, if he feels equal to it, and has the time at his disposal.

_En route_ one passes Anthéore, which may best be described as a colony of artistic and literary people who have settled here for the quiet and change from the bustle of the modern life of the towns. This was the case at least when the settlement was founded, and the poet Brieux built himself a house and put up over the gateway the significant words: “_Je suis venu ici pour être seul._” Whether he was able to carry out this wish is best judged by the fact that since that time many outsiders have gained a foothold, and the Grand Hôtel de la Corniche d’Or has come to break the solitude with balls and bridge and all the distractions of the more celebrated Riviera towns and cities.

Between Anthéore and Le Trayas is a narrow pathway which mounts to St. Barthélémy, but the coast road still continues its delightful course toward La Napoule.

Le Trayas, though it figures in the railway time-tables, is hardly more than a hamlet; but it boasts proudly of a hotel and a group of villas. It has not yet become spoiled in spite of this, and though it lacks the picturesque local colour of the average Mediterranean coast town, and almost altogether the distractions of the great resorts, it is worth the visiting, if only for its charming situation.

The Département of the Var joins that of the Alpes-Maritimes just beyond, and, at three kilometres farther on, the coast road rises to its greatest height, a trifle over a hundred metres.

Before one comes to La Napoule he passes the progressive, hard-pushing little resort of Théoule, so altogether delightful from every point of view that one can but wish that winter tourists had never heard of it. This was not to be, however, and Théoule is doing its utmost to become both a winter and a summer resort, with many of the qualifications of both. It is deliciously situated on the Golfe de la Napoule, or, rather, on a little _anse_ or bay thereof, and consists of perhaps a hundred houses of all classes, most of which rejoice in the name of Villa Something-or-other. Most of these villas are well hidden by the trees, and their _coquette_ architecture (on the order of a Swiss châlet, but stuccoed here and there and with bits of coloured glass stuck into the gables,--and perhaps a plaster cat on the ridge-pole) is not so obtrusive as it might otherwise be.

Leaving Théoule, the coast road continues to La Napoule, but, properly speaking, the “Corniche” ends at Théoule. Throughout its whole length it is a wonderfully varied and attractive route to the popular Riviera towns, and one could hardly do better, if he has journeyed from the north by train, than to leave the cars at Fréjus or St. Raphaël and make the journey eastward via the Corniche d’Or. If he does this, as likely as not he will find some delightful beauty-spot which will appeal to him as far more attractive than a Cannes or Nice boarding-house, where the gossip is the same sort of thing that one gets in Bloomsbury or on Beacon Hill. The thing is decidedly worth the trying, and the suggestion is here given for what it may be worth to the reader.