CHAPTER XI.

VILLEFRANCHE AND THE FORTIFICATIONS

Nice in many respects is the centre from which radiates all the life of the Riviera; moreover its military and strategic importance attains the same distinction; it is the base of the whole system, social and political.

East and west the “Côte d’Azur” extends until it runs against the grime and commercial activity of Marseilles on the one side, and Genoa on the other.

From the heights back of Nice one sees the Ligurian coast stretch away to infinity, with the sea and the distant isles to the right, while to the left are the peaks of the Maritime Alps.

On this _pied de terre_ France has organized a great series of defences by land and sea. On every height is a fort or a battery, like the castle-crowned crags of the Rhine. The bays and harbours below the foot-hills are all defended from the menaces of a real or imaginary foe by a guardian fringe of batteries and defences of all ranks, and, what with battle-ships and torpedo-boats, and destroyers and submarines, this frontier strip is in no more danger of sudden attack by an unfriendly power than are the interior provinces of Berry and Burgundy.

The entire country around Nice is one vast entrenched camp, constructed, equipped, and maintained, as may be supposed, with considerable difficulty and at enormous expense. A mountain fortress whose very stones, to say nothing of other materials, are transported up a trailless mountainside, is one of the wonder-works of man, and here there is a long line of such, encircling the whole region from the Italian frontier westward to Toulon.

Above all, the fortifications are concentrated in the country just back of the capital of the Riviera. All the great hillsides, rocky, moss-grown, or covered with pines or olive-trees, are a network of forts and batteries, strategic roads, reservoirs of water, and magazines of shot and shell.

One of the strongest of these forts is on the flanks of Mont Boron; Cap Ferrat holds another, and the “Route de la Corniche,” the only low-level line of communication between France and Italy, literally bristles with the same sort of thing.

Fort de la Drette, five hundred metres in altitude, rises above that astonishing Saracen village of Eze, while a strategic route leads to another at Feuillerins, six hundred and forty-eight metres high, and thence to Fort de la Revere at seven hundred and three metres, an impregnable series of fortifications, one would think.

Between the battery-crowned heights are the reservoirs and magazines of powder, all in full view of the automobile and coach tourists from Nice to Monte Carlo. The route skirts La Revere and the great towering rock back of Monte Carlo, known as the “Tête de Chien,” and the tourist may readily enough judge for himself as to the utility and efficacy of these distinctly modern defences.

The crowning glory, however, is on Mont Agel, the culminating peak in the vicinity of Nice. It is situated at a height of eleven hundred and forty-nine metres, and it would take a long siege indeed to capture this fortress, if things ever came to an issue in its neighbourhood.

Of all the wonderful examples of road-making in France, and they are more numerous and excellent than elsewhere, the “Route de la Grande Corniche” is the best known, covering as it does a matter of nearly fifty kilometres from Nice to Vintimille.

Personally conducted tourists make the trip in brakes and char-à-bancs via Mont Gros and its observatory, the Col des Quatre Chemins, by Eze perched on its pyramidal rock, and La Turbie with its memories of Augustus, until they descend, either via Roquebrune to Menton, or by the steeps of La Turbie to Monte Carlo and its “_distractions de haut goût_.”

It is all very wonderful and, to the traveller who makes the trip for the first time or the hundredth, the beauties of the panorama which unfolds at every white kilometre stone is so totally different from that which he has just passed that he wonders if he is not journeying on some sort of a magic carpet which simply floats in space. Certainly there is no more beautiful view-point in all the world than that from the height overlooking Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Cap Martin, all bedded like jewels amid an inconceivable brilliancy and softness, a combination which seems paradoxical enough in print, but which in real life is quite the reverse, although it is ravishingly beautiful enough to be unreal.

The twenty-franc excursionists from Nice are rushed out from town in the early morning, via “La Grande Corniche,” to Menton, and back in the early afternoon via the “Route du Bord du Mer,” at something like the speed that the _malle-poste_ of other days used to thread the great national roadways of France. Really the excursion is quite worth the money, and you _do_ cover the ground, but you cover it much too rapidly, and so do the speeding automobilists. By far the best way to drink in all the beauties of this delightful promenade is to devote a week to it, and do it on foot. Walking tours are not fashionable any more, and in many thousands of miles of travel by road in France, the writer has never so much as walked between neighbouring villages, but some day that promenade _au pied_ is going to be made on the “Corniche” between Nice and Menton, returning, as do the “trippers,” via the lower road through Monte Carlo, La Condamine, and Beaulieu. It is the only way to appreciate the artistic beauties, and the strategic value, of this great highway of a civilization of another day, whose life, if not as refined as that of the present, could hardly have been more dissolute than that which to-day goes on to some extent here in this playground of the world.

One should make the journey out by the “Corniche” and back by the waterside, lunching at the _auberge_ at Eze off an anchovy or two, a handful of dried figs, and a flagon of thick, red, perfumed wine. Then he will indeed think life worth living, and regret that such things as railway trains, automobiles, and palace hotels ever existed.

Beyond Nice the Corniche route toward Italy is ample and majestic throughout its whole course, though, as a whole, it is no more beautiful than that Corniche by the Estérel. It winds around Mont Gros, at the back of Nice, and reaches its greatest height just beyond the Auberge de la Drette. _En route_, at least after passing the Col des Quatre Chemins, there is that ever-present panorama of the Mediterranean blue which all Frenchmen, and most dwellers on its shores, and some others besides, consider the most beautiful bit of water in the world.

To know the full charms of the road from Nice to Villefranche and Beaulieu one should start early in the morning, say in April or even May, when, to him who has only known the Riviera in the winter months, the very liquidness of the atmosphere and the landscape will be a revelation. All is impregnated with a penetrating gentle light, under which the house walls, the roadway, the waves, the rocks, and the foliage take on a subtle tone which is quite indescribable and quite different from the artificiality which is more or less present all through the Riviera towns in winter. There is a difference, too, from the sun-baked dryness of the dead of summer. Each rock, each cliff, each bank of sand, and each wavelet of the Mediterranean has a note which forms the one tone needful for the gamut which is played upon one’s emotions.

Rounding Mont Boron by the coast road, one soon comes to Villefranche, whose very name indicates the privileges which were accorded to it by its founder, Charles II., Comte de Provence et Roi de Naples. Built in 1295, it became at once a free trading port, and speedily drew to itself a very considerable population. Soon, too, it came into prominence as a military port, and the Ducs de Savoie made it their chief arsenal.

To-day Villefranche occupies a very equivocal position. It has a population of something over five thousand souls, and its splendid harbour gives it a prominence in naval circles which is well deserved; but, in spite of this, the town has none of the attributes of the other Riviera coast towns and cities.

The prevailing note of Villefranche is Oriental, with its house walls kalsomined in red, blue, and pink, in ravishingly delicate and picturesque tones; really a great improvement, from every point of view, to the whitewash of Anglo-Saxon lands. The French name for this species of decoration is the worst thing about it, and, unless one has a considerable French vocabulary, the word “_badigeonée_” means nothing. Another exotic in the way of nomenclature which one meets at Villefranche is _moucharabieh_, which is not found in many dictionaries of the French language. A _moucharabieh_ is nothing more or less than a unique variety of window screen or blind, behind which, taking into account the Eastern aspect of all things in Villefranche, one needs only to see the beautiful head of an Oriental maiden to imagine himself in far Arabia.

It is but a step beyond Villefranche to Beaulieu and “_La Petite Afrique_,” generally thought to be the most exclusive and retired of all the Riviera resorts. To a great extent this is so, though the scorching automobilists of the _nouveau-riche_ variety have covered its giant olive-trees with a powdery whiteness which has considerably paled their already delicate gray tones.

Between Villefranche and Beaulieu is the peninsula of St. Jean, washed by the waves on either side and as indented and jagged as the shores of Greece. To-day it has become an annex of Nice, with opulent villas of kings, princes, and millionaires, from Leopold, King of Belgium down.

At St. Jean-sur-Mer, midway down the peninsula, is a little fishing village, still quaint and unspoiled amid all the splendours of the palaces of kings and villas of millionaires, which have of late grown so plentiful in this once virgin forest tract. There are many souvenirs here of the time when the neighbourhood was occupied by the Knights Hospitalers of St. John of Jerusalem, and there is much history and legend connected with them. Seaward is the Promontory or Pointe de St. Hospice, where the Duc de Savoie, Emmanuel Philibert, built a fortification. It was an ideal spot for a defensive work of this nature, though it protected nothing except what was inside. It must, in a former day, have been a very satisfactory work of its kind, as it is recorded that this prince, coming to view the progress of the work, and fallen upon by the Saracens, retreated within the walls of his new defence, where he successfully repulsed all their attacks.

Many times did the pirates attack this outpost, but finally, as the country became peaceful, a hospice came to take the place of the warlike fortification, and from this establishment the Pointe de St. Hospice of to-day takes its name.

Half-way up the foot-hills of the Alps the great white ribbon of the “Corniche” rolls its solitary way until La Turbie is reached. Here is a little village seated proudly beneath that colossal ruin, the Augustan trophy, which has been a marvel and subject of speculation for archæologists for ages past. One thing seems certain, however, and that is that it was a monument commemorative of the submission of forty-five distinct peoples of western Gaul to the power of Rome.

Westward is Roquebrune, where the “Corniche” drops to the two hundred-metre level, and one rapidly approaches the sea beyond Cap Martin, and thus reaches Menton, but two kilometres onward.

The coast route from Nice to Menton via Villefranche and Beaulieu approximates the same length as the “Corniche” proper, and its charms are as varied. It rolls along behind the old citadel of Mont Boron and suddenly opens up the magnificent bay of Villefranche, the favourite Mediterranean station of the Russians and Americans, and thence on rapidly to Beaulieu, Monte Carlo, and Menton.

All the way this route by the sea follows the shore and skirts picturesque gulfs and _calanques_, and now and then tunnels a hillside only to come out into day and a vista more beautiful than that which was left behind.