A Book of The Riviera

Formerly S. Cassien was the fortress to the town of Arluc. Castle and town have disappeared wholly. Arluc, Ara lucis[14 - A fantastic derivation. Actually, Arluc is By the Mere.] as the place is called in old deeds, was a shrine in a sacred wood. The Provençal Troubadour Raymond Ferand tells a story of it.

Here lived once on a time a sorcerer named Cloaster; he had an altar in the wood, at which he practised all kinds of diableries. There was a bridge over the Siagne crossed by the people who came there to worship. Now S. Nazarius was abbot of Lerins. One day, a youth named Ambrose was sacrificing to idols at Arluc, when the devils laid hold of him, raised him in the air, and flew away with him, in spite of all his protests and kicks, to convey him to hell. But as they were thus transporting him over the island of Lerins, Ambrose heard the chanting of the monks, and he cried out to S. Honorat to help him. Then the devils let go, and he came fluttering down like a feather into the midst of the cloister of Lerins, where S. Nazarius received him; and thenceforth Ambrose lived with the monks as a good Christian.

The Lerins Chronicle tells us that the Abbot Nazarius destroyed a temple of Venus that was at Arluc, and built a church on its site, which he dedicated to S. Stephen in A.D. 616, and attached to it a convent of women. But in 730 the Saracens destroyed church and convent and town, and sacked Lerins, where they massacred the abbot and five hundred of his monks.

The town of Arluc was rebuilt by Pepin le Bref, but in 890 the Saracens again destroyed it. It again struggled into existence, but was finally utterly ruined and effaced by the Tard-Venus in 1361, under their chief, who called himself “The Enemy of Man.” These Tard-Venus were one of the Free Companies that ravaged the country, gleaning after others had reaped.

The chapel was rebuilt, and when given to the abbey of S. Victor at Marseilles, was dedicated to S. Cassien. The fête is on July 23rd; religious services take place in the morning and a pleasure fair and merrymaking in the afternoon.

A pretty watering place is La Napoule, that once enjoyed a prosperity of which Cannes had no thought. It was the Roman station Ad Horea, where vast stores of provisions were collected in magazines, for transmission to the troops. The name Napoule has been supposed to be the same as Naples, Neapolis, signifying the New Town, but no text gives colour to this derivation, and it is more probable that La Napoule comes from Epulia, Provisions, as it was a store place; excavations made there when the railway was in construction laid bare immense underground magazines and granaries, divided systematically into compartments by pillars, and vaulted. These were originally well ventilated. Remains of Roman constructions may still be seen by the shore, and although no mention is made in the Itinerary of Antoninus of a port there, it cannot be doubted that there was one for the disembarkation or embarkation of stores.

The little feudal castle built on Roman substructures was wrecked by the Saracen corsairs in the thirteenth century. The present village of Napoule is tenanted by poor fishermen, but it is likely to look up as a bathing place, and as a centre for excursions into the Estérel. The tower is all that remains of a castle of the Counts of Villeneuve. The rocks in the bay, beaten by the sea, have assumed fantastic shapes; being of sandstone, they are not like porphyry, too hard to resist the erosion of the sea.

And La Napoule, facing east, sees how that, —

“The eastern gate, all fiery red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams,
Turns into yellow gold his salt-green streams.”

    Midsummer Night’s Dream, III. 2.
Another old place that fell into decay, but which has in it now hopes of renovation, is Antibes. This was the Greek Antipolis, the town over against Nicæa, at the farther side of the bay.

Almost all of the monuments bearing Greek inscriptions that have been found in such numbers in Provence belong to a date after the Roman annexation. But this is not the case with regard to a curious inscription discovered at Antibes on a black boulder, egg-shaped, of diorite, a kind of basalt. This stone had no shaping given to it by the hand of man, but on it was cut in archaic characters, this inscription: —

“I am Terpon, servant of the august goddess Aphrodite; may Cypris reward with her favours those who erected me here.”

What does this mean? How could the stone be Terpon, a servant of the Goddess of Love?

It would seem to have been one of those mysterious sacred stones which received worship from the most remote ages, a form of worship belonging to the earliest people of whom anything is known. This cult of rude unshapen stones, very generally black, prevailed among the Phœnicians; it forced its way into the worship of the Israelites. Such stones were set up even in the temple of Jehovah by some of the kings, who inclined to the superstitions of the Canaanites. The worship had so strong a hold on the Arabs that Mohammed could not extirpate it, and the Black Stone of Mecca still receives the veneration of the faithful. It forced its way into the religion of the ancient Greeks, and though quite incongruous with their mythology, held its own to the last.

Prudentius, the Christian poet (died about 410) shows us how strong was the devotion, even in his day.

“His first food was the sacred meal, his earliest sight the sacred candles, and the family gods growing black with holy oil. He saw his mother pale at her prayers before the holy stone, and he, too, would be lifted by his nurse to kiss it in his turn.” (Cont. Symmachum.)

It has been so tough that it is not extirpated yet.

In 1877 a correspondent of the Society of Anthropology at Paris wrote about the worship as still prevailing in the valleys of the Pyrenees.

“One comes across these sacred stones most usually near fountains. They are rough blocks of porphyroid, or amphibolite granite, left on the mountain side by glacial action. They are almost invariably shapeless, and rarely present any features that can distinguish them from other great stones strewn about. One might pass them by unnoticed but for the local traditions that attach to them and the veneration with which they are regarded by the natives. In vain do the priests preach against them. They have utterly failed to drive the superstition from the hearts of their people. In vain do they get them smashed up secretly, in hopes of thereby destroying these vestiges of paganism; especially do they use their efforts against such as serve as meeting-places to young men and girls. The natives, when they come on the workmen engaged in the destruction, break out into riot, and stop the work. When they cannot do this, then they collect the fragments, replace them, and continue to surround them with veneration. It is necessary to disperse the débris of the Holy Stone to put an end to the cult; but even then, the place where it stood is regarded as sacred, and sometimes the clergy plant a cross there, as the only means of turning the traditional reverence of the spot into a new direction.”

Whether this religion of the black stone of Antibes goes back to Phœnician or to Ligurian religion one cannot say – probably both Phœnician colonist and Ligurian native shared the same devotion to rude blocks of stone.

In Scotland, in Ireland, in Cornwall, in Brittany, among the graves of the dead of the Bronze Age, almost invariably a piece of white quartz or a jade weapon is found. Indeed, the bit of quartz is so constant that a workman engaged in opening one of the barrows will cry out, “Now we are coming on the bones,” when he sees it gleam. The bit of quartz or jade pertained to the same category of ideas. It was the rude stone protecting the dead, as the rude stone was the safeguard of the living, the object of worship in life, of hope, of confidence in death.

At Antibes, in the wall of the Hôtel de Ville, is the stone with the inscription, already spoken of, to the poor little dancing boy of twelve, from the North. In the museum is an inscription to the memory of a horse, by his sorrowing master. Another shows that at Antibes there was a corporation of Utriculares, that is to say, of boatmen who navigated the sea in vessels sustained by bladders. These were common enough on the lagoons and the rivers, but exceptional on the coast.

Perhaps the most interesting excursion that can be made from Cannes is to the isles of Lerins. Of these there are two – Ste. Marguerite and S. Honorat – the latter formerly the seat of the great school and monastery of Lerins. The islands take their name from some mythic Lero, of whose story nothing is known; but Pliny informs us that there had once been a town named Vergoanum situated on one of them which had disappeared before the Christian era, and of which no traces remained. That Ste. Marguerite was occupied by Greeks and Romans is testified by the finding there of a bi-lingual inscription. But whatever relics of structures may have been left by its old masters have been used up again and again from mediæval times down to the present. The fortress now standing is a barrack. It was built by Richelieu, considerably enlarged by the Spaniards when they had possession of the island, and then transformed after the plans of Vauban. The fortress was employed mainly as a military or State prison.

The most celebrated of its prisoners, or at least him about whom most has been written, was the Man of the Iron Mask. It was due to Voltaire that the story obtained such currency and excited so keen an interest. In his Age of Louis XIV., published in 1751, he wrote: —

“Some months after the death of Mazarin an event happened which is without a parallel in history. Moreover, and this is not less remarkable, the event has been passed over in silence by every historian. There was sent with the utmost secrecy to the castle of the Isles of Ste. Marguerite, in the Sea of Provence, a prisoner unknown, of a stature above the average, young, and with features of rare nobility and beauty. On the way the prisoner wore a mask, the chin-piece of which was furnished with springs of steel, so that he could eat without removing it. Order had been given to kill him if he ventured to uncover. He remained at the Isles until a trusted officer, Saint Mars by name, Governor of Pignerol, having been appointed in 1690 to the command of the Bastille, came to Ste. Marguerite to fetch him, and bore him thence – always in his mask – to the Bastille. Before his removal he was seen in the isle by the Marquis de Louvois, who remained standing while he spoke to him with a consideration savouring of respect. In the Bastille the unknown was as well bestowed as was possible in that place, and nothing that he asked for was refused him. He had a passion for lace and fine linen; he amused himself with a guitar; and his table was furnished with the best. The governor rarely sat down in his presence. An old doctor of the Bastille, who had often attended this interesting prisoner, said that, although he had examined his tongue and the rest of his body, he had never seen his face. He was admirably made, said the doctor, and his skin was of a brownish tint. He spoke charmingly, with a voice of a deeply impressive quality, never complaining of his lot, and never letting it be guessed who he was. This unknown captive died in 1703, and was buried by night in the parish of S. Paul. What is doubly astonishing is this: that when he was sent to Ste. Marguerite there did not disappear from Europe any personage of note. But observe what happened within a few days of his arrival at the isle. The governor himself laid the prisoner’s table and then withdrew and locked the door. One day the prisoner wrote something with a knife on a silver plate and threw the plate out of the window towards a boat on the shore, almost at the foot of the tower. A fisherman to whom the boat belonged picked up the plate and carried it to the governor, who, surprised beyond measure, asked the man: ‘Have you read what is written on this plate, and has any one seen it in your hands?’ ‘I cannot read,’ answered the fisherman; ‘I have only just found it, and no one else has seen it.’ He was detained until the governor had made sure that he could not read, and that no other person had seen the plate. ‘Go,’ he then said. ‘It is well for you that you cannot read.’”

How Voltaire could describe the prisoner as “with features of rare nobility and beauty,” when he was invariably masked, so that no one could see his face, is certainly remarkable.

When Voltaire found that this story had created a sensation, he vouchsafed a solution to it. “The Iron Mask was without doubt a brother, and an elder brother, of Louis XIV.”

But the mystery has been solved. We know with certainty who the prisoner was – no one of great importance after all, but one against whom Louis XIV. entertained a bitter and implacable resentment – Ercole Antonio Mattioli.

Louis XIV. had a strong desire to obtain the Marquisate of Montferrat, with its capital Cassale; but the marquisate belonged to Charles, Duke of Mantua, a feeble, dissipated, extravagant fool. On the other hand, the Empress and the Spanish party were bitterly hostile to French schemes of aggrandisement. Mattioli acted as a paid agent of the French Government to negotiate in secrecy a sale of Cassale to Louis; and after he had received a good deal of payment for his services, betrayed the whole intrigue to the Austro-Spanish Government. Louis was furious, not only at having failed in this coup d’état, but also at being so fooled. Mattioli was lured near to the frontier, and fallen on upon Piedmontese soil, carried off and thrown into the fortress of Pignerol, which was then in the hands of the French. From Pignerol he was afterwards moved to Lerins, and then finally to the Bastille, where he died. The whole story has been thoroughly thrashed out, and that the Man in the Iron Mask was Mattioli and no one else has been conclusively established.[15 - Hopkins (Tighe) The Man in the Iron Mask, Lond. 1901.]

It would seem that an attempt was made to fabricate for Napoleon a descent from the Iron Mask, who was assumed to be an elder brother to Louis XIV., and by this means to establish for Napoleon a legitimate right to the throne of the Capets. But the attempt was too absurd to obtain credence, if ever proposed to Bonaparte. In the Mémorial de Sainte Hélène allusion is made to this.

“Conversation turned on the Mask of Iron, and all that had been said on the subject by Voltaire, Dutens, etc., and what was found in the Mémoires of Richelieu was passed in review. These made him, as is well known, to be the twin brother of Louis XIV., and his elder. Then some one (probably Count de Las Casas) added that on studying genealogical trees, it had been seriously shown that he, Napoleon, was the lineal descendant of the Man in the Iron Mask, consequently legitimate heir to Louis XIII. and to Henry IV. in preference to Louis XIV. and his posterity. The Emperor replied that he had, in fact, heard this, and added that human credulity and love of the marvellous was capable of believing anything; that it would have been quite possible to establish this to the satisfaction of the multitude, and that there would not have lacked men in the senate capable of producing the requisite demonstrations, and these the men who later turned against him when they saw that he was unfortunate.

“Then we went on to discuss the particulars of the fable. The governor of the isle of Ste. Marguerite at the time, so it was said, the man to whose care the Iron Mask was confided, was called M. de Bonpart, a very remarkable fact. This man had a daughter. The young people saw each other and loved. The Governor thereupon communicated with the Court; and it was there decided that no great inconvenience could arise if the unfortunate man were suffered to find in love some alleviation of his misfortunes. Accordingly M. de Bonpart had them married.

“He who related this turned red when the facts were disputed. He said that the marriage could be verified by inspection of the register of a certain parish in Marseilles, which he named. He added that the children born of this marriage were clandestinely removed to Corsica, where the difference of language, or deliberate purpose, caused the name Bonpart to be rendered Bonaparte, or Buonaparte.”

Whether it was proposed to Napoleon at one time to circulate this fable is uncertain. What is certain is, that, when he was emperor, he took pains to have the registers of Ajaccio falsified or destroyed, either in preparation for the publication of this fiction, or because they revealed some unpleasant truths, which he was interested in suppressing. The crucial difficulty in the way of formulating this fable was that Saint Mars, and not any M. Bonpart, had been governor of Ste. Marguerite whilst the Iron Mask was there.

The last celebrated prisoner at Ste. Marguerite was Marshal Bazaine, who escaped with the assistance of his wife, it can hardly be doubted with the connivance of the governor. Marshal François Achille Bazaine was born at Versailles in 1811, and was destined to be a tradesman by his very bourgeois parents. But as he did not relish the shop, he entered the army as a private soldier in 1831, and served in Algiers, where he sufficiently distinguished himself to be promoted to a lieutenancy, and then become captain of the Foreign Legion in the service of Queen Christina against the Carlists. In 1841 he again served in Algiers, became colonel, and next general of brigade. He was in the Crimean War, and returned from it as general of division. Later he attended the unfortunate Emperor Maximilian to Mexico, when he was raised to the rank of marshal. There he married a rich Creole. His conduct in Mexico was not glorious. He left the emperor in the most menaced position; but whether this desertion was due to himself or to orders received from Napoleon is not known. After that, for some time nothing was heard of him, but on the breaking out of the war with Prussia and Germany he was appointed to the command of the Third Army Corps. How he surrendered Metz, with 150,000 men, on October 23rd, 1870, is well known.

The questions asked of the jury at his trial were these: —

1. Is Marshal Bazaine guilty, on October 28th, 1870, of having signed a capitulation in the open field, at the head of his army?

2. Was the consequence of this capitulation, that the army laid down its arms?

3. Did Marshal Bazaine, both verbally and by writing, correspond with the enemy, without having previously done all that was his duty?

4. Is Marshal Bazaine guilty, on October 28th, 1870, of having capitulated to the enemy, and delivered over the fortress of Metz, over which he had command, without having previously used every effort in his power to defend it, and exhausted every means of holding out that lay open to him in duty and honour?

The jury answered Yes, unanimously, to all these questions, and he was sentenced to degradation and death; but the sentence of death was commuted to imprisonment for twenty years. On December 25th – Christmas Day – 1873, he was taken from the Trianon, Versailles, in a close carriage, to Villeneuve l’Etang, and thence conveyed to Antibes, where he was placed on a steamboat and transferred to the fortress of Ste. Marguerite. On August 10th, 1874, the director of the prison, named Marchi, found Bazaine’s prison empty. The first thought in France, when this news was spread by the telegraph, was that he had been allowed to escape by the connivance of MacMahon. Then details were published which put a romantic gloss on the evasion.

In the fortress of Ste. Marguerite three rooms had been placed at the disposal of the prisoner, as well as a little terrace, which latter was reached by a stone bridge with a wall on each side, and here stood a sentinel, on the wall; but he could not see those who passed over the bridge nor what went on upon the terrace, as the latter was partly covered with an awning against the sun. On the terrace, to which led several steps from the bridge, the Marshal had formed for himself a little garden; and whilst working therein one day he found a choked gutter intended for carrying off rain-water from the castle shoots; it was bored through the rock; and he set to work to clear it. By means of sympathetic ink he was able to maintain a correspondence with his wife; and all was planned for his escape.

On the evening determined on he asked his gaoler, who usually accompanied him for a stroll on the terrace after dinner, to allow him to walk it alone, and this was readily permitted.

After a while Bazaine opened and slammed the gate, and the sentinel supposed that he had passed out of the terrace garden, on his way back to the prison. But that the Marshal, instead, had cleared the drain hole and slipped through, he could not see, because the awning hid from him all view of the terrace. In the drain was a rope, and this Bazaine let down the face of the rock, making it fast to an iron bar crossing the conduit. The descent was for eighty feet. Below burnt a light, giving him notice that his wife was there awaiting him in a boat.

The descent was not a little arduous, and he scratched and bruised his knuckles and knees against the rock, as a high wind was blowing at the time. When he reached the bottom a voice across the water asked who was there, and he struck a match and showed his face. The boat could not come up under the cliff, and he was obliged to plunge into the water to reach it. In the boat were his Creole wife and his nephew, a Mexican, Don Alvarez de Rull. Mme. Bazaine had been in Genoa from August 3rd, and had there hired a pleasure steam-yacht, the Baron Ricasoli, and in this she had either remained in the harbour of Genoa or had gone cruises in it, and had penetrated more than once to the Gulf of Saint Juan. At La Croisette she and her nephew had been set ashore, nominally that she might look at a villa, that she pretended she had an idea of renting. There they hired a boat, and in this they rowed to the foot of the cliff under the foot of the fortress, and awaited the arrival of the Marshal. No sooner was he in the boat than they rowed to the vessel, which had all steam up, and started at full speed for Genoa.

In a letter written by Mme. Bazaine to the French Minister of the Interior, General Chabaud-Latour, dated August 16th, she stated that she had had no confederates. Bazaine also made the same assertion in a letter from Cologne. But no one believed this except the Ultramontane editor of the Univers, who attributed the happy escape to the merits of a consecrated scapular and a thread of the Blessed Virgin’s smock, which Bazaine wore about his neck. Colonel Villette, who had voluntarily shared the Marshal’s imprisonment, and who quitted Ste. Marguerite the day after his escape, was arrested at Marseilles and brought before the magistrates. During the investigation it became clear enough that Bazaine had not been without confederates.

The rope by which Bazaine had let himself down had been woven partly out of the cord that had tied up his boxes, partly out of a swing that his children had used, when allowed to share his imprisonment for awhile. Bazaine himself was not skilful enough to have made this rope; it was woven by Villette. The iron bar to which it was asserted that the rope had been fastened was not to be found in the drain; and it was evident that some one must have held the end when the Marshal was let down.

Marchi, the gaoler, protested that he had only allowed Bazaine the liberty he enjoyed, because the latter had given his word of honour not to attempt an escape. Bazaine’s valet, Barreau, was certainly implicated in the matter; so was a Colonel Doineau, who, as head of the Bureaux Arabes in Algeria, had been sentenced to death for murder and robbery, but had been pardoned by Napoleon II. He had managed the correspondence between Bazaine and his wife. Several of the warders were guilty at least of negligence, but were let off very easily with one, two, or six months’ imprisonment.

The island of S. Honorat is smaller than Ste. Marguerite. It is a poor little stony patch in the sea, a miniature of the larger isle, a bank of rocks covered with a thin bed of soil, and rising not above four feet over the sea level. And yet this isle, whose meagre clumps of pines and whose battered tower hardly attract the attention of the tourists, played a considerable part, through long centuries, in the history of intellectual and religious growth in Europe. In 375 S. Honoratus founded there his religious community, and grouped about him a little family of earnest and intellectual men. In a few years it grew in power, not the power of the sword, but of brain and earnestness of purpose; and this island saved Western Christendom from a grave disaster.