# A Book of the Riviera/Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII
CANNES
CANNES does not possess much of a history. It was but a fishing village occupying a rock above a little port, built about a ruined castle and a church, when "invented" by Lord Brougham, as already related.
Its history may be summed up shortly. Old Cannes possibly occupies the site of the Ligurian town of Ægitna, destroyed B.C. 154 by the Consul Quintus
Interior, Chateau St. Honorat
century it pertained to the abbey of Lerins, and in the Middle Ages maintained incessant contest with the tyrannical abbots, in efforts to obtain municipal freedom. Not till 1788—the year before the Revolution—did the town become free from its ecclesiastical masters.
From Cannes in 1580 the plague spread which ravaged Provence. It was brought there by a ship from the Levant. To plague succeeded war. In 1746 Cannes succumbed to the Piedmontese and German forces that had crossed the Var. After taking and sacking Cannes, where they got little beyond fishing-nets, they plundered Grasse.
A little before this Admiral Matthews, who had taken Ventimiglia, captured the Ile Ste. Marguerite. The war which led to the blockading of the Ligurian coast by the English was occasioned by a trifle.
In 1738 the English were thrown into a paroxysm of indignation by a tale that circulated, which was characterised by Burke as "The Fable of Jenkins's Ear." Jenkins was master of a small trading sloop in Jamaica, which seven years previously had been overhauled by a Spanish coastguard boat. The captain, disappointed at finding nothing contraband in the vessel, tore off one of Jenkins's ears, and bade him carry it to King George, and inform his Britannic Majesty that if he should come that way he would serve him in the same manner. ​This ear Jenkins carried about with him wrapped up in cotton wool. For seven years Jenkins kept his ear, and produced it in taverns and to all he met, as an instance of the indignities to which freeborn Britons were exposed at the hands of Spain. Of course much correspondence took place between the two governments relative to this bit of dried ear, but not till 1737 was he called before a committee of the House of Commons, when he appeared at the bar, exhibited his ear, that looked like a dried mushroom or a truffle. War was proclaimed amidst great rejoicing among the English. Church bells were rung. Walpole said bitterly, "You are ringing your bells now; before long you will be wringing your hands."
The English fleet in the Mediterranean blockaded the ports of Spain. But the death of Charles of Austria in the following year led to a general scramble to get hold of portions of his vast possessions, and the war assumed a more complicated character. The Spaniards, assisted by the French, landed on the Italian coasts, and Admiral Matthews was sent to drive them thence.
The story of Jenkins and his ear had roused all England. Pulteney declared that England needed no allies that Jenkins's story alone would raise volunteers anywhere. It was, however, more than hinted at the time, that Jenkins had lost his ear in the pillory, and not through the violence of a Spanish custom-house officer.
The war fizzled out. Matthews was badly served with men and ships from England, and the Ile of Ste. Marguerite was speedily abandoned.
Compared with Nice, Cannes enjoys certain advantages. It is less towny and commercial. It does not ​savour of Monte Carlo. It possesses on the east the wooded height of La Californie, studded with hotels and villas, commanding one of the most beautiful evening views in Europe. When the sun goes down beyond the Estérel range, standing up in royal purple against an amber sky, it may well be thought that this is a scene of unsurpassable beauty.
Nice has to the East Mont Boron and Mont Alban, but they do not serve for a residential suburb, as does La Californie. They are cut off from Nice by the port, and they do not command so incomparable a view.
For the depth of winter, in gloom and cold, then no place for shelter can be compared with Beaulieu, or Mentone, or Alassio. But when the months of December and January are passed, then Cannes. Lastly, to cool off before encountering the chills of spring in England, S. Raphael. Cannes further has at its door, for a run of a day, Estérel, easily reached, and never to be exhausted or forgotten. Then, again, from Cannes, also accessible, the isles of Lerins, where the fresh breezes blow.
"Verily," says Leuthéric, "no country in the world possesses a climate comparable to that of Cannes. There no extremes of temperature are known, as in other parts of Provence. The belt of hills which enclose the gulf form a screen intervening between the bay and the towering mountains; and when the cold winds blow down from the Alps, they sweep over the littoral, which lies always sheltered. Thanks to this natural protection, they fall at some distance out to sea, and one can mark the ruffle of the surface on the horizon, whilst that near the beach gently undulates like the face of a tranquil lake. The nightly loss of heat, favoured by the limpidity of a sky always cloudless, is compensated for by the proximity of the sea, always ​slow to give up its heat, and which bathes this coast with an atmosphere ever temperate. The mean temperature is superior to those of Nice, Genoa, Florence, Pisa, Rome, and even of Naples; it never falls below freezing point, and never rises as high as in most of the towns of Europe.
"This equilibrium of temperature is manifest in the simultaneous development of vegetations apparently contradictory. At Cannes, above every spot on the coast of Provence, the vegetations of opposite climes melt into one another in an admirable promiscuity. The landscape is veritably unique, and one feels there as if one were transported into a vast conservatory, in which artificially are united growths, the most different in character. The plain is covered with oranges and lemons, from among which shoot up at intervals the fans of palms trees and the spikes of aloes. The hills are crowned with umbrella pines, whose majestic heads recall classic sites in the Roman campagna. In the background of the picture are dark and dense forests of pines, like a gloomy drapery above which rise the pure and gleaming heights of the Alps in their eternal snows. Thus, as in a single framework, one can see grouped together the great conifers of the north, the olives of Provence, the golden fruits of the Balearic Isles, the oleanders of Asia Minor, and the thorny vegetation of the Algerian Tell."
I must, however, in all fairness, add, as a qualification to this picture, that in the early months of 1905, frost and hail did so smite and blast the oranges, the lemons, the eucalyptus of the plain of the Siagne, that the glory of the glossy leaves was gone, the country had assumed the aspect of a withered orchard. The golden fruit were shed, and the leaves were bleached and pendant.
If Cannes has gone up in the world, her neighbours have gone down. About four miles from Cannes, in the Plain of the Siagne, is an outcrop of the Estérel red ​sandstone, crowned by magnificent pines, cypresses, cork trees and ilexes, that embower a chapel of S. Cassien and a farm. Here, till recently, lived a hermit. These gentry are becoming scarce. Possibly the prognostication of M. Anselme Benoit, in Jules Fabre's novel Man Oncle Celestin, is accomplishing itself:
"Va au diable avec tes médailles et tes chapelets. Je te le prédis depuis longtemps: à force d'embrasser les filles, tu finiras par embrasser les gendarmes au detour de quelque chemin."
In 1661 Bishop Godeau found a vagabond hermit at S. Jeanette, and tried in vain to dislodge him ; but the man hung on, and Godeau found him still there in 1667.
These men pick up a subsistence by the sale of sacred metals, pictures, scapulars, rosaries ; sometimes manufacturing the latter themselves. Very often they are simply lazy loons who can subsist on such sales and occasional alms; but some have been as great scamps as Jacopo Rusca in Fabre's delightful story—which is a graphic picture of country life and country people in the South, full of delicious word painting.
Formerly S. Cassien was the fortress to the town of Arluc. Castle and town have disappeared wholly. Arluc, Ara lucis 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 Nights 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 ​not 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
The Prison of the Man with the Iron Mask
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.
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.
The Castle of S. Honorat
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.
The Mussulman has a legend of Creation. According to that, when God was creating man, He took a pellet of clay in His left hand, moulded it into human shape, cast it aside to the left, and said, "This goes to hell, and what care I?" In like manner He worked another ball of clay with His right hand, flung that aside, and said, "And this goes to heaven, and what care I?"
Now the master mind of Western Christendom, Augustine of Hippo, had devised the same theory of caprice in the Most High, predestinating to good or ill without reason, and that before Mohammed was born. Divine Grace, he held, was paramount and irresistible, carrying man to happiness or damnation without man being able to determine his course one way or the other. Man, according to Augustine, was a mere "Lump" of sin, damnable, utterly damnable. But God, in His inscrutable providence, indistinguishable from wantonness, chose to elect some to weal, and leave the rest to woe. This was a doctrine that did away with the necessity of man making the smallest endeavour after righteousness, from exercising the least self-control; of man feeling the slightest compunction after committing the grossest sins. Augustine sent his treatise to Abbot ​Valentine of Adrumetium. Valentine, in calm self-complacency, sitting among the ashes of dead lusts, highly approved of this scheme of Predestination. But a monk, Felix, when he heard it read, sprang to his feet and uttered his protest. This protest was reported to Augustine, who boiled over with bad temper at any opposition; and he wrote a violent rejoinder "On Grace and Freewill," in which he insisted again on his doctrine of Fatalism.
The theses of Augustine reached Lerins, the nursery of the Bishops of Gaul, and were read there with indignation and disgust. The monks drew up a reply to Augustine that was temperate in tone and sound in argument. Grace, they said, was mighty, but man had freewill, and could respond to it or rebel against it.
Augustine answered. He attempted to browbeat these insignificant monks and clergy on a petty islet in the sea. But they were not men to be intimidated by his great name and intellectual powers, not even by his sincere piety.
They argued that if his doctrine were true, then farewell for ever and a day to all teaching of Christian morality. Man was but a cloud, blown about by the wind, where the wind listed to carry it.
But for these stubborn monks of Lerins it is possible enough that Western Christendom would have accepted a kismet as fatal as that of Mohammedanism, and that, indeed, it would have differed in name and certain outside trimmings only from the Moslem religion. Rome was much inclined to accept Augustine's view, and give it definite sanction. But the Gaulish bishops, bred in the nursery of Lerins, would not hear of this. Finally, in the Council of Orange, in 529, they laid down the ​main principle: "We do not believe," they boldly said, "that God has predestined any men to be evil."
S. Patrick, the apostle of Ireland, was at one time a pupil at Lerins. The "Confessions of Augustine" are indeed a beautiful picture of the workings of a human soul; but not more tender and beautiful than that revelation of a noble heart given to us in the "Confession of Patrick."
Lerins—that is, especially Saint Honorat—was the refuge of the intellect, the science, the literature, of a civilised world going to pieces' into utter wreckage.
As Guizot well said:—
"For culture of mind, one thing is requisite, and that is quiet. When the social condition of the world is in convulsion, and all about is barbarity and misery, then study suffers, is neglected and declines. Taste for truth, the sentiment for what is beautiful, are plants as delicate as they are noble. For their cultivation a sweet atmosphere is necessary; they bow their heads and are blighted by storm. Study, literature, intellectual activity, could not battle against general discouragement, universal disaster; they must have a holdfast somewhere, attach themselves to popular convictions, or perish. The Christian religion furnished them with the means of living. By allying themselves to that, philosophy and literature were saved from the ruin that menaced them. One may say, without exaggeration, that the human mind, proscribed, storm-tossed, found its only possible refuge in churches and monasteries. It clung as a suppliant to the altars, and pleaded to be allowed to live under their shelter, and at their service, till better times should arrive, when they would expand in the open air."
La Napoule
The interesting fortress, with its cloister and quadrangle in the centre, was erected by the monks as a place of refuge from the Moors and Algerine pirates.
But worse times were in store, when the Crown came to look on the great abbeys as fiefs, to be given in commendam to laymen, to bastards, to favourites, to harlots, who might enjoy the revenues and ignore the duties. Naturally enough, in such a condition of affairs, Lerins declined. It became a place to which younger sons were relegated, vicious monks were banished; it was resolved into a bastille for evildoers, and sank to so low an ebb that, as a scandal, the abbey was suppressed the year before the Revolution came, and swept all monastic institutions away.
To the west of the Île Ste. Marguerite, in the sea pours up a copious spring of fresh water. When the surface of the sea is calm, the upflow can be easily distinguished by the undulations. There are other such springs in the Gulf of Jouan, near Antibes, also at the mouth of the Var; near the shore at Portissol, west of S. Nazaire; another again near Bandol. In 1838, a M. Bazin tapped this latter when sinking a well at Cadière, and such an abundance of water poured forth that the well had to be abandoned. Off Cassis is a very considerable spring in the sea, so strong that it carries floating bodies for a couple of miles from its source. But the largest of all is in the Gulf of Spezzia, and is called La Polla. This has been enclosed by the Italian government, and vessels supply themselves with fresh water from it.
The rain which falls on the limestone causses, that ​form the terrace to the Maritime Alps, is at once absorbed, and descends through fissures to deep channels, where the accumulated water flows and breaks forth in what are locally called ƒoux, often in large volume, and feed the rivers. Sometimes the streams drop into pot-holes; these are called embues. The Siagne has its source in the Place de la Caille, an ancient lake bed, but sinks, and comes forth 1,500 feet below in the ƒoux of the Siagne. This river receives the Siagnole, which derives its water from a number of these springs that spout out of the rock. But in some cases the rain-water sinks to a level still lower, and then breaks forth in the sea itself.
* ↑ A fantastic derivation. Actually, Arluc is By the Mere.
* ↑ Hopkins (Tighe) The Man in the Iron Mask, Lond. 1901.