inated by the soft gray of the castle and abbey, is like a reflected cloud. Between Théoule and Cannes the railway crosses the viaduct of the Siagne. Through the arches one can see the golf-course on which an English statesman thought out the later phases of British Imperialism.

To the west, the Gulf of La Napoule ends in the pine-covered promontory of the Esquillon. Except for a very small beach in front of the Théoule hotel, the coast is rocky. From February to May our terrace outlook competed successfully with the war.

Young and old in Théoule have to make a daily effort to enjoy educational

and religious privileges. We wondered at first why the school and church were placed on the promontory, a good mile and a half from the town; but later we came to realize that this was a salutary measure. The climate is insidious. A daily antidote against laziness is needed. I was glad that I volunteered to take the children to school at eight and two, and go after them at eleven and four, and that they held me to it. In order to reach a passable route on the steep wall of rock and pine, the road built by the Touring Club de France makes a bend of two kilometers in the valley behind Théoule. By taking a footpath from the hotel, the pedestrian eliminates the bend in five minutes. In spite of curves, the road is continuously steep and keeps a heavy grade until it reaches the Pointe de l'Esquillon.

I never tired of the four times a day. Between the Villa Étoile and the town was the castle, built on the water's edge. After Louis XIV. it became a soap-factory, and was restored to its ancient dignity only recently. I ought not to say "dignity," for the restorer was a baron of industry, and his improvements are distressing. The entrance to the park created on the inner side of the road opposite the château is the result of landscape dentistry. The creator did not find that the natural rock lent itself to his fancies, and filled in the hollows with stones of volcanic origin. On the side of the hill, fountains

a

and pools and a truly massive flight of steps have been made. Scrawny firs are trying to grow where they ought not to. Quasi-natural urns overflow with captive flowers, geraniums and nasturtiums predominating. Ferns hang as gracefully as shirtings displayed in department-store window. Stone lions defy, and terra-cotta stags run away from, porcelain dogs. There are bowers and benches of imitation petrified wood. American money may be responsible for the château garden, but the villas of Théoule are all French. Modern French artistic genius runs to painting and clothes. There is none left for building or house-furnishing. French taste, as expressed in homes, inside and outside, is as bad as Prussian. We may admire mildly the monotonous symmetry of post-Haussmann Paris. When we get to the suburbs and to the provincial towns and to summer and winter resorts, we have to confess that architecture is a lost art in France. In America, especially in our cities, we have regret

table traces of mid-Victorianism, and we have to contend with Irish politicians and German contractors. In the suburbs and in the country, however, where Americans build their own homes, we have become accustomed to ideas of beauty that make the results of the last sixty years of European growth painful to us. Our taste in line, color, decoration, and interior furnishing is at hopeless variance with that of twentiethcentury Europe. We admire and we buy in Europe that which our European ancestors created. Our admirationand our buying-is confined strictly to Europe of the past. Present-day Europe displays German Schmuck from one end to the other-and France is no exception.

On the walk to school you soon get beyond the château and the villas. But even on the promontory there is more than the dodging of automobiles to remind one that this is the twentieth century. The Corniche de l'Esterel has been singled out by the moving-picture

men for playing out-of-door scenarios. When the sun is shining, a day rarely passes without film-making. The man with a camera has the rising road and bends around which the action can enter into the scene, the forest up and the forest down, the Mediterranean and

one met. Children go slowly, and squirrels and birds belong to nature. There was always time to breathe in the forest and the sea and to look across to the mountains. When cartables and goûters were handed over at the school gate parental responsibility ceased for three hours. One had the choice of going on around the point toward Trayas or down to the sea.

The people of Théoule say that Corsica, sixty miles away, can be seen from the Esquillon. All one has to do is to keep going day after day until "atmospheric conditions are favorable. The Touring Club has built a belvedere at the extremity of the Esquillon. Arrows on a dial indicate the direction of important places from Leghorn to Marseilles. The Apennines behind Florence, as well as Corsica, are marked as within the range of visibility. The Apennines had not been seen for years, but Corsica was liable to appear at any time. The first day the Artist went with me to the Esquillon an oldest inhabitant said that we had a Corsica day. A milkwoman en route reported Corsica in sight, and told us to hurry. Toward nine o'clock the sun raises a mist from the sea, she explained. In the belvedere we found a girl without a guide-book who had evidently come over from Trayas. over from Trayas. She was crouched down to dial level, and her eyes were following the Corsica arrow. She did not look up or move when we entered. Minutes passed. There was no offer to give us a chance. We coughed and shuffled, and the Artist sang "The Little Gray Home in the West." I informed the Artist-in French-that a specialist had

mountain and island and Cannes backgrounds. Automobile hold-ups with pistols barking, the man and the maid in the woods and on the terrace, the villain assaulting and the hero rescuing the defenseless woman, the heroine jumping from a rock into the sea, and clinging to an upturned boat-these are commonplace events on the Corniche de l'Esterel.

The world of cinemas and motors does not rise early. On the morning walk, children and squirrels and birds were all

once remarked upon my hyperopic powers, and that if Corsica were really in sight I could not fail to see it.

Not until she had to shake the cramp out of her back did the girl straighten

up.

"Corsica is invisible to-day," she announced.

,,

she

She

"Yes," I answered, sadly. "Ten minutes ago the mist began to come up. You know, sun upon water-" A look in her eyes made me hesitate. "And all that sort of thing," I ended, lamely. "Nonsense, said, briskly. surveyed the Artist from mustache to cane point and turned back to me. "You at least," she declared, "are American, but of the unpractical sort. And you are as unresourceful as you are ungallant, Monsieur. How do I know? Well, you were complaining about my monopolizing the dial. There is a map on the tiles under your feet, and a compass dangles uselessly from your watchchain. I wonder, too, if you are hyperopic. You know which is the Carlton Hotel over there in Cannes. Tell me how many windows there are across a floor." The atmosphere was wonderfully clear, and the Carlton stood out plainly, but I failed the test.

The girl laughed. I did not mind that. When the Artist started in I turned on him savagely. "Well, you count the Carlton windows," I said.

"No specialist ever told me I was hyperopic," he came back.

I had to save the day by answering

that I was glad to be myopic just now. Who wanted to see Corsica any longer? The girl knew interesting upper paths on the western side of the promontory. She had as much time as we, or rather, I must say regretfully, she and the Artist had more time than I. For eleven o'clock

ON THE ISLE ST. MARGUERITE

came quickly, and I hurried off to fulfil my parental duty. The Artist told me afterward that there was a fine cuisine at the Trayas restaurant.

I did think of my compass one day, for I had sore need for it; but, as generally happens in such cases, I was not wearing it. Between Théoule and La Napoule, the nearest town on the way to Cannes, a tempting forest road leads back into the valley. A sign states that

a curious view of a mountain peak, named after Marcus Aurelius, could be had by following the road for half a dozen kilometers. It was one of the things tourists did when they were visiting the Corniche for a day. ConseConsequently, when one was staying on the

be the big hill just behind the Villa Étoile. If, instead of retracing our steps toward La Napoule, we kept ahead and remembered to take the left at every cross path, we would come out at the place where the Corniche road made its big bend before mounting to the promontory. It was all so simple that it could not be otherwise. We were sure of the direction, and fairly sure of the distance, since we had left the motor road between Théoule and La Napoule.

Corniche, it was always an excursion of the morrow. During the Artist's first week we were walking over to Mandelieu to take the tram to Cannes one to Cannes one morning and suddenly decided that the last thing in the world for sensible folks to do was to go to Cannes on a day when the country was calling insistently. We turned in at the sign. After we had seen the view we thought that it would be possible to take a short cut back to Théoule. The wall of the valley that shut us off from the sea must certainly

There was an hour and a half before lunch. A lumber road followed the brook, and the brook skirted the hill beyond which was Théoule and the Villa Étoile. It was a day to swear by, and April flowers were in full bloom. It was delightful until we had to confess that the hill showed no intention of coming down to a valley on the left. Finally, at a point where a path went up abruptly from the stream, we decided that it would be best to cut over the summit of the hill and not wait until the Corniche road appeared before us. In

this way we would

avoid the walk back from the hotel to our villa, and come out in our own garden. But on the Riviera Nature has shown no care in placing her hills where they ought to be and in symmetrizing and limiting them. They go on indefinitely. So did we, until we came to feel that we would be like the soldiers of Xenophon once we spied the But the cry "Thalassa!" was denied us. Eventually we turned back and tried keeping the hill on the right. This was as perplexing as keeping it on the left had been. A pair of famished explorers, hungry enough to eat canned

sea.