Italians met at the foot of the Maritime Alps. There was never a time
in history when governmental systems or political unities did not have
as a goal natural boundaries, and, once having reached the goal, did
not feel that security necessitated going farther. Invasions thus
provoked counter-invasions.

On sea it has been as on land. Something is acquired. Immediately
something more must be taken to safeguard the new acquisition.

All this comes to one with peculiar force at Antibes. You look at Nice
from your promontory, and your eye follows the coast from promontory to
promontory, and you can picture how the Phoceans, once established at
Antibes, were tempted to extend the protective system of Marseilles.
You have only to turn around and follow the coast beyond the Esterel to
understand how the Ligurians, if they had captured Antibes, would still
have felt unsafe. And then your eye sweeps the range of the white
Maritime Alps. Hannibal had to cross them to carry the war into Italy.
So did Napoleon. And Caesar, to save the Republic from a recurrence of
the menace of the Cimbri and Teutoni, brought his armies into Gaul.
The Saracens were once on this coast. When they were expelled from it,
the French went to Africa as the Romans before them had gone to Africa
after expelling the Carthaginians from Europe.

Of the medieval fortress, erected against the Saracens, two square
keeps remain. The strategic importance of Antibes during the heyday of
the Bourbon Empire is attested by the Vauban fortifications. The high
loopholed walls enclosing the harbor have not been maintained intact,
but the foundation, a pier over five hundred feet long, is still, after
two centuries and a half, the breakwater. The view towards Nice from
Vauban's Fort Carre or from the larger tower, around which the church
is built, affords the best panorama of the Maritime Alps on the
Riviera. Nowhere else on the Mediterranean coast, except from Beirut
to Alexandretta or on the Silician plain or in the Gulf of Saloniki, do
you have so provoking a contrast of nearby but unattainable snow with
sizzling heat. This may not be always true. The day of the aeroplane,
as a common and matter-of-fact means of locomotion, is coming.

Looking towards the Alps from the Fort Carre, the donjon of
Villeneuve-Loubet and the hill towns of Cagnes and Saint-Paul-du-Var,
where we had passed happy days, seem as near as Nice. Farther off on
the slope of Mont F