e you may hate yourself for
wanting noise and lights, while you may still affect to despise the
herding instinct, you find yourself quite willing to commune with
nature a little less intimately than in the first enthusiastic days of
your escape from the whirl and the turmoil of your accustomed
atmosphere. Not that Cannes is ever exactly "whirl and turmoil;" but
you could have tea at Rumpelmayer's, you could dance and listen to
music and see shows at the Casino, and you could look in shop windows.
On the terrace of the Villa Etoile we thanked God that we were out in
the country, and we loved our walks on the Corniche road and back into
the Esterel. But it was a comfort to have Cannes so near! We were not
dependent upon the twice-a-day _omnibus_ train, which made all the
stops between Marseilles and Nice. An hour and a half of brisker
walking than one would have cared to indulge in farther east on the
Riviera took us to Cannes, and the _cochers_ were always reasonable
about driving out to Theoule in the evening.

From our villa to La Napoule we were still in the Esterel. Then we
crossed the mouth of the Siagne by a bridge, and came down to the sea
on the Boulevard Jean Hibert. Between the mouth of the Siagne and Mont
Chevalier are the original villas of Cannes and the hotels of the
Second Empire. Here Lord Brougham built the Villa Eleonore Louise in
1834, when Cannes was a fishing village, not better known than any
other hamlet along the coast. Here are the Chateau Vallombrosa (now
the Hotel du Pare), the Villa Larochefoucauld and the Villa Rothschild,
whose unrivaled gardens are shut off by high walls and shrubbery. They
are well worth a visit: but you must know when and how to get into
them. As you near Mont Chevalier, the sea wall, no longer needed to
protect the railway (which for a couple of miles had to run right on
the sea to avoid the grounds and villas laid out before it was dreamed
of), recedes for a few hundred feet and leaves a beach.

On Mont Chevalier is the Old Town, grouped around a ruined castle and
an eleventh-century tower. The parish church is of the thirteenth
century. The buildings on the quay below, facing the port, are of the
middle of the nineteenth century. But they look much older. For they
were built by townspeople, and serve the needs of the small portion of
the population which would be living in Cannes if it were not a
fashionable watering place. Despite its marvelous growth,