road opposite the chateau 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 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 a 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 chateau garden, but the
villas of Theoule 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 regrettable 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 twentieth-century
Europe. We admire and we buy in Europe that which our European
ancestors created. Our admiration--and 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 chateau 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 mountain