ose tower on the sea rose a hill crowned with the
ruins of a chapel. Behind were the Maritime Alps."

RIVIERA TOWNS

CHAPTER I

GRASSE

For several months I had been seeing Grasse every day. The atmosphere of
the Midi is so clear that a city fifteen miles away seems right at hand.
You can almost count the windows in the houses. Against the rising
background of buildings every tower stands out, and you distinguish one
roof from another. From my study window at Theoule, Grasse was as
constant a temptation as the two islands in the Bay of Cannes. But the
things at hand are the things that one is least liable to do. They are
reserved for "some day" because they can be done "any day." Since first
coming to Theoule, I had been a week's journey south of Cairo into the
Sudan, and to Verdun in an opposite corner of France. Menton and St.
Raphael, the ends of the Riviera, had been visited. Grasse, two hours
away, remained unexplored.

I owe to the Artist the pleasure of becoming acquainted with Grasse. One
day a telegram from Bordeaux stated that he had just landed, and was
taking the train for Theoule. The next evening he arrived. I gave him
my study for a bedroom. The following morning he looked out of the
window, and asked, "What is that town up there behind Cannes, the big one
right under the mountains?"

"Grasse, the home of perfumes," I answered.

"I don't care what it's the home of," was his characteristic response.
"Is it old and all right?" ("All right" to the Artist means "full of
subjects.")

"I have never been there," I confessed.

The Artist was fresh from New York. "We'll go this morning," he
announced.

From sea to mountains, the valley between the Corniche de l'Esterel and
Nice produces every kind of vegetation known to the Mediterranean
littoral. Memories of Spain, Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor,
Greece and Italy are constantly before you. But there is a difference.
The familiar trees and bushes and flowers of the Orient do not spring
here from bare earth. Even where cultivated land, wrested from the
mountain sides, is laboriously terraced, stones do not predominate.
Earth and rock are hidden by a thick undergrowth of grass and creepers
that defies the sun, and draws from the nearby mountain snow a perennial
supply of water. Olive and plane, almond and walnut, orange and lemon,
cedar and cork, palm and umbrella-pine, grape-vine and flower-bush have
not the monopoly