Читать книгу The Riviera of the Corniche Road - Sir Frederick Treves - Страница 9

NICE: THE OLD TERRACES.

The author of a French guide book suggests that the visitor should attend the Carnival “at least once.” He makes this proposal with evident diffidence. He owns that the affair is one of animation incroyable, that the streets are occupied by une cohue de gens en délire and recommends the pleasure seeker to carry no valuables, to wear no clothes that are capable of being spoiled, no hat that would suffer from being bashed in, and to remember always that the dust is énorme.

Those who like a rollicking crowd, hustling through streets a-flutter with a thousand flags and hung with festoons by the kilometre, and those who have a passion for throwing things at other people might go even more than once. They will see in the procession much that is ludicrous, grotesque and puerile, an exaggerated combination of a circus car parade and a native war dance, as well as a display of misapplied decoration of extreme ingenuity.

On the other hand, the flower lover should escape to the mountains and hide until the days of the Carnival are over, and with him might go any who would prefer a chaplet of violets on the head of a girl to a laundry basket full of peonies on the bonnet of a motor.

On that side of the old town which borders upon the sea are relics which illustrate the more frivolous mood of Nice as it was expressed before the building of the Promenade des Anglais. These relics show in what manner the visitor to Nice in those far days sought joy in life. Parallel to the beach is the Cours Saleya, a long, narrow, open space shaded by trees. It was at one time a fashionable promenade, comparable to the Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells. It is now a flower and vegetable market. On the ocean side of this Cours are two lines of shops, very humble and very low. The roofs of these squat houses are level and continuous and so form two terraces running side by side and extending for a distance of 800 feet.

These are the famous Terrasses where the beaus and the beauties of Nice promenaded, simpered, curtsied or bowed, and when this walk by the shore was vowed to be “monstrous fine, egad.”^[1] The terraces are now deserted, are paved with vulgar asphalt and edged by a disorderly row of tin chimneys. On one side, however, of this once crowded and fashionable walk are a number of stone benches, on which the ladies sat, received their friends, and displayed their Paris frocks. The terrace is as uninviting as a laundry drying ground and these grey, melancholy benches alone recall the fact that the place once rippled with colour and sparkled with life as if it were the enclosure at Ascot.

[1]	The first of these terraces was completed in 1780 and the second one in 1844.