It was from just such fortified heights as this that the Saracens were able to command all Provence and the valley of the Rhône up to the Jura. Concerning these far-away times, and the exact movements of the Saracens, historians are not very precise, and a good deal has to be taken on faith; but where monuments were left behind to tell the story, albeit they were mostly fortresses, enough has come down to allow one to build up a fabric which will give a more or less just view of the extent of the Saracen influence which swept over southern Gaul from the eighth to the tenth centuries. They made one of their greatest strongholds here on the Pic du Fraxinet (“the place planted with _frênes_”), and, in spite of the fact that they were sooner or later driven from their position, as history does tell in this case, their descendants, becoming Christians, were the ancestors of the present growers of mulberry-trees and cork-oaks, and tenders of silk-worms, which form the principal occupations of the inhabitants of La Garde-Freinet to-day. Any one, with the least eye for the fair sex, will note the fact that the women of La Garde-Freinet--the _Fraxinétaines_ of the ethnologists--have a unique kind of beauty greatly to be admired. They are not as beautiful as the women of Arles, to whom the palm must always be given among the women of France; but they are well-formed, with beautiful hair, great, liquid black eyes, oval faces, and plump, well-formed arms, justifying, even to-day, the beauty which they are supposed to have acquired from their Moorish ancestors. There are no monuments at La Garde-Freinet except the ruined, dominant fortress, but for all that the pilgrimage is one worth the making, if only for glimpses of those wonderfully beautiful women, or for the delightful journey thither. From La Foux and Grimaud one rapidly advances toward the Estérel, that sheltering range of reddish, rocky mountains which makes Cannes and La Napoule what they are. St. Tropez and its tall white houses are left behind, and the shores of the Golfe are followed until one comes to the most ancient town of Ste. Maxime. Unlike St. Tropez, Ste. Maxime, though only thirty minutes away by boat, across the mouth of the Golfe, has not the penetrating mistral for a scourge. On the other hand one does get the sun in his eyes when he wishes to view the sea, and has not that magically coloured curtain of the Estérel, with all its varied reds and browns, before his eyes. One cannot have everything as he wishes, even on the Riviera. If he has the view, he often has also the mistral; and, if he finds a place that is really sheltered from the mistral, it has a more or less restricted view, and a climate which the doctors and invalids call “relaxing,” whatever that arbitrary term may mean.