Leaving Théoule, the coast road continues to La Napoule, but, properly speaking, the “Corniche” ends at Théoule. Throughout its whole length it is a wonderfully varied and attractive route to the popular Riviera towns, and one could hardly do better, if he has journeyed from the north by train, than to leave the cars at Fréjus or St. Raphaël and make the journey eastward via the Corniche d’Or. If he does this, as likely as not he will find some delightful beauty-spot which will appeal to him as far more attractive than a Cannes or Nice boarding-house, where the gossip is the same sort of thing that one gets in Bloomsbury or on Beacon Hill. The thing is decidedly worth the trying, and the suggestion is here given for what it may be worth to the reader. CHAPTER VII. LA NAPOULE AND CANNES La Napoule is known chiefly to those birds of passage who annually hibernate at Cannes as the end of a six-mile constitutional which the doctors advise their patients to take as an antidote to overfeeding and “tea-fights.” In reality it is much more than this; it is one of the most charmingly situated of all the Riviera coast towns, and has a history which dates back to a fourteenth-century fortress, built by the Comté de Villeneuve, a tower of which stands to-day as a part of the more modern château which rises back of the town. [Illustration: _On the Golfe de la Napoule_] French residents on the Riviera have a popular tradition that Lord Brougham originally made overtures to the municipality of Fréjus when he was seeking to found an English colony on the Riviera. Whatever his advances may have been, they were promptly spurned by the town, and England’s chancellor forthwith turned his steps toward Italy, whither he had originally been bound. Suddenly he came upon the ravishing outlook over the Golfe de la Napoule, and the charms of this lovely spot so impressed him that he fell a prey to their winsomeness forthwith and decided that if he could find a place where the inhabitants were at all in favour of a peaceful English invasion, he would throw the weight of his influence in their favour. He travelled the country up and down and threaded the highways and byways for a distance of fifty kilometres in every direction until finally he decided that Cannes, on the opposite side of the Golfe, should have his approval. Thus the Riviera, as it is known by name to countless thousands to-day, was born as a popular English resort, and soon Cannes became the “_ville élégante_,” replacing the little “_bourg de pêche_” of a former day.