Between the town and the sea is an immense rocky wall known as Les Ribbes, with a picturesque cascade rippling down its flank. From its apex Napoleon, escaping from Elba, arrested his flight long enough to turn and--in the words of his best-known historian--“_contemplate the immense panorama which unrolled before his eyes, and salute for the last time the Mediterranean and the mountains of La Corse, which he was never again to see_.” The assertion “_voir La Corse_,” in the original, was not a figure of speech, for under certain conditions of wind and weather the same is possible to-day. A half a dozen kilometres to the eastward of Grasse the highroad crosses the river Loup, and one sees a semicircular town before him known as Villeneuve-Loubet. The town has hotels and all the faint echoes of the watering-places of the coast. This is a pity, for it is delightful, or was, before all this up-to-dateness came. Its château, still proudly rearing its head above the town, was built in the twelfth century by the Comtes de Provence. The primitive town was called Loubet, a corruption of the name of the river which bathes its walls. Before even the days of the occupation of the Comtes de Provence, as early as the seventh century, there was a monastery here known by the name of Notre Dame la Dorée, of which scanty remains are visible even to-day. Owing to various Mussulman incursions, the occupants of the monastery were forced to flee to the protection of the château, and soon the “_Ville-neuve_” was created, ultimately forming the hyphenated name by which the place is known to-day. Still onward, on the road to Nice, is Cagnes, a sort of economical overflow from the more aristocratic resort, with few advantages to-day as an abiding-place, and most of the disadvantages of the larger city. There are tooting trams, automobile garages, and shops for the sale of many of the minor wants of life, which in former times one had to walk the ten or a dozen kilometres into Nice to get. The automobile is a very good thing for touring, but, as a perambulator in which to “run down to the village,” it is much overrated and a confirmed nuisance to every one; and Cannes suffers from this more than any other place in France, unless it be Giverny on the Seine, the most overautomobiled town in the world,--one to every score of inhabitants. Once Cagnes bid fair to become an artists’ resort, but it became overrun with “tea and toast” tourists, and so it just missed becoming a Pont Aven or a Barbizon. For all that, it is a picturesque enough place to-day; indeed, it is delightful, and if it were not for the automobiles everywhere about, and that awful tram, it would be even more so. However, its little artists’ hotel was, and is, able to make up for a good deal that is otherwise lacking, and the sawmills, brick-works, and distilleries of the neighbourhood are not offensive enough to take away all of its sylvan charm.