It is all very wonderful and, to the traveller who makes the trip for the first time or the hundredth, the beauties of the panorama which unfolds at every white kilometre stone is so totally different from that which he has just passed that he wonders if he is not journeying on some sort of a magic carpet which simply floats in space. Certainly there is no more beautiful view-point in all the world than that from the height overlooking Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Cap Martin, all bedded like jewels amid an inconceivable brilliancy and softness, a combination which seems paradoxical enough in print, but which in real life is quite the reverse, although it is ravishingly beautiful enough to be unreal. The twenty-franc excursionists from Nice are rushed out from town in the early morning, via “La Grande Corniche,” to Menton, and back in the early afternoon via the “Route du Bord du Mer,” at something like the speed that the _malle-poste_ of other days used to thread the great national roadways of France. Really the excursion is quite worth the money, and you _do_ cover the ground, but you cover it much too rapidly, and so do the speeding automobilists. By far the best way to drink in all the beauties of this delightful promenade is to devote a week to it, and do it on foot. Walking tours are not fashionable any more, and in many thousands of miles of travel by road in France, the writer has never so much as walked between neighbouring villages, but some day that promenade _au pied_ is going to be made on the “Corniche” between Nice and Menton, returning, as do the “trippers,” via the lower road through Monte Carlo, La Condamine, and Beaulieu. It is the only way to appreciate the artistic beauties, and the strategic value, of this great highway of a civilization of another day, whose life, if not as refined as that of the present, could hardly have been more dissolute than that which to-day goes on to some extent here in this playground of the world. One should make the journey out by the “Corniche” and back by the waterside, lunching at the _auberge_ at Eze off an anchovy or two, a handful of dried figs, and a flagon of thick, red, perfumed wine. Then he will indeed think life worth living, and regret that such things as railway trains, automobiles, and palace hotels ever existed. Beyond Nice the Corniche route toward Italy is ample and majestic throughout its whole course, though, as a whole, it is no more beautiful than that Corniche by the Estérel. It winds around Mont Gros, at the back of Nice, and reaches its greatest height just beyond the Auberge de la Drette. _En route_, at least after passing the Col des Quatre Chemins, there is that ever-present panorama of the Mediterranean blue which all Frenchmen, and most dwellers on its shores, and some others besides, consider the most beautiful bit of water in the world.