Ollioules itself is of far more attraction, to the lover of picturesque old streets and houses and crumbling historical monuments, than its gorge. The town bears still the true stamp of the middle ages, though the inhabitants will tell you that it has great hopes of becoming some day a popular resort like Nice, this being the future to which all the small Riviera towns aspire. Old vaulted streets, leaning porched houses, with enormous gables and delicately sculptured corbels and window-frames, give quite the effect of mediævalism to Ollioules, though a hooting tram from Toulon makes a false note which is for ever sounding in one’s ears. All the same, Ollioules, with the débris of its thirteenth-century château, its very considerable remains of city wall, and its _Place_, tree-shaded by high-growing palms, is a town to be loved, by one jaded with the round of resorts, for its many and varied old-world attractions. Ollioules is built in the open air, at the end of the defile or gorge, in the midst of a country glowing with all the splendour and beauty of endless beds of hyacinths and narcissi, flowers which rank among the most beautiful in all the world, and which here, in this corner of old Provence, grow as luxuriantly as heather on the hills of Scotland or tulips in Holland. Violets, poppies, the mimosa, and tuberoses are also here in abundance. Two hundred and fifty hectares, or more, in the immediate vicinity of Ollioules, are devoted to the culture of bulbs, and five million bulbs form an average crop, most of which is sent away by rail to Belgium, Holland (tell it not to a Dutchman), and England. The origin of the name of the town is peculiar, as indeed is the derivation of many place-names. Savants think that it comes from olearium, meaning a place where oil was made and stored. This may be so, but olive-oil does not figure any more among the products of this particular _petit pays_. Not only the rock-bound gorge but the whole basin of Ollioules is a wonderland of exotic and rare natural beauties. On one side, to the north, rise the volcanic heights of Evenos, crowned to-day with ruins which may be Saracenic, or _gallo-romain_, or prehistoric, perhaps,--it is impossible to tell. George Sand has written with great appreciation of the whole neighbouring region in “Tamaris,” but even her graphic pen has not been able to reproduce the charming and distinguished characteristics of a region which, even to-day, is little or not at all known to the great mass of tourists who annually rush to the Riviera resorts from all parts of America and Europe. “_Tant pis_,” then, as Sterne said, but the way is here made plain for any who would go slowly over this well-worn road of history and cast a glance up and down the cross-roads as he comes to them.