Of Cannes itself, marvelous product of this gad-about and commercial age, how shall the truthful chronicler speak with becoming respect and becoming dignity? For Cannes has its faults. Truly a wonderful place is that cosmopolitan winter resort. Rococo châteaux, glorious gardens of palm-trees, imitation Moorish villas, wooden châlets from the scene-painter's ideal Switzerland, Elizabethan mansions stuck in Italian grounds, lovely groves of mimosa, eucalyptus, and judas-trees, all mingle together in so strange and incongruous a picture that one knows not when to laugh, when to weep, when to admire, when to cry "Out on it!" Imagine a conglomeration of two or three white-faced Parisian streets, interspersed with little bits of England, of Brussels, of Algiers, of Constantinople, of Pekin, of Bern, of Nuremberg and of Venice, jumbled side by side on a green Provençal hillside before a beautiful bay, and you get modern Cannes; a Babel set in Paradise; a sort of _boulevardier_ Bond Street, with a view across blue waves to the serrated peaks of the ever lovely Estérel. Nay; try as it will, Cannes cannot help being beautiful. Nature has done so much for it that art itself, the debased French art of the Empire and the Republic, can never for one moment succeed in making it ugly; though I am bound to admit it has striven as hard as it knew for that laudable object. But Cannes is Cannes still, in spite of Grand Dukes and landscape gardeners and architects. And the Old Town, at least, is yet wholly unspoilt by the speculative builder. Almost every Riviera watering-place has such an old-world nucleus or kernel of its own, the quaint fisher village of ancient days, round which the meretricious modern villas have clustered, one by one, in irregular succession. At Cannes the Old Town is even more conspicuous than elsewhere; for it clambers up the steep sides of a little seaward hillock, crowned by the tower of an eleventh century church, and is as picturesque, as gray, as dirty, as most other haunts of the hardy Provençal fisherman. Strange, too, to see how the two streams of life flow on ever, side by side, yet ever unmingled. The Cannes of the fishermen is to this day as unvaried as if the new cosmopolitan winter resort had never grown up, with its Anglo-Russian airs and graces, its German-American frivolities, round that unpromising center.