ROQUEBRUNE is very old. It can claim a lineage so ancient that the first stirrings of human life among the rocks on which it stands would appear to the historian as a mere speck in the dark hollow of the unknown. Roquebrune has been a town since men left caves and forests and began to live in dwellings made by hands. It can boast that for long years it was—with Monaco and Eze—one of the three chief sea towns along this range of coast. Its history differs in detail only from the history of any old settlement within sight of the northern waters of the Mediterranean. The Pageant of Roquebrune unfolds itself to the imagination as a picturesque march of men with a broken hillside as a background and a stone stair as a processional way. Foremost in the column that moves across the stage would come the vague figure of the native searching for something to eat; then the shrewd Phœnician would pass searching for something to barter and then the staid soldierly Roman seeking for whatever would advance the glory of his imperial city. They all in turn had lived in Roquebrune. [Illustration: ROQUEBRUNE, SHOWING THE CASTLE.] As the Pageant progressed there would pass by the hectoring Lombard, the swarthy Moor, a restless band of robber barons and pirate chiefs, a medley of mediæval men-at-arms and a cluster of lords and ladies with their suites. They all in turn had lived in Roquebrune. Finally there would mount the stair the shopkeeper and the artisan of to-day, who would reach the foot of Roquebrune in a tramcar. This Pageant of Roquebrune would impress the mind with the great antiquity of man, with his ceaseless evolution through the ages with an ever-repeated change in face, in speech, in bearing and in garb. Yet look! Above the housetops of the present town a company of swifts is whirling with a shrill whistle like that of a sword swishing through the air. They, at least, have remained unchanged. They hovered over the town before the Romans came. They have seen the Saracens, the troopers of Savoy, the Turkish bandits, the soldiers of Napoleon. Age after age, it would seem, they have been the same, the same happy birds, the same circle of wings, the same song in the air. On the rock too are bushes of rosemary—“Rosemary for remembrance.” The little shrub with its blue flower has also seen no change. The caveman knew it when he first wandered over the hill with the curiosity of a child. The centurion picked a bunch of it to put in his helmet. The pirate of six hundred years ago slashed at it with his cutlass as he passed along and the maiden of to-day presses it shyly upon her parting lover. In the Pageant of Roquebrune man is, indeed, the new-comer, the upstart, the being of to-day, the creature that changes. The swifts, the rosemary and the hillside belong to old Roquebrune.