| NICE. The "Collinettes", a wooded hill with olive trees and oleanders, have always been the favorite neighborhood of Nice for artists. The Villa des Ravenelles, where Guy de Maupassant came to see his mother, is at the foot of these hanging gardens, dominating the horizon stained by the blue of the motionless sea. Halfway up the Collinettes, the clear facade of Jules Chéret's house smiles behind the curtain of palms and the flames of the cypresses. A little higher up, in a true Virgilian setting, you can see the pink "villino" where the painter Luminais, a precursor of Cormon, died. Finally, at the very top of this hill, crowned with light and azure, stands the "charterhouse" of Louis Bertrand, a discreet worker's retreat as if set on the edge of the air and where the author of "Saint-Augustin" and "Cina" wrote most of his books. To the right, on the Nice side, the trees are falling to make way for "palaces". Tomorrow, where there were groves of oleanders, tenement houses will rise. The noise of the pickaxe and the din of the building sites frightened the artists who delightedly prolonged their vacation in this Eden-like setting. The first, Jules Chéret, left for the heights of Mont-Boron. Louis Bertrand will take his writing desk elsewhere, and it is said that Maurice Maeterlinck has decided to sell "The Bees" and return to Ghent. |
