icial breakwater
with no Alps behind than a natural harbor with a Cap Ferrat.

Occasionally a huge ocean liner, chartered by an American tourist
agency for an Eastern Mediterranean tour, drops into Villefranche
roadstead. These chance visits, to give the tourists a day at Nice and
Monte Carlo, demonstrate that Villefranche could be a port of call for
the leviathans, commercial and naval, of the twentieth century. How
much easier it would be to go to the Riviera directly from London and
New York, instead of having a wearisome train journey added to the
ocean voyage! But freights pay a large part of passenger rates, and
the routing from great port to great port is as rigid and unalterable
as the fact that a straight line is not the shortest distance between
two points on land. Trains and ships must pass by way of great centers
of population.

A naval cemetery is the memorial of Villefranche's naval past in the
last brilliant decade of the Second Empire and the early years of the
Third Republic. A little American corner, which our Paris Memorial Day
Committee never forgets, bears witness to the period when the American
flag was known everywhere in the Mediterranean. We used to have the
lion's share of the carrying trade, and Villefranche was a frequent
port of call for American warships. Now we have rarely even single
warships or freighters in the Mediterranean. The only American
passenger line that serves Mediterranean ports is the old Turkish Hadji
Daoud Line of five small and dirty Levantine ships, which ply along the
coast of Asia Minor and in and out of the Greek islands, camouflaged
under our flag.

The old town of Villefranche is on the western side of the harbor
between the Petite Corniche and the water. Like all Riviera towns on a
main road it has grown rapidly and medieval streets and buildings have
almost disappeared, giving way to the banal architecture of the end of
the nineteenth century. The garish brick villas of the head of the
gulf are excrescences in their lovely garden setting. But after one
has reached the eastern side of the harbor and gone through Font Saint
Jean, the tramway road, with its noise and dust and variegated
bourgeois fantasies, can be abandoned.

[Illustration: Medieval streets and buildings have almost disappeared.]

If we except Cap Martin, no Riviera walks are lovelier than those of
Cap Ferrat. On the Villefranche side, until you have passed through
Saint Jean, the a