Toulon was interesting to me as the place where Napoleon's career began. The fortifications are very imposing. We passed out of the town over the draw-bridge, and were again in the midst of a lovely landscape, with an air of bland and exhilarating softness, and everything that could delight the eye. The road runs along the shore of the Mediterranean, and the fields are green to the water edge.
We arrived at Antibes to-day at noon, within fifteen miles of the frontier of Sardinia. We have run through most of the south of France, and have found it all like a garden. The thing most like it in our country is the neighborhood of Boston, particularly the undulated country about Brookline and Dorchester. Remove all the stone fences from that sweet country, put here and there an old chateau on an eminence, and change the pretty white mock cottages of gentlemen, for the real stone cottages of peasantry, and you have a fair picture of the scenery of this celebrated shore. The Mediterranean should be added as a distance, with its exquisite blue, equalled by nothing but an American sky in a July noon--its crowds of sail, of every shape and nation, and the Alps in the horizon crested with snow, like clouds half touched by the sun. It is really a delicious climate. Out of the scorching sun the air is bracing and cool; and though my ears have been blistered in walking up the hills in a travelling cap, I have scarcely experienced an uncomfortable sensation of heat, and this in my winter dress, with flannels and a surtout, as I have worn them for the six months past in Paris. The air could not be tempered more accurately for enjoyment. I regret to go in doors. I regret to sleep it away.
_Antibes_ was fortified by the celebrated _Vauban_, and it looks impregnable enough to my unscientific eye. If the portcullises were drawn up, I would not undertake to get into the town with the full consent of the inhabitants. We walked around the ramparts which are washed by the Mediterranean, and got an appetite in the sea-breeze, which we would willingly have dispensed with. I dislike to abuse people, but I must say that the _cuisine_ of Madame Agarra, at the "Gold Eagle," is rather the worst I have fallen upon in my travels. Her price, as is usual in France, was proportionably exorbitant. My Irish friend, who is one of the most religious gentlemen of his country I ever met, came as near getting into a passion with his supper and bill, as was possible for a temper so well disciplined. For myself, having acquired only polite French, I can but "look daggers" when I am abused. We depart presently for _Nice_, in a ricketty barouche, with post-horses, the _courier_, or post-coach, going no farther. It is a roomy old affair, that has had pretensions to style some time since Henri Quatre, but the arms on its panels are illegible now, and the ambitious driving-box is occupied by the humble materials to remedy a probable break-down by the way. The postillion is cracking his whip impatiently, my friend has called me twice, and I must put up my pencil.