The chapel was rebuilt, and when given to the abbey of S. Victor at Marseilles, was dedicated to S. Cassien. The fête is on July 23rd; religious services take place in the morning and a pleasure fair and merrymaking in the afternoon.
A pretty watering place is La Napoule, that once enjoyed a prosperity of which Cannes had no thought. It was the Roman station Ad Horea, where vast stores of provisions were collected in magazines, for transmission to the troops. The name Napoule has been supposed to be the same as Naples, Neapolis, signifying the New Town, but no text gives colour to this derivation, and it is more probable that La Napoule comes from Epulia, _Provisions_, as it was a store place; excavations made there when the railway was in construction laid bare immense underground magazines and granaries, divided systematically into compartments by pillars, and vaulted. These were originally well ventilated. Remains of Roman constructions may still be seen by the shore, and although no mention is made in the Itinerary of Antoninus of a port there, it cannot be doubted that there was one for the disembarkation or embarkation of stores.
The little feudal castle built on Roman substructures was wrecked by the Saracen corsairs in the thirteenth century. The present village of Napoule is tenanted by poor fishermen, but it is likely to look up as a bathing place, and as a centre for excursions into the Estérel. The tower is all that remains of a castle of the Counts of Villeneuve. The rocks in the bay, beaten by the sea, have assumed fantastic shapes; being of sandstone, they are not like porphyry, too hard to resist the erosion of the sea.
And La Napoule, facing east, sees how that,—
“The eastern gate, all fiery red, Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams, Turns into yellow gold his salt-green streams.”
Another old place that fell into decay, but which has in it now hopes of renovation, is Antibes. This was the Greek Antipolis, the town _over against_ Nicæa, at the farther side of the bay.
Almost all of the monuments bearing Greek inscriptions that have been found in such numbers in Provence belong to a date after the Roman annexation. But this is not the case with regard to a curious inscription discovered at Antibes on a black boulder, egg-shaped, of diorite, a kind of basalt. This stone had no shaping given to it by the hand of man, but on it was cut in archaic characters, this inscription:—