Page:Book of the Riviera.djvu/112

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86
THE RIVIERA

rotten rags. All the filthy and decayed scraps of clothing cast by the Neapolitan peasantry are carried in boats to the coast and are eagerly bought as manure.

At Hyères, moreover, we come on the orange and the lemon. The orange was originally imported from China into Spain, and thence passed to Italy and the Riviera. Oranges are said to live four or five hundred years. S. Dominic planted one in the garden at Sta. Sabina, at Rome, in 1200, that still flourishes. Hale and fruitbearing also is that at Fondi, planted by Thomas Aquinas in 1278. Nevertheless, it is certain that old orange-trees have disappeared from Hyères. Whether they were killed by the severe winter of 1864, or whether by a disease, is doubtful. The trees one sees now are none of them ancient, and do not attain a height above nine feet. The name orange comes from the Sanskrit, and the Portuguese, who introduced the orange to Europe, borrowed the name from the Hindus. In 1516 Francis I. was present during a naval sham fight at Marseilles, where oranges were used as projectiles. Oranges had been grown sufficiently long at Hyères to have attained a great size in the sixteenth century, for when there, Charles IX., his brother the Duke of Anjou, and the King of Navarre, by stretching their hands, together hooped round the trunk of one tree that bore 14,000 oranges. Thereupon was cut in the bark, "Caroli regis amplexu glorior." But there are no such orange-trees as that now at Hyères. Probably that was of a more hardy nature and of inferior quality to the orange-tree now grown. In fact, the present strain of oranges cultivated is a late importation, not earlier than about 1848. When a horticulturist of Marseilles imported it, it was next brought to Bordighera; from thence it passed to San