Being
Especially Exasperated Against What He Regarded As The Treachery
Of Victor Amadeus), And The Razing To The Ground Of Its Famous
Citadel.
The city henceforth lost a good deal of its civic
dignity, and its morale was conspicuously impaired.
In the war of
the Austrian succession an English fleet under Admiral Matthews
was told off to defend the territory of the Nicois against the
attentions of Toulon. This was the first close contact
experienced between England and Nice, but the impressions formed
were mutually favourable. The inhabitants were enthusiastic about
the unaccustomed English plan of paying in full for all supplies
demanded. The British officers were no less delighted with the
climate of Nice, the fame of which they carried to their northern
homes. It was both directly and indirectly through one of these
officers that the claims of Nice as a sanatorium came to be put
so plainly before Smollett. [Losing its prestige as a ville
forte, Nice was henceforth rapidly to gain the new character of a
ville de plaisir. In 1763, says one of the city's historians,
Smollett, the famous historian and novelist, visited Nice.
"Arriving here shattered in health and depressed in spirits,
under the genial influence of the climate he soon found himself a
new man. His notes on the country, its gardens, its orange
groves, its climate without a winter, are pleasant and just and
would seem to have been written yesterday instead of more than a
hundred years ago. . . . His memory is preserved in the street
nomenclature of the place; one of the thoroughfares still bears
the appellation of Rue Smollett." (James Nash, The Guide to Nice,
1884, p. 110.)]
Among other celebrated residents at Nice during the period of
Smollett's visit were Edward Augustus, Duke of York, the brother
of George III., who died at Monaco a few years later, and Andre
Massena, a native of the city, then a lad of six.
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