« It was in 1839 that I first came to this country (...); this delicious Cannet, so well tucked away, so warm. Nestled in its bed of lemon and orange trees, with its terraced houses (...), it had everything of a Sardinian or Corsican village.»

Victorien Sardou was 8 years old when he first came to stay in the family house, the fifth in the road that bears his name. Captivated by the atmosphere, the colours and the light unique to Le Cannet that Bonnard found so inspiring, he was one of the many celebrities to leave their stamp on the Cannet way if life.

A member of one of the founding families of Le Cannet, he was born in Paris in 1831. First a medical student, then a tutor in philosophy, mathematics and history, he made his literary début by collaborating with magazines and encyclopaedias. After producing one play that turned out to be a failure, he abandoned the theatre until his marriage to Mademoiselle Brécourt in 1858. One year later he finally met with success with "Les premières armes du Figaro" (The first weapons of Figaro). He produced over 40 other plays – including the famous "Madame sans-gêne" (The shameless woman) and "Tosca" – for which he was elected to the Académie Française in 1877.

Throughout his life he regularly went to stay at Le Cannet, and produced many descriptions of it.
(...) It could only be accessed in the days of my childhood by the old road, long since forgotten. It followed a vale that still exists, unto Sainte-Catherine, leaving on its right first the old chapel, that has been in ruins for as long as I can remember, and its great withered fig tree that used to be lush and green; then uncle Jean's aqueducts which rivalled the Roman ones in my eyes. At the church, the road's name changed to "la Calade", a narrow street, one of the country's great arteries, one that a cart entered with the greatest caution. My grandfather's house was, and still is in "la Calade"; that's where I went to sleep, on Saturday evenings, in order to spend Sundays in Le Cannet.

Having mentioned in some of his notes the Danys Tower and Tour de la placette – in which his great-uncle distinguished himself in 1706 by sounding the alarm and thus preventing the village from being plundered – he said: "Le Cannet did not only possess its orange trees, that suffered so badly last winter, and cassia, that only flowered there. It had its monuments. It still has them. Two towers: the Danys Tower, known by Mérimée as the "Tour des brigands" and the Tour de la Placette. I mentioned two monuments, but there is a third: how could I forget the house of my cousin Jean-Jacques. The Villa Sardou was long ago lost amongst the orange trees and difficult to access, bordered by a stream the proximity of which was not always pleasant."