A few years ago an Englishman who had lived our neighbor in the same
villa at San Remo, came and said that he was going away because it was
so dull at San Remo. He was going with his wife to Monte Carlo, because
you could find amusement every day in the week at the tables of the
different games of chance, and Sundays there was a very nice little
English church. He did not seem to think there was anything out of the
way in his grouping of these advantages, but he did not strongly urge
them upon us, and we restricted ourselves in turn to our tacit
reflections on the indifference of the English to a point of morals on
which the American conscience is apt to suffer more or less anguish if
it offends. So far as I know they do not think it wrong to take money
won at any game; but possibly their depravity in this matter rather
comforted us than offended. At any rate, I am sure of the superiority of
our own morals in visiting Monte Carlo after we left Genoa. If we did
not look forward with our Englishman's complacency to the nice little
church there, we certainly did not mean to risk our money at the tables
of Roulette, nor yet at the tables of Trente et Quarante, in the Casino.
What we really wished to do was to look on in the spiritual security of
saints while the sinners of both sexes lost and gained to the equal hurt
of their souls. We perhaps expected to hear the report of a pistol in
the gardens of the Casino, if we did not actually see the ruined gambler
falling among the flowers, or if not so much as this, we thought we
might witness his dramatic despair as the croupier drew in the last
remnant of his fortune and mechanically invited the other Messieurs and
Mesdames to make their game; secretly, we might even have been willing
to see something hysterical on the part of the Mesdames if fate frowned
upon them, or something scandalously exuberant if it smiled. If our
motives were not the worst, they were, at any rate, not the best; I
suppose they were the usual human motives, and I am afraid they were
mixed.
We found it rather long from Genoa to Monte Carlo, but this was not so
much because of the distance as because of the delays of our train,
which, having started late, grew reckless on the way, and before we
reached the Italian frontier at Ventimiglia, had lost all shame and
failed to connect there with the French train for the rest of our
journey. So, instead of having barely time to affirm our innocence of
tobacco, spirits, or perfumes to the customs officers, and to wash down
a sandwich with a cup of coffee at the restaurant, we had an hour and
forty minutes at Ventimiglia, which I partly spent in vain attempts to
buy the poverty of the inspector so far as to prevail with him not to
delay the examination of our baggage, but to proceed to it at once, in
order that we might have it all off our minds, and devote our long
leisure to the inquiry by what steps the ancient Ligurian tribe of the
Intemelii lost their name in its actual corruption of Ventimiglia. It is
a charming old town, far more charming than the stranger who never has
time to walk into it from the station can imagine, and there is a
palm-bordered avenue leading from the railway to the sea, with the shops
and cafes of Italy on one side and the shops and cafes of France on the
other. So late as six o'clock in the evening those cafes and shops
preserved a reciprocal integrity which I could not praise too highly,
but after dark there must be a ghostly interchange of forbidden
commodities among them which no force of customs officers could wholly
suppress. At any rate, I should have liked to see them try it, though I
should not have liked to be kept in Ventimiglia overnight for any less
reason; it seemed a lonesome place, though mighty picturesque, with old
walls, and a magnificent old fort toward the sea, and a fine bridge
spanning, though for the moment superfluously spanning, the perfectly
dry bed of a river.
I wished to ask what the name of the river was, but out of all the files
of people coming and going I chose an aged man who could not tell me; he
excused himself with real regret on the ground that he was a stranger in
those parts. Then there was nothing for me to do but go back to the
station and renew my attempt on the inspector, who still remained proof
against me. What added to the hardship of the situation was that it was
Italy at one end of the station and France at the other, and in one
extremity it was an hour earlier than it was at the other, by the time
of Central Europe at the east and by the time of Paris at the west, so
that I do not know but we were two hours and forty minutes at
Ventimiglia instead of one hour and forty minutes. Of this period little
could be employed at tea, and we were not otherwise hungry; we could
give something of our interminable leisure to counting our baggage and
suffering unfounded alarms at failing to make it come out right, but we
could not give much.
The weather had turned chilly, the long station was full of draughts,
and the invalid of the party, without whom no American party is
perfectly national, was rapidly taking cold. We were quite incredulous
when the examination actually began, but at last it really did, and it
began with our pieces, with such a show of favoring us on the
inspector's part, that when it was over, in about two minutes, one trunk
serving as a type of the innocence of all, I furtively held up a piece
of five francs in recognition of his kindness. But he slowly shook his
head, whether in regret or whether in stern refusal I shall never know.
He was an Italian, but in the employment of the French republic, and I
have not been able since to credit with certainty his incorruptibility
to his native or his adoptive country; I might easily be mistaken in
deciding either way.
What I am certain of, and certainly sorry for, is the superiority of the
French company's railway carriage, from Ventimiglia on, to the Italian
carriage which had brought us so far, and it is still with unwillingness
that I own the corporation's greater care for our comfort. If we had
been in the paternal care of the administration of the gambling-house.
at Monte Carlo, we could not have been more tenderly or cleanly
cushioned about, or borne away on softer springs; and very possibly a
measure of wickedness in the means is a condition of comfort in the end
to which we are so tempted to abandon ourselves in a world which is not
yet so sternly collectivist as I could wish. It was not quite dark when
we arrived at Monte Carlo and began to experience, in the beautiful
keeping of the place, how admirably a gambling-house can manage the
affairs of a principality when it pays all the taxes. There were many
two-horse landaus waiting our pleasure outside the station, and the
horses were all so robust and handsome that we were not put to our usual
painful endeavor in seeking the best and getting the worst. All those
stately equipages were good, and the one that fell to us mounted the
hill to our hotel by a grade so insinuating that the balkiest horse in
Frascati could hardly have suspected it.
In our easy ascent we were aware of the gray-and-blond houses behind
their walls among their groves and gardens, among flowers and blossoms;
of the varying inclines and levels from which some lovely difference of
prospect appeared at every step; of the admirably tended roadways, and
the walks that followed them up hill and down, and crossed to little
parks, or led to streets brilliant with shops and hotels, clustering
about the great gambling-house, the centre of the common prosperity and
animation. The air had softened with the setting sun, and the weather
which had at Leghorn and Genoa delayed through two weeks of rain and
cold, seemed to confess the control of the Casino administration, as
everything else does at Monte Carlo, and promised an amiability to which
we eagerly trusted.
[Illustration: 51 MONACO]
It was of course warmer out-doors than in-doors, and while the fire was
kindling on our hearth we gave the quarter hour before dinner to looking
over our garden-wall into the comely town in the valley below, and to
the palace and capital of the Prince of Monaco on the heights beyond.
Nothing by day or by night could be more exquisite than the little
harbor, a perfect horseshoe in shape, and now, at our first sight of it,
set round with electric lights, like diamonds in the scarf-pin of some
sporty Titan, or perhaps of Hercules Monoecus himself, who is said to
have founded Monaco. In the morning we saw that the waters arranged
themselves in the rainbow colors of such a scarf round the shores, and
that there were only pleasure-craft moored in them: the yacht of the
Prince of Monaco and the yacht of some American Prince, whose title I
did not ascertain, but whose flag was unmistakable. There must have been
other yachts, but I do not remember them, and possibly there were some
workaday craft, of which I do not now recall the impression; but I am
certain of the festive air of disoccupation pervading the port from the
adjacent towns, both Monte Carlo and Monaco, which its wicked suburb has
cleansed in corrupting, and rendered attractive by the example of its
elegant leisure. There remains from both places, and from Condamine in
the plain between them the sense of a perpetual round of holidays. There
seemed to be no more creative business in one place than another, but I
do not say there is none; there is certainly a polite distillery of
perfumes and liqueurs in Condamine, but what one sees is the commerce of
the shops, and the building up of more and more villas and hotels, on
every shelf and ledge, to harden and whiten in the sun, and let their
gardens hang over the verges of the cliffs. On the northeast, the
mountains rise into magnificent steeps whose names would say nothing to
the reader, except that of Turbia, which he will recall as the classic
Tropaea of Augustus, who marked there the bounds between Italy and Gaul.
But we were as yet in no mood to climb this height, even with the help
of a funicular railway, and I made my explorations at such convenient
elevations as I could reach on foot, or by the help of one of those
luxurious landaus peculiar to Monte Carlo.
One such point was undoubtedly the headland of Monaco, where the Greeks
of Marseilles, long enough before Augustus, built a temple to Hercules
Monoecus. The Grimaldi family which gave Genoa many doges, came early
into the sovereignty of Monaco, by the hook or crook those days, but
whether it was they who fostered its piracy in the fourteenth century,
does not distinctly appear, though it seems certain that one of the
Grimaldi princes served against the English under Philip of Valois, and
was wounded at Crecy. In 1524 a successor went over to the empire under
Charles V. Still later the principality returned to the sovereignty of
France, and in 1793 the French republicans frankly annexed it, but it
was given back to the Grimaldi in 1814.
The Grimaldi on the whole were a baddish line of potentates, and only
lacked largeness of scene to have left the memory of world-tragedies.
They murdered one another, at least in two cases; in another, the people
killed their ruler by publicly drowning him in the sea for insulting
their women; the princes were the protectors of piracy, and in the very
late times following their restoration by the Congress of Vienna, the
reigning prince confiscated the property of the churches for his own
behoof, and took into his hands the whole trade of the principality. He
alone bought and ground the grain, and baked the bread, which he sold to
his people at an extortionate price; he bought damaged flour in Genoa
and fed it to his subjects at the same rate as good. When they murmured
and threatened rebellion, he threatened in turn that he would rule them
with a rod of iron, as if their actual conditions were not bad enough.
Some of his oppressions were of a fantasticality bordering on comic
opera: travellers had to give up their provisions at the frontier and
eat the official bread of Monaco; ships entering the port were
confiscated if they had brought more loaves than sufficed them for their
voyage thither; no man might cut his own wood without leave of the
police, or prune his trees, or till his land, or irrigate it; the birth
and death of every animal must be publicly registered, with the payment
of a given tax, and nobody could go out after ten at night without
carrying a taxed lantern. When Nice was annexed to France in 1860 Monaco
passed under French protection again, and now it is subject to
conscription like the rest of France. Ten years after the beginning of
this new order of things the great M. Blanc was expelled from Hombourg,
and the Prince of Monaco rented to him the-gambling privilege of Monte
Carlo.
Then the modern splendor of the place began. The entire population of
the three towns, Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Condamine, is not above
fifteen thousand, and apparently the greater part of the inhabitants
depend upon the gay industry of the Casino for their livelihood. I
should say that the most of the houses in Monte Carlo were hotels, or
pensions, or furnished villas, or furnished apartments, and if one could
be content to live in the atmosphere of the Casino, which is not
meteorologically lurid, I do not know where one could live in greater
comfort. It is said that everything is rather dearer than in Nice, for
instance, but such things as I wanted to buy I did not find very dear.
The rates at the most expensive hotels did not seem exhorbitant when
reduced to dollars, and if you went a little way from the Casino the
hotels were very reasonable, so that you could spend a great deal of
money at the tables which in America you would spend in board and
lodging. I fancy that a villa could be got there very reasonably, and as
the morals of all the inhabitants are scrupulously cared for by the
administration of the Casino, and no one living in the principality is
allowed to frequent the gaming-tables, it is probable that domestic
service is good and cheap. If I may speak from our experience at our
very simple little hotel, it is admirable, one waiter sufficing for ten
or twelve guests, with leisure for much friendly conversation in the
office, between the breakfasts served in our rooms and the excellent
dinners at the small tables in the salon. If you liked, he would speak
French or Italian, though he spoke English as well as any one, and he
was of that excellent Piedmontese race which has been the saving salt of
the whole peninsula. As for the food, it was far beyond that of our
cold-storage, and it must have been cheap, since it was provided for us
at the rate we paid.
The cost of dress varies, according to the taste of and the purse,
everywhere. White serge seemed the favorite wear of most of the ladies
one saw in the street at Monte Carlo, especially in the region of the
Casino. This may have expressed an inner condition, or it may have been
a sympathetic response to the advances of the flowers in the pretty beds
and parterres so fancifully designed by the gardeners of the
administration, or it may have been a token of the helpless submission
to which the windows of the milliners and modistes reduced all comers of
the dressful sex. Many of the men with the women, or without them, were
also in white serge, but they seemed more variably attired; there was a
prevailing suggestion of yachting or automobiling in their dress,
though doubtless most of them had not sailed or motored to the spot.
Some few, say four or five, may have motored away from it, for in the
centre of the charming square before the Casino there was an automobile
of some newest type being raffled for in the interest of that chiefest
of the Christian virtues which makes its most successful appeals in the
vicinity of games of chance. Some one must have won the machine and
carried a party of his friends away, and triumphantly turned turtle with
it over the first of the precipices which abound at Monte Carlo. More
than the tables within this opportunity of fortune tempted me, and it
was only by the repeated recurrence to my principles that I was able to
get away alive. In spite of myself, I did not get away without, however
guiltlessly, having yielded to the spirit of the place. It was at the
Administrational Art Exhibition, where there were really some good
pictures, and where, on my entering, I was given a small brass disk. On
going out I attempted to restore this to the door-keeper, but he went
back with me to a certain piece of mechanism, where he instructed me to
put the disk into a slot. Then the disk ran its course, and a small
brass ball came out at the bottom. The door-keeper opened this, and
showed me that it was empty; but he gave me to understand that it might
have been full of diamonds, or rubies, or seed-pearls, which might have
implanted in me a lust of gambling I should never have overcome. Monte
Carlo was in every way tempting. A vast oblong, brilliant with flowers
in artistic patterns, stretched upward from the Casino, and there was an
agreeable park where one might sit. On every other side there were
costly hotels and costly restaurants, including that of the unexampled,
the insurpassable Giro, where one saw people eating and drinking at the
windows whenever one passed, by day or night. Beyond the Casino seaward
were the beautiful terraces, planted with palms and other tropic
growths, where people might come out and kill themselves when they had
nothing left to lose but their lives; and against the dark green of
their fronds the temple of fortune lifted a frosted-cake-like front of
long extent. I do not know just what type of architecture it is of, but
it distinctly suggests the art of the pastry cook when he has triumphed
in some edifice crowning the centre of the table at a great public
dinner. What mars the pleasing effect most is a detail which enforces
this suggestion, for the region of the Casino is thickly frequented by a
species of black doves, and when these gather in close lines of black
dots along the eaves, they have exactly the effect of flies clustering
on the sugary surfaces of the cake. At intervals are bronze statues of
what seem a sort of adolescent cherubs, but which have, I do not know
why, a peculiarly devilish appearance. No doubt they are harmless
enough; but certainly they do nothing to keep the flies off the cake.
In fine, as an edifice the Casino disappoints, and if one is not
pressingly curious about the interior, one rather lingers on the terrace
overlooking the sea, and the lines of the railroad following the shore,
and the panorama of the several towns. It is charming to sit there, and
if it is in the afternoon, you may see an artist there painting
water-colors of the scenery. Even if he were not painting, you could not
help knowing him for an artist, because he wears a black velvet jacket
and knickerbockers, and a soft slouch hat, and has a curled black
mustache and pointed beard; there is no mistaking him; and at a given
moment, after he has been working long enough, he puts above his sketch
the sign, “For Sale,” as artists always do, and then, if you want a
masterpiece, you go down a few steps from where you are sitting and buy
it. But I never did that any more than I took tickets for the charity
automobile, though there is no telling what I might not have done if I
had broken the bank when at last I went into the Casino.
It seems to open about eleven o'clock in the morning, for gamblers are
hard-working, impatient people, and do not want to lose time. A broad
stretch of red carpet is laid down the steps from the portal and they
begin to go in at once, and people keep going in until I know not what
hour at night. But I think mid-afternoon is the best hour to see them,
and it is then that I will invite the reader to accompany me,
instructing him to turn to the left on entering, and get his gratis
billet of admission to the rooms from the polite officials there in
charge, who will ask for his card, and inquire his country and city, but
will not insist upon his street and his number in it. This form is
apparently to make sure that you are not a resident of the principality,
and that if you suffer in your morals from your visit to the Casino you
shall not be a source of local corruption thereafter. They bow you away,
first audibly pronouncing your name with polyglottic accuracy, and then
you are free to wander where you like. But probably you will want to go
at once from the large, nobly colonnaded reception-hall or atrium, into
that series of salons where wickeder visitors than yourself are already
closely seated at the oblong tables, and standing one or two deep round
them. The salons of the series are four, and the tables in each are from
two to five, according to the demands of the season; some are Trente et
Quarante-tables, and some, by far the greater number, are
Roulette-tables. Roulette seems the simpler game, and the more popular;
I formed the notion that there was a sort of aristocratic quality in
Trente et Quarante, and that the players of that game were of higher
rank and longer purse, but I can allege no reason justifying my notion.
All that I can say is that the tables devoted to it commanded the
seaward views, and the tops of the gardens where the players withdrew
when they wished to commit suicide. The rooms are decorated by several
French painters of note, and the whole interior is designed by the
famous architect Gamier, to as little effect of beauty as could well be.
It is as if these French artists had worked in the German taste, rather
than their own, and in any case they have achieved in their several
allegories and impersonations something uniformly heavy and dull. One
might fancy that the mood of the players at the tables had imparted
itself to the figures in the panels, but very likely this is not so, for
the players had apparently parted with none of their unpleasing dulness.
They were in about equal number men and women, and they partook equally
of a look of hard repression. The repression may not have been wholly
from within; a little away from each table hovered, with an air of
detachment, certain plain and quiet men, who, for all their apparent
inattention, may have been agents of the Administration vigilant to
subdue the slightest show of drama in the players. I myself saw no
drama, unless I may call so the attitude of a certain tall, handsome
young man, who stood at the corner of one of the tables, and, with
nervously working jaws, staked his money at each invitation of the
croupiers. I did not know whether he won or lost, and I could not decide
from their faces which of the other men or women were winning or losing.
I had supposed that I might see distinguished faces, distinguished
figures, but I saw none. The players were of the average of the
spectators in dress and carriage, but in the heavy atmosphere of the
rooms, which was very hot and very bad, they all alike looked dull. At a
psychological moment it suddenly came to me in their presence, that if
there was such a place as hell, it must be very dull, like that, and
that the finest misery of perdition must be the stupid dulness of it.
For some unascertained reason, but probably from a mistaken purpose of
ornament, there hung over the centre of each table, almost down to the
level of the players' heads, lengths of large-linked chains, and it was
imaginable, though not very probable, that if any of the lost souls rose
violently up, or made an unseemly outcry, or other rebellious
demonstration, those plain, quiet men, the agents of the Administration,
would fling themselves upon him or her, and bind them with those chains,
and cast them into such outer darkness as could be symbolized by the
shade of the terrace trees. The thing was improbable, as I say, but not
impossible, if there is truth in Swedenborg's relation that the hells
are vigilantly policed, and from time to time put in order by angels
detailed for that office. To be sure the plain, quiet men did not look
like angels, and the Administration of which they were agents, could
not, except in its love of order, be likened to any celestial authority.
Commonly in the afternoon there is music in the great atrium from which
the gambling-rooms open, and then there is a pleasant movement of people
up and down. They are kept in motion perhaps by their preference,
somewhat, but also largely by the want of seats. If you can secure one
of these you may amuse yourself very well by looking on at the fashion
and beauty of those who have not secured any. Here you will see much
more distinction than in the gambling-rooms; the air is better, and if
you choose to fancy this the limbo of that inferno, it will not be by a
violent strain. In the crowd will be many pretty young girls, in proper
chaperonage, and dressed in the latest effects of Paris; if they happen
to be wearing the mob-cap hats of the moment it is your greater gain;
they could not be so charming in anything else, or look more innocent,
or more consciously innocent. You could only hope, however, such were
the malign associations of the place, that their chaperons would not
neglect them for the gaming-tables beyond, but you could not be sure, if
the chaperons were all like that old English lady one evening at the
opera in the Casino, who came in charge of her niece, or possibly some
friend's daughter. She remained dutifully enough beside the girl through
the first act of the stupid musical comedy, and even through the ensuing
ballet, and when a flaunting female, in a hat of cart-wheel
circumference, came in and shut out the whole stage from the hapless
stranger behind, this good old lady authorized her charge to ask him to
take the seat next them where he could see something of the action if he
wished. But at the end of the ballet, she rose, and bidding the girl
wait her return, she vanished in the direction of the gaming-rooms. She
may merely have gone to look on at a spectacle which, dulness for
dulness, was no worse than that of the musical comedy, and I have no
proof that she risked her money there. The girl sat through the next
act, and then in a sudden fine alarm, like that of a bird which, from no
visible cause, starts from its perch, she took flight, and I hope she
found her aunt, or her mother's friend, quietly sleeping on one of those
seats in the atrium. It was one of those tacit, eventless dramas which
in travel are always offering themselves to your witness. They begin in
silence, and go quietly on to their unfinish, and leave you steeped in
an interest which is life-long, whereas a story whose end you know soon
perishes from your mind. Art has not yet learned the supreme lesson of
life, which is never a tale that is told within the knowledge of the
living.
Nowhere, I think, is the “sweet security of streets” felt more than in
Monte Carlo. Whether the control of that good Administration of the
Casino reaches to the policing of the place in other respects or not, I
cannot say, but one walks home at night from the theatre of the Casino
with the same sense of safety that one enjoys under that paternal roof.
At eleven o'clock all Monte Carlo sleeps the sleep of the innocent and
the just in the dwellings of the citizens and permanent residents;
though it cannot be denied that there appear to be late suppers in the
hotels and restaurants surrounding the Casino, which the iniquitous may
be giving to the guilty. Away from the flare of their bold lights the
town reposes in a demi-dark, and presents to the more strenuous fancy
the effect of a mezzotint study of itself; by day it is a group of
wash-drawings near to, and farther off, of water-colors, very richly and
broadly treated. I could not insist too much upon this notion with the
reader who has never been there, or has not received picture
postal-cards from sojourning correspondents. These would afford him a
portrait of the chief features and characteristics of the place not too
highly flattered, for in fact it would be impossible for even a picture
postal-card to exaggerate its beauty. They will besides convey one of
the few convincing proofs that in spite of the Blanc Casino and the
French Republic the Prince of Monaco is still a reigning sovereign, for
the postage-stamps bear the tastefully printed head of that potentate.
If the visitor requires other proofs he may take a landau at the station
in Monaco, and drive up over the heights of the capital into the piazza
before the prince's palace. When the prince is not at home he can
readily get leave to visit the palace for twenty minutes, but on my
unlucky day the prince was doubly at home, for he was sick as well as in
residence. I satisfied myself as well as I could, and I am very easy to
satisfy, with my drive through the pleasant town, which is entirely
Italian in effect, with its people standing about or looking out of
their windows in their Sunday leisure, and quite Roman in the
cleanliness of its streets. I took due pleasure in the unfinished
exterior of the Oceanographic Museum and the newly finished interior of
the Monaco Cathedral. The cathedral, which is so new as to make one
rejoice that most other cathedrals are old, is of a glaring freshness,
but is very handsome; somehow in spite of its newness it contains the
tombs of the reigning family, and perhaps it has only been newly done
over. The museum which is ultimately to be the greatest of its kind in
the world, already contains somewhere in its raw inaccessible recesses
the collections made by Prince Albert in his many cruises, and is of a
palatiality worthy of a sovereign with a tenant so generous and prompt
in its rent as the Administration of the Casino of Monte Carlo.
[Illustration: 52 THE CASINO, MONTE CARLO]
This fact, namely, that the princely grandeur and splendor of Monaco all
came out of the gaming-tables, was something that the driver of my
landau made me observe, when our intimacy had mounted with our road, and
we paused for the magnificent view of the sea from the headland near the
museum. He was otherwise a shrewd and conversible Piedmontese who did
not make me pay much above the tariff, and who had pity on my poor
French after awhile, and consented to speak Italian with me. In the sort
of French glare over the whole local civilization of the principality,
everybody will wish to seem French, but after you break through the
surface, the natives will be as comfortably and endearingly Italian as
anybody in the peninsula. Among themselves they speak a Ligurian patois,
but with the stranger they will use an Italian easily much better than
his, and also much better than their own French. I think they prefer you
in their racial parlance after you have shown some knowledge of it, and
two kind women of whom I asked my way in Monte Carlo, one day when I was
trying for the station of the funicular to Turbia, grew more volubly
kind when I asked it in such Tuscan as I could command. That station is
really not hard to find when once you know where it is, and at three
o'clock in the afternoon I was mounting the precipitous incline of the
alp on whose summit Augustus divided Italy from Gaul, and left the
stupendous trophy which one sees there in ruins to-day.
I should like to render the sense of my upward progress dramatic by
pretending that we mounted from a zone of flowers at Monte Carlo into
regions where only the hardiest blossoms greeted us, but what I really
noticed was that by-and-by the little patches of vineyard seemed to grow
less and the olive-trees scraggier. Perhaps even this was partly fancy;
as for the flowers, I cannot bring myself to partake of their deceit;
for they are the most shameless fakers, as regards climate, in nature.
It is, for instance, perfectly true that they are in bloom along the
Riviera all winter long, but this does not prove that the winter of the
Riviera is always warm. It merely proves that flowers can stand a degree
of cold that nips the nose bent to hale their perfume, and brings tears
into the eyes dwelling in rapture on their loveliness. They are like
women; they look so fragile and delicate that you think they cannot
stand anything, but they can stand pretty much everything, or at least
everything they wish to. Throughout that week at Monte Carlo, while we
cowered round our fires or went out into a frigid sunshine, the flowers
smiled from every garden-ground in a gayety emulous of that of their
sisters passing in white serge. So probably I gave less attention to the
details of the scenery through which my funicular was passing than to
the stupendous prospects of sea and shore which it varyingly commanded.
If words could paint these I should not spare the words, but when I
recall them, my richest treasure of adjectives seems a beggarly array of
color tubes, flattened and twisted past all col-lapsibility. Nothing
less than an old-fashioned panoramic show would impart any notion of it,
and even that must fail where it should most abound, namely, in the
delicacy of that ineffable majesty.
We climbed and climbed, with many a muted hope and many a muted fear of
the mechanism which carried us so safely, and then we ran across a
stretch of comparative level and reached the last station, under the
cliff on which the local hotel stood, with the mighty ruin behind it.
Our passengers flocked up to the terrace of the hotel, much shoved and
shouldered by automobiles bearing the company which seems proper to
those vehicles, and dispersed themselves at the many little tables set
about for tea, and the glory of the matchless outlook. While one could
yet have the ruin mostly to one's self, it seemed the most favorable
moment to visit the crumbling walls and broken tower, whose fragments
strewed the slopes around. The tower was of Augustus, and the fortress
into which it was turned in the Middle Ages was of unknown authority,
but the ruin was the work of Marshal Villars, who blew up both trophy
and stronghold sometime in the French king's wars with the imperialists
in the first half of the eighteenth century. The destruction was
incomplete, though probably sufficient for the purpose, but as a ruin,
nothing could be more admirable. There seems to be at present something
like a restoration going on; it has not gone very far, however; it has
developed some fragments of majestic pillars, and some breadths of Roman
brick-work; a few spaces about the base of the tower are cleared; but
the rehabilitation will probably never proceed to such an extreme that
you may not sit down on some carven remnant of the past, and closing
your eyes to the surrounding glory of alp and sea find yourself again on
the Palatine or amid the memorials of the Forum.