as narrow as a trench—between the houses. They are paved with cobble
stones at the sides and with red bricks in the centre and are lit—such
is the anomaly—by electric light. These lanes wander about in an uneasy
and disconsolate way. They sometimes mount upwards; they sometimes glide
down as if undecided. They dip under houses through black, vaulted ways:
they lead to stone stairs that disappear round a corner: they turn
warily to the right and then to the left, as if someone followed.
There comes upon the visitor the sense of being lost, of wandering in a
nightmare town, of being entrapped in a maze, of never being able to get
out again. They are dreadful streets for an ambush and there is many a
corner where an assassin in a cloak must assuredly have waited for the
unsuspecting step. They are full of ghosts, of reeling, bellowing men
rolling down the steep arm in arm, of half-awakened soldiers, buckling
on their arms and hurrying to the clamour at the gate, of clinging,
terror-stricken women and of the stalwart prince with his solemn guard.
As to the place itself it is a town, tumbled and deranged, made up of
rocks and ruins and of melancholy houses of great age. It is a sorrowful
town, for Eze is oppressed by the burden of a doleful past and bears on
every side traces of its woes and evidences of its manifold disasters.
It is a town, it would seem, that can never forget. It is a silent town
and desolate. On the occasion of a certain visit the only occupant I
came upon was a half-demented beggar who gibbered in an unknown tongue,
while the only sound that fell upon the ear was that of a crowing cock.
Many of the houses are shuttered close, many are roofless and not a few
are without doors. It recalls at every turn the words of Dante of “the
steep stairs and the bitter bread.”
[Illustration: EZE: ON THE WAY TO THE CASTLE.]
[Illustration: EZE: ALL THAT REMAINS OF THE CASTLE.]
It is a colourless town for there is nothing to break the ever abiding
tint of oyster-shell grey. There are two trees in Eze and, in a back
yard, a vine. With these exceptions there is hardly a green leaf within
its confines. The only thing that grows in Eze is a monstrous and
deformed cactus, a bloated and horrible thing covered with prickles. A
botanical ogre rather than a plant it seems to be a survival from an
extinct age and to belong to a world over whose plains saurians and
other obscene reptiles crawled. This senile and unlovely shrub would
appear to be appropriate in some way to the poor, sad town that cannot
forget.
There is by the way no water in Eze except such rain-water as is
collected in tanks by the provident. To obtain water it is necessary to
leave the town and journey to the bottom of the path. There, on the road
where the carriage of the tourist draws up, is the fountain.
Eze too is a place suggestive of craft and secret doings, a town which
might have been planned by a man with a guilty conscience, for it is a
veritable rabbit warren in which to burrow or to hide while its
shuffling lanes, which dodge so cunningly, would seem to have been
devised to favour the panting culprit with justice at his heels.
Rock crops up everywhere. Certain buildings would seem to be compounded
of the native rock below and of worked stones above. Caverns are cut out
of the cliff as well as curious paths, although some of these now lead
nowhere.
There are no two buildings alike. Many may be only a hundred years old,
but, in any case, they are incongruous dwellings with windows at odd
levels and with doors in unexpected places. There are, on the other
hand, buildings which show evidence of greater age and of much
distinction. There are towers which have been converted into common
habitations and relics of mansions of no little pretence. On a few of
these the corbels are still to be seen which once supported the
balconies from which fair ladies scattered flowers upon victorious
troops tramping up to the castle. There are many fine doorways in stone.
Some show traces of the Moorish taste, others belong to the thirteenth
century, while a few display the pointed arch of later years. There are
some beautiful stone windows and many stoutly worked doors of wood and
other odd details which recall a less squalid past. The lounger in the
streets of Eze will meet with crypt-like and cavernous stables for
goats, cellars open to the sky owing to collapse of the roof, and chilly
tunnels without apparent purpose. One or two passages are wide and
vaulted and provided with a long stone bench against the wall. Here, in
the shadow, soldiers will have sat to clean their arms and old men to
gossip.
The public buildings are, of course, few. The _Mairie_ is rather
pretentiously humble and is the least authoritative building I have ever
seen. The post office clings precariously to the side of a steep lane,
the Rue du Brek, and looks out upon a wall of rock covered with cactus.
It seems incongruous that from this half-unconscious place it is
possible both to telegraph and telephone. There is a dejected café but
it is closed.
The church is of little interest. It was enlarged and restored—that is
to say spoiled—in 1765. It contains, besides a font of the sixteenth
century and an old cross, a painting ascribed to the seventeenth century
in the left lower corner of which is a picture of Eze as it was. The
castle in the picture is intact, is solid, square and arrogant looking.
It quite overwhelms the jumbled-up little brown-red town at its foot.
From the top of the tower floats a red flag with a white cross on it.
The castle is on the highest point of the town and is reached by a path
fashioned out of the rock. This is a path with indeed a story to tell,
if only it could utter it; if it could but speak of the footsteps it has
listened to—the halting feet of men led up to be judged, the trembling
feet of men led down to be hanged, the heavy tread of the well-laden
robber, the nervous step of the spy, the rustle of the foot of the
damosel. Of this castle of the Lords of Eze nothing remains but a wall
and a fragment of a vaulted chamber. In the castle yard is a wretched,
shamefaced hut on which is painted “Bar des Touristes.” It is happily
derelict and a victim to the general coma which has spread over Eze, for
it is as out of place as a roulette table in a nunnery.
High up on the side of a house on the south of the town is a little old
window. It has a rounded arch of weathered stone and is probably the
oldest window in Eze, for it follows the mode that we in England call
“Norman.” It looks across the sea while on the sill is a bunch of
scarlet geranium in a broken jar. I like to think that this is the
window of Blacas, the troubadour, that he lived in this house on the
cliff and that from this casement he poured forth his songs of love and
of gallant deeds.
A love song—as I have said—would seem strange in Eze in its old
ruffian days. It may seem as strange even now. But love is eternal and
so long as men and women walk the alleys of this ancient town it will
linger within its walls. All the fiercer passions of Eze have died
away—the lust for power, the thirst for revenge, the mad fever for the
fray—but love, it would seem, still remains as, possibly, its only
heritage; for I came upon a document in the _Mairie_ that announced the
coming marriage of two young people in Eze. It was not a troubadour’s
sonnet, it is true; but it served to show that the old lanes near by may
still be paths for lovers, that there are still steep places where he
may help her down and still a parapet where the two may lean, gaze over
the sea and dream.
One walks down the path from the town as one would leave a chamber of
death; for Eze is slowly dying, dying like a doddering old man—once the
captain of a host—who is breathing his last in a garret, with around
him pathetic relics of his virile past and piteous evidences of his
present poverty.
XVIII
THE HARBOUR OF MONACO
THE history of Monaco from its early days to the time when it came upon
peace is a breathless story full of incident, clamour and surprise. It
may not be unfitly compared to an account—from moment to moment—of the
flights and rebuffs of a football in a long contested game. Now and
again the bewildered ball is lost sight of in a mêlée of panting men. At
another moment it rolls quietly into the open to be at once pounced upon
by two furious packs. At times it is “out of bounds” and at peace, only
to be thrown again into the fight where it is harried and battered and
driven now to this quarter and now to that. Monaco was the ball in the
fierce game between the Grimaldi, on the one side, and the powers of the
Eastern Mediterranean on the other and in the end the Grimaldi won.
Until about the end of the twelfth century Monaco was merely a lonely
rock, almost inaccessible, uninhabited and waterless. Projecting as it
does into the sea it afforded so good a shelter for ships that the
little bay in its shadow became famous as a harbour of refuge. Fringing
the bay was a pebble beach where a galley could be hauled up or a
caravel unloaded.
Monaco was known as a port in Roman days. Indeed it was from this
unpretentious haven that Augustus Cæsar embarked for Genoa on his way to
Rome when his victories in southern Gaul had been accomplished. The
departure of the Emperor was, no doubt, a scene of much pomp, made
brilliant by many-coloured standards and flashing spears. As the Emperor
stepped on board his ship the blare of trumpets and the shout of the
troops drawn up on the plain must have been heard far beyond La Turbie.
The boats of Greek and Phœnician traders have made for this harbour and
have deposited their strange cargoes here to the amazement of gaping
natives. Here in Monaco Bay wild Saracens have tumbled ashore with such
unearthly shouts as to cause the sea birds on the rock to rise in one
fluttering cloud. The beach too has been lit often enough by a camp fire
around which a company of pirates would be drinking and singing, while
they waited for the return of the marauding party that had left at dawn.
Although the harbour was often alive with men the rock remained
untenanted. I should imagine that the first adventurer to set foot on
Monaco would be a Phœnician cabin boy. He would climb the cliff and
gaining the summit would explore it with all the curiosity and alert
imagination of a boy landed on a desert island.
It is said that in 1078 two pious men, who lived at La Turbie, built on
Monaco a tiny chapel to St. Mary. They built it with their own hands and
employed, in the making, stones from the Roman monument in their native
town. If this be true the only building that for a hundred years stood
upon this barren plateau was the child-like chapel, a speck of white on
the dark expanse of rock.
[Illustration: CAP D’AIL NEAR MONACO.]
In 1191 the Emperor Henry VI granted Monaco to the wealthy and
prosperous town of Genoa. The Emperor’s rights over this fragment of
territory might be questioned, but there was none to gainsay him. His
gift was coupled with the requirement that a fortress should be built on
Monaco which should be ready to serve the Emperor in his wars with the
pestilential people of Marseilles and of other towns in Provence.
In the same year an official party of noble Genoese came to Monaco and
formally took possession of the place in the name of their city. It was
a solemn occasion; for those who represented Genoa made a ceremonial
tour of the rock, carrying olive boughs in their hands. It was,
moreover, a trying occasion for the visit was made in the stifling month
of June.
Some of the noble commissioners who were stout and advanced in years (as
commissioners often are) must have been hauled, dragged and pushed up
the cliff side, like so many bulky packages. Burdened as they were with
official robes and olive branches, which had to be carried with decorum,
they would have found the ceremony very exacting. They did more than
merely stumble about on the top of the rock, panting and perspiring and
trying to look official under sweltering conditions. They laid down the
lines of a fort. It was to be a square fort and very large, with a tower
at each of the four angles, and it was to be designed in the Moorish
style.
This fort or castle was erected in the year 1215 on the site of the
present palace and was provided with a garrison by the Genoese. Outside
the fort the rudiments of a town appeared—the first huts and houses of
Monaco. That town, therefore, has already passed the seven hundredth
anniversary of its foundation.
The harbour of Monaco of to-day is a model harbour as perfect as the art
of the engineer can make it. Two stone piers guard the entrance and at
the end of each is a lighthouse. There are two wide quays where feluccas
and other rakish-looking ships land barrels of wine; while the basin
itself can accommodate a fleet of yachts.
This haven which has sheltered the very earliest forms of sea-going ship
now shelters—during the regatta season—the latest development of the
motor boat and the racing launch. History repeats itself. There was
amazement at Monaco when the first hydroplane dropped on to the water by
the harbour’s mouth: there was amazement also, centuries ago, when the
loungers about the beach saw enter the new ship, the astounding vessel
that was propelled not by paddles or oars, but by sails.
Above the pebble beach is a modest promenade and a road—the main road
to Nice. On the other side of the highway are genial hotels where people
lunch and dine out of doors, amid a profusion of white tablecloths and
green chairs and where the menu of the day is suspended from the
railings.
At the far end of this Boulevard de la Condamine are an avenue of trees
and the old Etablissement des Bains de Mer which, even as late as Hare’s
time, was “much frequented in summer.” The Etablissement is now little
more than a ghost. The sound of its gaiety has long since been hushed
into silence. There is a somewhat frivolous-looking building by the
water’s edge which has a rounded glass front and some suggestion that it
may once have been a palace of delight. It has now fallen into a state
of decrepitude and shabbiness and is given up to quite commonplace
commercial uses. It is like a dandy in extreme old age who, dressed in
the thread-bare clothes which were the fashion a generation ago, still
sits on a parade which once was rustling with happy people and which is
now as sombre as a cemetery lane.
Opening on to the margin of the harbour is a great gorge, a sudden
breach in the earth which serves to separate the sober town of Monaco
from the frivolous town of Monte Carlo. It is a strange thing—this
ravine. It is deep and full of shadows. Its walls, lit by the sun, are
sheer precipices of biscuit-coloured rock, tinted faintly with red as
with rust. From every crack and cranny on its towering sides something
green is bursting; while, here and there, a flower, yellow or blue,
clings to a ledge like a perching bird.
From the balustrade of a garden on its summit there hang festoons of
scarlet geraniums and a curtain of blue heliotrope. Along the bottom of
the chasm runs a fussy stream, with a noise like that of many flutes and
by its side—among a jumble of rocks, bushes and brambles—an
inconsequent path creeps up, out of pure curiosity, since it leads
nowhere.
This ravine, as wild and savage as it was a thousand years ago, is a
strange thing to find in the middle of a town, for houses crowd about it
on either side and press so far forward on its heights that they appear
likely to topple into the abyss. A huge railway viaduct crosses its
entrance, while its floor slopes to a road where motors and tramcars
rattle along, without heed to this quiet nook in the mountain side. It
is as incongruous and out of place as a green meadow with buttercups and
cows spread out by the side of the blatant traffic of Fleet Street.
There are other anomalies about this Ravin des Gaumates. It is so
reckless-looking and so theatrical a chasm that one is convinced that
duels have been fought here and that here conspirators in cloaks have
met, and buccaneers have stored their surprising spoils. At the present
day, however, the sea rover’s camp is occupied by a laundry shed, where
unemotional women, with red arms and untidy heads, are busy; and where,
in the place of brigands’ loot, sheets are spread upon the rocks to dry,
together with white articles of underclothing.
At the mouth of the gorge—standing quite alone—is the little chapel of
St. Dévote. It is a humble church, modern, plain as a peasant, and of no
intrinsic interest. It is notable only in its position. The building
seems to be as surprised at the place in which it finds itself as is the
visitor who finds it there. Possibly no more strangely situated house of
prayer exists in Europe. Behind it is a wild, disorderly glen; on each
side is a precipice and in front is a gigantic railway viaduct of such
immoderate proportions that it towers above the very steeple of the
church.
The building viewed from the road where the tramcars run looks like a
small shrinking figure enshrined in a niche provided by a vulgar,
overbearing and irreverent railway arch.
[Illustration: MONACO.]
St. Dévote is the patron saint of Monaco. The celebration held every
year in her honour is very picturesque and impressive; for then a long
procession winds down from Monaco to the little chapel to do homage to
her memory. The legend of St. Dévote takes many forms. The version here
given is that which appears to be generally accepted in Monaco.[31]
In the reign of the Emperor Diocletian there lived in Corsica a
Christian maiden whose name was Dévote. She was bitterly persecuted for
her religion; but found a friend in Euticius, a senator, who concealed
her in his house. Her hiding place was discovered by the Roman prefect
who was engaged in the hunting down of Christians. Euticius was killed
by poison. Dévote was dragged forth into the street, was mutilated with
the utmost brutality and finally expired while undergoing the torture of
the “chevalet.” She died praying for the soul of her friend and
protector, the noble Euticius.
During the night the body of the martyr was carried down secretly to the
seashore by her fellow Christians and placed, with solemn reverence, on
board a ship. As the day dawned the ship set sail for the coast of
Africa; but, after a while, a storm burst upon it and drove it, helpless
and hopeless, before a fierce wind towards the shores of Gaul.
The captain—one Gratien—felt that the ship was lost. His strength was
spent and he gave way to utter despair. As he clung wearily to the helm,
dazed and exhausted, a vision of the dead maiden appeared before him as
a small, white figure against a curtain of black cloud. She opened her
mouth to speak.
“Up! Gratien,” she said, “the tempest is passing away; your ship will
sail safely into the blue. Watch by me and when you see a dove fly forth
from my mouth, follow it with a good heart. It will take you to a quiet
haven, called in the Greek, Monaco, and in the Latin, Singulare. There
you will find peace and there, by the beach, bury my body.”
Her words came true. The wind ceased; the savage waves dropped into a
rippled calm and under an azure sky, made glorious by the sun, the
battered boat—bearing the wan maiden on its deck—sailed, like a
radiant thing, into a harbour of enchantment. At the mouth of the glen,
where the rosemary grew and by the side of the laughing stream the body
of the little maid was buried.
-----
[31] “Monaco et ses Princes,” par Henri Metivier, 1862.
XIX
THE ROCK OF MONACO
MONACO is a bold, assertive mass of rock—long, narrow and blunt—which
thrusts itself out into the sea, as if to show that it held the ocean in
contempt and cared nothing for either winds or waves. The sea has tried
its strength against it since the world began, but Monaco has ever
remained bland and indifferent. The rock is cut off from the mainland by
a gorge through which the road to Nice slinks by as if glad to escape.
The sides of Monaco are everywhere precipitous, except towards the east.
It is from this side only that it can be approached. Its fortifications
are very massive and consist of high, unbroken walls which cover the
cliff from base to rampart like a cloak. The palace end of the rock has,
indeed, the appearance of one gigantic keep. The walls which surround
the palace gardens date from 1552 to 1560, while the fortifications that
surmount the Rampe belong to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The flanks of Monaco, when neither sheer cliff nor iron wall, are
covered with lavish green, for there is not a ledge nor a slope nor a
cranny that does not lodge some flower or some shrub.
Access to the town is gained by the Rampe Major, a broad and steep,
paved path which has been, in large part, hewn out of the side of the
rock. Up and down this path there is an endless procession of townfolk
and harbour folk, soldiers and priests, schoolboys and girls, hurried
officials and gaping visitors. Below the Rampe lies a carriage road up
to the town, traversed by a tram line. This way, the Avenue de la Porte
Neuve was constructed in 1828. Before that date Monaco could only be
reached on foot or on horseback.
Three gates are met with in ascending the Rampe. The first is a
ceremonial gate rather than a defence work. It was built in 1714 and
affects a faintly classical style, being fashioned of narrow bricks and
white stone. The Rampe beyond bends upon itself and, skirting a platform
surmounted by a sentry tower as yellow as old parchment, comes face to
face with the great battery (now bricked up) which stands at the foot of
the palace walls. It can be seen how perfectly this gun emplacement
commanded not only the Rampe but also the entrance to the harbour. On
the east side of the battery is an immense military work in the form of
a rounded buttress, very like the fold of a hanging curtain turned to
stone. This is the _oreillon_ which served to mask the battery from the
land side.
Below the battery the Rampe turns again upon itself and so reaches the
second gate. It is a gate in white stone, frail and ghostlike, and
inscribed with the date 1533. Beyond it was the drawbridge. Here the
Rampe bends sharply in its course for the third time and passes through
the main gateway by a vaulted passage of great solidity. This was the
famous Mirador or post of the guard.
The Rampe now ends in a bald square with the palace on one side and the
town on the other. On the remaining sides of the square are only a
parapet and the winds of heaven.
There are trees and seats in the square, for it is a place for idleness
where old women knit and young women sew, where children play and
ancients ruminate. There are cannon in the square pointing towards
innocent Cap d’Ail. They were presented to the reigning prince of the
time by Louis XIV. They are quite innocuous, but serve to remind the
careless that the place is a stronghold and to provide a plaything for
small boys who—with the happy imagination of the young—regard these
implements of war as horses (or more probably as donkeys), sit astride
of them, strike them with whips and urge them to “get up.”
The palace covers the whole of the northern extremity of the rock. It is
disappointing in that it fails to realise the emotional past of the
place, its dramatic and picturesque history, the dire assaults and
bloody frays without its gates, the tragedies within its walls. It has
been so mutilated in the past and so improved and modernised in the
present that it has become inexpressive. The strong, rigid lines, the
grim wrinkles, the determined frown have been so smoothed away that the
face has become vacuous. The new clock tower and the rows of modern
windows do not recall the stern halberdier who held the place against
all odds, nor the bull-necked men in armour who yelled damnation to the
Genoese.
The battlements are more suited for the display of flowers than for a
line of determined faces under steel caps glaring along the barrels of
their muskets. As the official residence of a prince it is becoming and
appropriate, but it is not that palace on a rock that bid defiance to
the world for flaming centuries. Monaco has a great and a glorious
history, but it is not written on the walls of the palace of to-day.