I have followed it, these past few days, on the banks of the Borigo,
from the torrent of Careï to the Val de Gorbio, in those little rustic
towns, Ventimiglia, Tende, Sospello, in those curious villages, perched
upon rocks, Sant' Agnese, Castellar, Castillon, in that adorable and
already quite Italian country which surrounds Mentone. You go through a
few streets quickened with the cosmopolitan and somewhat hateful life of
the Riviera, you leave behind you the band-stand, with its everlasting
town music, around which gather the consumptive rank and fashion of
Mentone, and behold, at two steps from the crowd that dreads it as it
would a scourge from Heaven, you find the admirable silence of the
trees, all the goodly Virgilian realities of sunk roads, clear springs,
shady pools that sleep on the mountain-sides, where they seem to await a
goddess's reflection. You climb a path between two stone walls
brightened by violets and crowned with the strange brown cowls of the
arisarum, with its leaves of so deep a green that one might believe them
to be created to symbolize the coolness of the well, and the
amphitheatre of a valley opens like a moist and splendid flower. Through
the blue veil of the giant olive-trees that cover the horizon with a
transparent curtain of scintillating pearls, gleams the discreet and
harmonious brilliancy of all that men imagine in their dreams and paint
upon scenes that are thought unreal and unrealizable, when they wish to
define the ideal gladness of an immortal hour, of some enchanted
island, of a lost paradise, or the dwelling of the gods.