NICE
Not having as yet been in the _Cirque privé_ at Monte Carlo, I was
perhaps unduly impressed by the splendor of the rooms devoted to
gambling in this amazingly large casino. There were eight hundred or a
thousand people all in evening clothes, who had paid a heavy price for
the mere privilege of entering, and were now gathered about handsome
green-covered mahogany tables under glittering and ornate electroliers,
playing a variety of carefully devised gambling games with a fervor
that at times makes martyrs in other causes. To a humble-minded
American person like myself, unused to the high world of fashion, this
spectacle was, to say the least, an interesting one. Here were a dozen
nationalities represented by men and women whose hands were manicured
to perfection, whose toilets were all that a high social occasion might
require, their faces showing in every instance a keen understanding
of their world and how it works. Here in Nice, if you walk away from
these centers of social perfection, where health and beauty and
sophistication and money abound, the vast run of citizens are as
poverty-stricken as any; but this collection of nobility and gentry, of
millionaires, adventurers, intellectual prostitutes and savage beauties
is recruited from all over the world. I hold that is something to see.
The tables were fairly swarming with a fascinating throng all very
much alike in their attitude and their love of the game, but still
individual and interesting. I venture to say that any one of the
people I saw in this room, if you saw him in a crowd on the street,
would take your attention. A native force and self-sufficiency went
with each one. I wondered constantly where they all came from. It
takes money to come to the Riviera; it takes money to buy your way
into any gambling-room. It takes money to gamble; and what is more it
takes a certain amount of self-assurance and individual selection to
come here at all. By your mere presence you are putting yourself in
contact and contrast with a notable standard of social achievement.
Your intellectuality, your ability to take care of yourself, your
breeding and your subtlety are at once challenged--not consciously, but
unconsciously. Do you really belong here? the eyes of the attendants
ask you as you pass. And the glitter and color and life and beauty of
the room is a constant challenge.
It did not surprise me in the least that all these men and women in
their health and attractiveness carried themselves with cynical, almost
sneering hauteur. They might well do so--as the world judges these
material things--for they are certainly far removed from the rank and
file of the streets; and to see them extracting from their purses and
their pockets handfuls of gold, unfolding layers of crisp notes that
represented a thousand francs each, and with an almost indifferent
air laying them on their favorite numbers or combinations was to my
unaccustomed eye a gripping experience. Yet I was not interested in
gambling--only in the people who played.
I know that to the denizens of this world who are fascinated by
chance and find their amusement in such playing, this atmosphere is
commonplace. It was not so to me. I watched the women--particularly the
beautiful women--who strolled about the chambers with their escorts
solely to show off their fine clothes. You see a certain type of youth
here who seems to be experienced in this gay world that drifts from one
resort to another, for you hear such phrases as “Oh, yes, I saw her at
Aix-les-Bains,” or, “She was at Karlsbad last summer.” “Is that the
same fellow she was with last year? I thought she was living with --”
(this of a second individual). “My heaven, how well she keeps up!” or,
“This must be her first season here--I have never seen her before.”
Two or three of these young bloods would follow a woman all around the
rooms, watching her, admiring her beauty quite as a horseman might
examine the fine points of a horse. And all the while you could see
that she was keenly aware of the critical fire of these eyes.
[Illustration: “My heaven, how well she keeps up!”]
At the tables was another type of woman whom I had first casually
noticed at Monte Carlo, a not too good looking, rather practical, and
perhaps disillusioned type of woman--usually inclined to stoutness,
as is so often the case with women of indolent habits and no
temperament--although, now that I think of it, I have the feeling that
neither illusion nor disillusion have ever played much part in the
lives of such as these. They looked to me like women who, from their
youth up, had taken life with a grain of salt and who had never been
carried away by anything much--neither love, nor fashion, nor children,
nor ambition. Perhaps their keenest interest had always been money--the
having and holding of it. And here they sat--not good-looking, not
apparently magnetic--interested in chance, and very likely winning and
losing by turns, their principal purpose being, I fancy, to avoid the
dullness and monotony of an existence which they are not anxious to
endure. I heard one or two derogatory comments on women of this type
while I was abroad; but I cannot say that they did more than appeal
to my sympathies. Supposing, to look at it from another point of view,
you were a woman of forty-five or fifty. You have no family--nothing to
hold you, perhaps, but a collection of dreary relatives, or the _ennui_
of a conventional neighborhood with prejudices that are wearisome to
your sense of liberty and freedom. If by any chance you have money,
here on the Riviera is your resource. You can live in a wonderful
climate of sun and blue water; you can see nature clad in her daintiest
raiment the year round; you can see fashion and cosmopolitan types and
exchange the gossip of all the world; you can go to really excellent
restaurants--the best that Europe provides; and for leisure, from ten
o’clock in the morning until four or five o’clock the next morning,
you can gamble if you choose, gamble silently, indifferently, without
hindrance as long as your means endure.
If you are of a mathematical or calculating turn of mind you can
amuse yourself infinitely by attempting to solve the strange puzzle
of chance--how numbers fall and why. It leads off at last, I know,
into the abstrusities of chemistry and physics. The esoteric realms
of the mystical are not more subtle than the strange abnormalities of
psychology that are here indulged in. Certain people are supposed to
have a chemical and physical attraction for numbers or cards. Dreams
are of great importance. It is bad to sit by a losing person, good to
sit by a winning one. Every conceivable eccentricity of thought in
relation to personality is here indulged in; and when all is said and
done, in spite of the wonders of their cobwebby calculations, it comes
to about the same old thing--they win and lose, win and lose, win and
lose.
Now and then some interesting personality--stranger, youth, celebrity,
or other--wins heavily or loses heavily; in which case, if he plunges
fiercely on, his table will be surrounded by a curious throng, their
heads craning over each other’s shoulders, while he piles his gold on
his combinations. Such a man or woman for the time being becomes an
intensely dramatic figure. He is aware of the audacity of the thing he
is doing, and he moves with conscious gestures--the manner of a grand
seigneur. I saw one such later--in the _Cirque privé_ at Monte Carlo--a
red-bearded man of fifty--tall, intense, graceful. It was rumored that
he was a prince out of Russia--almost any one can be a prince out of
Russia at Monte Carlo! He had stacks of gold and he distributed it
with a lavish hand. He piled it in little golden towers over a score
of numbers; and when his numbers fell wrong his towers fell with them,
and the croupier raked great masses of metal into his basket. There was
not the slightest indication on his pale impassive face that the loss
or the gain was of the slightest interest to him. He handed crisp bills
to the clerk in charge of the bank and received more gold to play his
numbers. When he wearied, after a dozen failures--a breathing throng
watching him with moist lips and damp, eager eyes--he rose and strolled
forth to another chamber, rolling a cigarette as he went. He had lost
thousands and thousands.
The next morning it was lovely and sunshiny again. Sitting out on my
balcony high over the surrounding land, commanding as it did all of
Monte Carlo, the bay of Mentone and Cap Martin, I made many solemn
resolutions. This gay life here was meretricious and artificial,
I decided. Gambling was a vice, in spite of Sir Scorp’s lofty
predilection for it; it drew to and around it the allied viciousness of
the world, gormandizing, harlotry, wastefulness, vain-glory. I resolved
here in the cool morning that I would reform. I would see something of
the surrounding country and then leave for Italy where I would forget
all this.
I started out with Barfleur about ten to see the Oceanographical Museum
and to lunch at the Princess, but the day did not work out exactly
as we planned. We visited the Oceanographical Museum; but I found it
amazingly dull--the sort of a thing a prince making his money out of
gambling would endow. It may have vast scientific ramifications, but I
doubt it. A meager collection of insects and dried specimens quickly
gave me a headache. The only case that really interested me was the one
containing a half-dozen octopi of large size. I stood transfixed before
their bulbous centers and dull, muddy, bronze-green arms, studded with
suckers. I can imagine nothing so horrible as to be seized upon by one
of these things, and I fairly shivered as I stood in front of the case.
Barfleur contemplated solemnly the possibility of his being attacked by
one of them, monocle and all. He foresaw a swift end to his career.
We came out into the sunlight and viewed with relief, by contrast
with the dull museum, the very new and commonplace cathedral--oh,
exceedingly poorly executed--and the castle or palace or residence
of His Highness, the Prince of Monaco. I cannot imagine why Europe
tolerates this man with his fine gambling privileges unless it is that
the different governments look with opposition on the thought of any
other government having so fine a source of wealth. France should have
it by rights; and it would be suitable that the French temperament
should conduct such an institution. The palace of the Prince of Monaco
was as dull as his church and his museum; and the Monacoan Army drawn
up in front of his residence for their morning exercise looked like a
company of third-rate French policemen.
However I secured as fine an impression of the beauty of Monaco and
the whole coast from this height, as I received at any time during my
stay; for it is like the jewel of a ring projecting out of the sea. You
climb up to the Oceanographical Museum and the palace by a series of
stairways and walks that from time to time bring you out to the sheer
edge of the cliff overlooking the blue waters below. There is expensive
gardening done here, everywhere; for you find vines and flowers and
benches underneath the shade of palms and umbrella trees where you can
sit and look out over the sea. Lovely panoramas confront you in every
direction; and below, perhaps as far down as three and four hundred
feet, you can see and hear the waves breaking and the foam eddying
about the rocks. The visitor to Monte Carlo, I fancy, is not greatly
disturbed about scenery, however. Such walks as these are empty and
still while the Casino is packed to the doors. The gaming-tables are
the great center; and to these we ourselves invariably returned.