more aristocratic and thousands can be lost and won in a night.
Everybody looks tired, absent, inattentive; nobody takes much notice of
his neighbour or of the spectators looking on; nobody cares to speak; a
finger suffices to direct the croupier to push the stake on to the
desired spot, a nod or a look to indicate the winner. The game goes on
in a dull uniformity; nobody varies his stake; a few napoleons are added
to or subtracted from the heaps before each as the minutes go on;
sometimes a little sum is done on a paper beside the player; but there
is the same impassive countenance, the same bored expression everywhere.
Now and then one player gets quietly up and another sits quietly down.
But there is nothing startling or dramatic, no frenzies of hope or
exclamations of despair, nothing of the gambler of fiction with "his
hands clasped to his burning forehead," and the like. To any one who is
not fascinated by the mere look of rolls of napoleons pushed from one
colour to another, or of gold raked about in little heaps, there is
something very difficult to understand in the spell which a gaming-table
exercises. Roulette is a little more amusing, as it is more intelligible
to the looker-on. The stakes are smaller, the company changes oftener,
and is socially more varied. There is not such a dead, heavy earnestness
about these riskers of five-franc pieces as about the more desperate
gamblers of rouge-et-noir; the outside fringe of lookers-on bend over
with their stakes to back "a run of luck," and there is a certain quiet
buzz of interest when the game seems going against the bank. There is
always someone going and coming, over-dressed girls lean over and drop
their stake and disappear, young clerks bring their quarter's salary,
the casual visitor "doesn't mind risking a few francs" at roulette.
But even the excitement of roulette is of the gravest and dullest order.
The only player who seems to throw any kind of vivacity into his
gambling is a gaudy little Jew with heavy watch-chain, who vibrates
between one table and another, sees nothing of the game save the
dropping his stake at roulette and then rushing off to drop another
stake at rouge-et-noir, and finds time in his marches to spare a merry
little word to a friend or two. But he is the only person who seems to
know anybody. Men who sit by one another year after year never exchange
a word. There is not even the air of reckless adventure to excite one.
The player who dashes down his all on any part of the table and trusts
to fortune is a mere creature of fiction; the gambler of fact is a
calculator, a man of business, with a contempt for speculation and a
firm belief in long-studied combination. Each has his little card, and
ticks off the succession of numbers with the accuracy of a ledger. It is
in the careful study of these statistics that each believes he discovers
the secret of the game, the arrangement which, however it may be
defeated for a time by inscrutable interference of ill-luck, must in the
end, if there is any truth in statistics, be successful. One looks in
vain for the "reckless gambler" one has read about and talked about, for
"reckless" is the very last word by which one would describe the ring of
business-like people who come day after day with the hope of making
money by an ingenious dodge.
Their talk, if one listens to it over the dinner-table, turns altogether
on this business-like aspect of the question. Nobody takes the least
interest in its romantic or poetic side, in the wonderful runs of luck
or the terrible stories of ruin and despair which form the
stock-in-trade of the novelist. The talk might be that of a conference
of commercial travellers. Everybody has his infallible nostrum for
breaking the bank; but everybody looks upon the prospect of such a
fortune in a purely commercial light. The general opinion of the wiser
sort goes against heavy stakes, and "wild play" is only talked about
with contempt. The qualities held in honour, so far as we can gather
from the conversation, are "judgment," which means a careful study of
the little cards and a certain knowledge of mathematics, and
"constancy"--the playing not from caprice but on a definite plan and
principle. Nobody has the least belief in "luck." A winner is
congratulated on his "science." The loser explains the causes of his
loss. A portly person who announces himself as one of a company of
gamblers who have invested an enormous capital on a theory of winning by
means of low stakes and a certain combination excites universal
interest. Most of the talkers describe themselves frankly as men of
business. No doubt at Monaco, as elsewhere, there is the usual
aristocratic fringe--the Russian prince who flings away an estate at a
sitting, the half-blind countess from the Faubourg St. Germain, the
Polish dancer with a score of titles, the English "milord." But the bulk
of the players have the look and air of people who have made their money
in trade. It is well to look on at such a scene, if only to strip off
the romance which has been so profusely showered over it. As a matter of
fact nothing is more prosaic, nothing meaner in tone, nothing more
utterly devoid of interest, than a gambling-table. But as a question of
profit the establishment of M. Blanc throws into the shade the older
piracy of Monaco. The Venetian galleons, the carracks of Genoa, the
galleys of Marseilles, brought infinitely less gold to its harbour than
these two little groups of the fools of half a continent.
SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
IV.
THE WINTER RETREAT.
It is odd, when one is safely anchored in a winter refuge to look back
at the terrors and reluctance with which one first faced the sentence of
exile. Even if sunshine were the only gain of a winter flitting, it
would still be hard to estimate the gain. The cold winds, the icy
showers, the fogs we leave behind us, give perhaps a zest not wholly its
own to Italian sunshine. But the abrupt plunge into a land of warmth and
colour sends a strange shock of pleasure through every nerve. The
flinging off of wraps and furs, the discarding of greatcoats, is like
the beginning of a new life. It is not till we pass in this sharp,
abrupt fashion from the November of one side the Alps to the November of
the other that we get some notion of the way in which the actual range
and freedom of life is cramped by the "chill north-easters" in which
Mr. Kingsley revelled. The unchanged vegetation, the background of dark
olive woods, the masses of ilex, the golden globes of the orange hanging
over the garden wall, are all so many distinct gains to an eye which has
associated winter with leafless boughs and a bare landscape. One has
almost a boyish delight in plucking roses at Christmas or hunting for
violets along the hedges on New Year's Day. There are chill days of
course, and chiller nights, but cold is a relative term and loses its
English meaning in spots where snow falls once or twice in a year and
vanishes before midday. The mere break of habit is delightful; it is
like a laughing defiance of established facts to lounge by the seashore
in the hot sun-glare of a January morning. And with this new sense of
liberty comes little by little a freedom from the overpowering dread of
chills and colds and coughs which only invalids can appreciate. It is an
indescribable relief not to look for a cold round every corner. The
"lounging" which becomes one's life along the Riviera or the Bay of
Naples is only another name for the ease and absence of anxiety which
the mere presence of constant sunshine gives to life.
Few people, in fact, actually "lounge" less than the English exiles who
bask in the sun of Italy. Their real danger lies in the perpetual
temptation to over-exertion which arises from the sense of renewed
health. Every village on its hilltop, every white shrine glistening high
up among the olives, seems to woo one up the stony paths and the long
hot climb to the summit. But the relief from home itself, the break away
from all the routine of one's life, is hardly less than the relief from
greatcoats. It is not till our life is thoroughly disorganized, till the
grave mother of a family finds herself perched on a donkey, or the
_habitue_ of Pall Mall sees himself sauntering along through the olive
groves, that one realizes the iron bounds within which our English
existence moves. Every holiday of course brings this home to one more or
less, but the long holiday of a whole winter brings it home most of all.
England and English ways recede and become unreal. Old prepossessions
and prejudices lose half their force when sea and mountains part us from
their native soil. It is hard to keep up our vivid interest in the
politics of Little Pedlington, or to maintain our old excitement over
the matrimonial fortunes of Miss Hominy. It becomes possible to
breakfast without the last telegram and to go to bed without the news of
a fresh butchery. One's real interest lies in the sunshine, in the
pleasure of having sunshine to-day, in the hope of having sunshine
to-morrow.
But really to enjoy the winter retreat one must keep as much as possible
out of the winter retreat itself. Few places are more depressing in
their social aspects than these picturesque little Britains. The winter
resort is a colony of squires with the rheumatism, elderly maidens with
delicate throats, worn-out legislators, a German princess or two with a
due train of portly and short-sighted chamberlains, girls with a hectic
flush of consumption, bronchitic parsons, barristers hurried off circuit
by the warning cough. The life of these patients is little more than the
life of a machine. As the London physician says when he bids them
"good-bye," "The nearer you can approach to the condition of a vegetable
the better for your chances of recovery." All the delicious
uncertainties and irregularities that make up the freedom of existence
disappear. The day is broken up into a number of little times and
seasons. Dinner comes at midday, and is as exact to its moment as the
early breakfast or the "heavy tea." And between each meal there are
medicines to be taken, inhalations to be gone through, the due hour of
rest to be allotted to digestion, the other due hour to exercise.
The air of the sick-room lingers everywhere about the place; one
catches, as it were, the far-off hush of the Campo Santo. Life is
reduced to its lowest expression; people exist rather than live. Every
one remembers that every one else is an invalid. Voices are soft,
conversation is subdued, visits are short. There is a languid, sickly
sweetness in the very courtesy of society. Gaiety is simply regarded as
a danger. Every hill is a temptation to too long and fatiguing a climb.
No sunshine makes "the patient" forget his wraps. No coolness of
delicious shade moves him to repose. His whole energy and watchfulness
is directed to the avoidance of a chill. Life becomes simply
barometrical. An east wind is the subject of public lamentation; the
vast mountain range to the north is admired less for its wild grandeur
than for the shelter it affords against the terrible mistral. Excitement
is a word of dread. Distance itself takes something of the sharpness
and vividness off from the old cares and interests of home. The very
letters that reach the winter resort are doctored, and "incidents which
might excite" are excluded by the care of correspondents: Mamma only
hears of Johnny's measles when Johnny is running about again. The young
scapegrace at Oxford is far too considerate to trouble his father,
against the doctor's orders, with the mention of his failure in the
schools. News comes with all colour strained and filtered out of it
through the columns of 'Galignani.' The neologian heresy, the debate in
Convocation which would have stirred the heart of the parson at home,
fall flat in the shape of a brown and aged 'Times.' There are no
"evenings out." The first sign of eve is the signal for dispersion
homewards, and it is only from the safe shelter of his own room that the
winter patient ventures to gaze on the perilous glories of the sunset.
The evenings are in fact a dawdle indoors as the day has been a dawdle
out, a little music, a little reading of the quiet order, a little chat,
a little letter-writing, and an early to bed.
It is this calm monotony of day after day at which the world of the
winter resort deliberately aims, a life like that of the deities of
Epicurus, untouched by the cares or interests of the world without. The
very gaiety is of the same subdued and quiet order--drives,
donkey-rides, picnics of the small and early type. An air of slow
respectability pervades the place; the bulk of the colonists are people
well-to-do, who can afford the expense of a winter away from home and of
a villa at L150 the season. The bankrupt element of Boulogne, the
half-pay element of Dinan or Avranches, is as rare on the Riviera as the
loungers who rejoice in the many-changing toilets of Arcachon or
Biarritz. The quiet humdrum tone of the parson best harmonises with that
of the winter resort, and parsons of all sorts abound there.
But the chaplain is not here, as in other little Britains, the centre of
social life; he is superseded by the doctor. The winter resort in fact
owes its origin to the doctor. The little village or the country town
looks with awe upon the man who has discovered for it a future of
prosperity, at whose call hosts of rich strangers come flocking from the
ends of the earth, at whose bidding villas rise white among the olives,
and parades stretch along the shore. "I found it a fishing hamlet," the
doctor may say with Augustus, "and I leave it a city." It is amusing to
see the awful submission which the city-builder expects in return. The
most refractory of patients trembles at the threat of his case being
abandoned. The doctor has his theories about situation. You are
lymphatic, and are ordered down to the very edge of the sea; you are
excitable, and must hurry from your comfortable lodgings to the highest
nook among the hills. He has his theories about diet, and you sink
obediently to milk and water. His one object of hostility and contempt
is your London physician. He tears up his rival's prescriptions with
contempt, he reverses the treatment. He sighs as you bid him farewell to
return to advice which is so likely to prove fatal. The London
physician, it is true, hints that though the oracle of the winter resort
is a clever man he is also a quack. But a quack soars into a greatness
beyond criticism when he creates cities and rules hundreds of patients
with his nod.
SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
V.
SAN REMO.
San Remo, though youngest in date, bids fair to become the most popular
of all the health resorts of the Riviera. At no other point along the
coast is the climate so mild and equable. The rural quiet and repose of
the place form a refreshing contrast with the Brighton-like gaiety of
Nizza or Cannes; even Mentone looks down with an air of fashionable
superiority on a rival almost destitute of promenades, and whose
municipality sighs in vain for a theatre. To the charms of quiet and
sunshine the place adds that of a peculiar beauty. The Apennines rise
like a screen behind the amphitheatre of soft hills that enclose
it--hills soft with olive woods, and dipping down into gardens of lemon
and orange, and vineyards dotted with palms. An isolated spur juts out
from the centre of the semicircle, and from summit to base of it tumbles
the oddest of Italian towns, a strange mass of arches and churches and
steep lanes, rushing down like a stone cataract to the sea. On either
side of the town lie deep ravines, with lemon gardens along their
bottoms, and olives thick along their sides. The olive is the
characteristic tree of San Remo. As late as the sixteenth century the
place was renowned for its palms; a palm tree stands on the civic
escutcheon, and the privilege of supplying the papal chapel with palm
branches in the week before Easter is still possessed by a family of San
Remese. But the palm has wandered off to Bordighera, and the high price
of oil during the early part of this century has given unquestioned
supremacy to the olive. The loss is after all a very little one, for the
palm, picturesque as is its natural effect, assumes any but picturesque
forms when grown for commercial purposes, while the thick masses of the
olive woods form a soft and almost luxurious background to every view of
San Remo.
What strikes one most about the place in an artistic sense is its
singular completeness. It lies perfectly shut in by the circle of
mountains, the two headlands in which they jut into the sea, and the
blue curve of the bay. It is only by climbing to the summit of the Capo
Nero or the Capo Verde that one sees the broken outline of the coast
towards Genoa or the dim forms of the Estrelles beyond Cannes. Nowhere
does the outer world seem more strangely far-off and unreal. But between
headland and headland it is hardly possible to find a point from which
the scene does not group itself into an exquisite picture with the white
gleaming mass of San Remo for a centre. Small too as the space is, it is
varied and broken by the natural configuration of the ground; everywhere
the hills fall steeply to the very edge of the sea and valleys and
ravines go sharply up among the olive woods. Each of these has its own
peculiar beauty; in the valley of the Romolo for instance, to the west
of the town, the grey mass of San Remo perched on a cliff-like steep,
the rocky bed of the torrent below, the light and almost fantastic arch
that spans it, the hills in the background with the further snow range
just peeping over them, leave memories that are hard to forget. It is
easy too for a good walker to reach sterner scenes than those
immediately around; a walk of two hours brings one among the pines of
San Romolo, an hour's drive plunges one into the almost Alpine scenery
of Ceriana. But for the ordinary frequenters of a winter resort the
chief attractions of the place will naturally lie in the warmth and
shelter of San Remo itself. Protected as it is on every side but that of
the sea, it is free from the dreaded mistral of Cannes and from the
sharp frost winds that sweep down the torrent-bed of Nizza. In the
earlier part of the first winter I spent there the snow, which lay thick
in the streets of Genoa and beneath even the palms of Bordighera, only
whitened the distant hilltops at San Remo. Christmas brought at last a
real snowfall, but every trace of it vanished before the sun-glare of
midday. From sunset to sunrise indeed the air is sometimes bitterly
cold, but the days themselves are often pure summer days.
What gives a special charm to San Remo, as to the other health-stations
along the Cornice, is the fact that winter and spring are here the
season of flowers. Roses nod at one over the garden-walls, violets peep
shyly out along the terraces, a run uphill brings one across a bed of
narcissus. It is odd to open one's window on a January morning and count
four-and-twenty different kinds of plants in bloom in the garden below.
But even were flowers absent, the character of the vegetation excludes
from northern eyes the sense of winter. The bare branches of the
fig-tree alone remind one that "summer is over and gone." Every
homestead up the torrent-valleys is embosomed in the lustrous foliage of
its lemon gardens. Every rivulet is choked with maiden-hair and delicate
ferns. The golden globes of the orange are the ornament of every garden.
The dark green masses of the olive, ruined by strong winds into sheets
of frosted silver, are the background of the whole. And right in front
from headland to headland lie the bright waters of the Mediterranean,
rising and sinking with a summer's swell, and glancing with a thousand
colours even in the gloomiest weather.
The story of San Remo begins with Saracenic inroads from Corsica and
Sardinia in the ninth century, to which Nizza, Oneglia, and Genoa owed
their walls. But before this time the wild Ligurian coast had afforded
hermitages to the earlier bishops of Genoa; to Siro who became its
apostle, to Romolo who was destined to give his name to the territory of
the town. San Romolo is indeed its invariable designation till the
fifteenth century, and it has been conjectured that its present name is
owing to no fanciful punning on Romulus and Remus but to a popular
contraction of its full ecclesiastical title, "Sancti Romuli in eremo."
It was in this "waste," left without inhabitants by the Saracenic
inroads, that Theodulf, bishop of Genoa, settled a little agricultural
colony round the Carolingian fort and lands which, though within the
feudal jurisdiction of the Counts of Ventimiglia, were the property of
his see. Two centuries passed quietly over the little town ere the
sudden rise of the Consulate here, as at Genoa and Milan, gave it
municipal liberty. The civil authority of the bishops passed to the
communal Parliament, the free assembly of the citizens in the church of
San Stefano; all civil administration, even the right of peace and war,
or of alliance, was exercised with perfect freedom from episcopal
intervention. The rights of the bishop in fact were reduced to the
nomination of the judicial magistrates of the town and the reception of
certain fees; rights which were subsequently sold to the Dorias, and
transferred by the Dorias to the Republic of Genoa.
This great communal revolution, itself a result of the wave of feeling
produced by the Crusades, left its characteristic mark in the armorial
bearings of the town, the Crusaders' Palm upon its shield. While its
neighbours, Ventimiglia and Albenga, sank into haunts of a feudal
noblesse, San Remo became a town of busy merchants, linked by treaties
of commerce with the trading cities of the French and Italian coasts.
The erection of San Siro marked the wealth and devotion of its citizens.
Ruined as it is, like all the churches of the Riviera, by the ochre and
stucco of a tasteless restoration, San Siro still retains much of the
characteristic twelfth-century work of its first foundation. The
alliance of the city with Genoa was that of a perfectly free State. The
terms of the treaty which was concluded between the two Republics in
1361 in the Genoese basilica of San Lorenzo are curious as illustrating
the federal relations of Italian States. It was in effect little more
than a judicial and military convention. Internal legislation, taxation,
rights of independent warfare, peace, and alliance were left wholly in
the power of the free commune. San Remo was bound to contribute ships
and men for service in Genoese warfare, but in return its citizens
shared the valuable privileges of those of Genoa in all parts of the
world. Genoa, as purchaser of the feudal rights of its lords, nominated
the podesta and other judicial officers, but these officers were bound
to administer the laws passed or adopted by the commune. The red cross
of Genoa was placed above the palm tree of San Remo on the shield of the
Republic; and on these terms the federal relations of the two States
continued without quarrel or change for nearly four hundred years.