Mentone

Italiam petimus....

Discovered, in a local library--a genuine old maid's library: full of

the trashiest novels--those two volumes of sketches by J. A. Symonds,

and forthwith set to comparing the Mentone of his day with that of ours.

What a transformation! The efforts of Dr. James Henry Bennet and

friends, aided and abetted by the railway, have converted the idyllic

fishing village into--something different. So vanishes another fair spot

from earth. And I knew it. Yet some demon has deposited me on these

shores, where life is spent in a round of trivialities.

One fact suffices. Symonds, driving over from Nice, at last found

himself at the door of "the inn." The inn.... Are there any inns left at

Mentone?

À propos of inns, here is a suggestive state of affairs. At the present

moment, twenty-two of the principal hotels and pensions of Mentone are

closed, because owned or controlled or managed by Germans. Does not this

speak rather loudly in favour of Teuton enterprise? Where, in a German

town of 18,000 inhabitants, will you find twenty-two such establishments

in the hands of Frenchmen?

The statistical mood is upon me. I wander either among the tombs of that

cemetery overhead, studying sepulchral inscriptions and drawing

deductions, from what is therein stated regarding the age, nationality

and other circumstances of the deceased, as to the relative number of

consumptives here interred. Sixty per cent, shall we say? Or else, in

the streets of the town, I catch myself endeavouring--hitherto without

success--to count up the number of grocers' shops. They are far in

excess of what is needful. Now, why? Well, your tailor or hatter or

hosier--he makes a certain fixed profit on each article he sells, and he

does not sell them at every moment of the day. The other, quite apart

from small advantages to be gained owing to the ever-shifting prices of

his wares, is ceaselessly engaged in dispensing trifles, on each of

which he makes a small gain. The grocery business commends itself warmly

to the French genius for garnering halfpennies. Nowhere on earth, I

fancy, will you see butter more meticulously weighed than here. Buy a

ton of it, and they will replace on their counter a fragment of the

weight and size of a postage stamp, rather than let the balance descend

on your side.

And so the days, the weeks, have passed. Will one ever again escape from

Mentone? It may well be colder in Italy, but anything is preferable to

this inane Riviera existence....

I am not prone to recommend restaurants, or to discommend them, for the

simple reason that, if they have proved bad, I smile to think of other

men being poisoned and robbed as well as myself; as to the good

ones--why, only a fool would reveal their whereabouts. Since, however, I

hope so to order my remaining days of life as never to be obliged to

return to these gimcrack regions, there is no inducement for withholding

the name of the Merle Blanc at Monte Carlo, a quite unpretentious place

of entertainment that well deserves its name--white blackbirds being

rather scarcer here than elsewhere. The food is excellent--it has a

cachet of its own; the wine more than merely good. And this is

surprising, for the local mixtures (either Italian stuff which is dumped

down in shiploads at Nice, Marseille, Cette, etc., or else the poor

though sometimes aromatic product of the Var) are not gratifying to the

palate. One imbibes them, none the less, in preference to anything else,

as it is a peculiarity of what goes under the name of wine hereabouts

that the more you pay for it, the worse it tastes. If you adventure into

the Olympic spheres of Chateau Lafite and so forth, you may put your

trust in God, or in a blue pill. Chateau Cassis would be a good name for

these finer vintages, seeing that the harmless black currant enters

largely into their composition, though not in sufficient quantity to

render them wholly innocuous. Which suggests a little problem for the

oenophilist. What difference of soil or exposure or climate or treatment

can explain the fact that Mentone is utterly deficient in anything

drinkable of native origin, whereas Ventimiglia, a stone's throw

eastwards, can boast of its San Biagio, Rossese, Latte, Dolceacqua and

other noble growths, the like of which are not to be found along the

whole length of the French Riviera?

Having pastured the inner man, to his complete satisfaction, at the

hospitable Merle Blanc, our traveller will do well to pasture his eyes

on the plants in the Casino gardens. Whoever wants to see flowers and

trees on their best behaviour, must come to Monte Carlo, where the

spick-and-span Riviera note is at its highest development. Not a leaf is

out of place; they have evidently been groomed and tubbed and manicured

from the hour of their birth. And yet--is it possible? Lurking among all

this modern splendour of vegetation, as though ashamed to show their

faces, may be discerned a few lowly olive trees. Well may they skulk!

For these are the Todas and Veddahs, the aboriginals of Monte Carlo, who

peopled its sunny slopes in long-forgotten days of rustic life--once

lords of the soil, now pariahs. What are they doing here? And how comes

it that the eyesore has not yet been detected and uprooted by those

keen-sighted authorities that perform such wonders in making the visitor

feel at home, and hush up with miraculous dexterity everything in the

nature of a public scandal?

In exemplification whereof, let me tell a trivial Riviera tale. There

was an Englishwoman here, one of those indestructible modern ladies who

breakfast off an ether cocktail and half a dozen aspirins and feel all

the better for it, and who, one day, found herself losing rather heavily

at the tables. "Another aspirin is going to turn my luck," she thought,

and therewith swallowed surreptitiously her last tabloid of the panacea.

Not unobserved, however; for straightway two elegant gentlemen--they

might have been Russian princes--pounced upon her and led her to that

underground operating-room where a kindly physician is in perennial

attendance. He brushed aside her explanations.

"It would be a thousand pities for so charming a lady to poison herself.

But since you wish to take that step, why choose the Casino which has a

reputation to keep up? Are there not hotels----"

"I tell you it was only aspirin."

"Alas, we are sufficiently familiar with that tale! Now, Madam, let us

not lose a moment! It is a question of life and death."

"Aspirin, I tell you----"

"Kindly submit, or the three of us will be obliged to employ force."

The stomach-pump was produced.

It is the drawback of all sea-side places that half the landscape is

unavailable for purposes of human locomotion, being covered by useless

water. Mentone is more unfortunate than most of them, for its Hinterland

is so cloven and contorted that unless you keep on the main roads, or

content yourself with short but pleasant strolls, you will soon find all

progress barred by some natural obstruction. And one really cannot walk

along the esplanade all day long, though it is worth while, once in a

lifetime, continuing that promenade as far as Cap Martin, if only in

memory of the inspiration which Symonds drew therefrom. Who, he

asks--who can resist the influence of Greek ideas at the Cape St.

Martin? Anybody can, nowadays. The place is encrusted with smug villas

of parvenus (wherein we include the Empress Eugénie), to say nothing of

that preposterous hotel at the very point, which disfigures the country

for leagues around.

On other occasions you may find your way towards evening up to Gorbio

and stay for supper, provided you do not mind being cheated. Or wander

further afield, over Sospel to Breil by the old path--note the lavender:

they make a passable perfume of it--or else to Moulinet (famous for bad

food and a mastodontic breed of mosquitoes) and thence along the

stream--note the bushes of wild box--and over a wooded ridge to the

breezy heights of Peira Cava, there to dream away the daylight under the

pines. These are summer rambles. At present the snow lies deep.

One of my favourite excursions has been up the so-called Berceau, the

cradle-shaped hill which dominates Mentone on the east. I was there

to-day for a solitary luncheon, resting awhile in the timbered saddle

between the peaks. The summit is only about five minutes' walk from this

delectable grove, but its view inland is partially intercepted by a

higher ridge. From here, if you are in the mood, you may descend

eastward over the Italian frontier, crossing the stream which is spanned

lower down by the bridge of St. Louis, and find yourself at Mortola

Superiore (try the wine) and then at Mortola proper (try the wine).

Somewhere in this gulley was killed the last wolf of these regions; so a

grey-haired local Nimrod told me. He had wrought much mischief in his

time. That is to say, he was not killed, but accidentally

drowned--drowned in one of those artificial reservoirs which are

periodically filled and drawn off for irrigating the gardens lower down;

an ignoble death, for a wolf! A goat lay drowned beside him. The event,

he reckoned, must have taken place half a century ago. Since then, the

wolf has never been seen.

This afternoon, however, I preferred to repose in that shady dell, while

a flock of goldcrests were investigating the branches overhead and two

buzzards cruised, in dreamy spirals, about the sunny sky of midday; to

repose; to indulge my genius and review the situation; to profit, in

short, by that sense of aloofness peculiar to such aerial spots, which

tempts the mind to set its house in order. What are we doing, in these

empty regions? Why not wander hence? That cursed traveller's gift of

sitting still; of remaining stationary, no matter where, until one is

actually pushed away! And yet, how enjoyable this land might be, were it

inhabited by any race save one whose thousand little meannesses, public

and private, are calculated to drain away a man's last ounce of

self-respect! Not many are the glad memories I shall carry from Mentone.

I can think of no more than two.

There is my landlady, to begin with, who spies out every detail of my

daily life; of decent birth and richer than Croesus, but inflamed with a

peevish penuriousness which no amount of plain speaking on my part will

correct. Never a day passes that she does not permit herself some

jocular observation anent my spendthrift habits. The following is an

example of our matutinal converse:

"I fear, Monsieur, you omitted to put out the light in a certain place

last night. It was burning when I returned home."

"Certainly not, Madame. I have been nicely brought up. I never visit

places at night. You ought to be familiar with my habits after all this

time."

"True. Then it must have been some one else. Ah, these electricians'

bills!"

Or this:

"Monsieur, Monsieur! The English Consul called yesterday with his little

dog at about five o'clock. He waited in your room, but you never came

back."

"Five o'clock? I was at the baths."

"I have heard of that establishment. What do they charge for a hot

bath?"

"Three francs----"

"Bon Dieu!"

"--if you take an abonnement. Otherwise, it may well be more."

"And so you go there. Why then--why must you also wash in the morning

and splash water on my floor? It may have to be polished after your

departure. Would you mind asking the Consul, by the way, not to sit on

the bed? It weakens the springs."

Or this:

"Might I beg you, Monsieur, to tread more lightly on the carpet in your

room? I bought it only nine years ago, and it already shows signs of

wear."

"Nine years--that old rag? It must have survived by a miracle."

"I do not ask you to avoid using it. I only beg you will tread as

lightly as possible."

"Carpets are meant to be worn out."

"You would express yourself less forcibly, if you had to pay for them."

"Let us say then: carpets are meant to be trodden on."

"Lightly."

"I am not a fairy, Madame."

"I wish you were, Monsieur."

Thrice already, in a burst of confidence, has she told me the story of

an egg--an egg which rankles in the memory. Some years ago, it seems,

she went to a certain shop (naming it)--a shop she has avoided ever

since--to buy an egg; and paid the full price--yes, the full price--of a

fresh egg. That particular egg was not fresh. So far from fresh was it,

that she experienced considerable difficulty in swallowing it.

A memorable episode occurred about a fortnight ago. I was greeted

towards 8 a.m. with moanings in the passage, where Madame tottered

around, her entire head swathed in a bundle of nondescript woollen

wraps, out of which there peered one steely, vulturesque eye. She looked

more than ever like an animated fungus.

Her teeth--her teeth! The pain was past enduring. The whole jaw, rather;

all the teeth at one and the same time; they were unaccountably loose

and felt, moreover, three inches longer than they ought to feel. Never

had she suffered such agony--never in all her life. What could it be?

It was easy to diagnose periostitis, and prescribe tincture of iodine.

"That will cost about a franc," she observed.

"Very likely."

"I think I'll wait."

Next day the pain was worse instead of better. She would give anything

to obtain relief--anything!

"Anything?" I inquired. "Then you had better have a morphia injection. I

have had numbers of them, for the same trouble. The pain will vanish

like magic. There is my friend Dr. Théophile Fornari----"

"I know all about him. He demands five francs a visit, even from poor

people like myself."

"You really cannot expect a busy practitioner to come here and climb

your seventy-two stairs for much less than five francs."

"I think I'll wait. Anyhow, I am not wasting money on food just now, and

that is a consolation."

Now periostitis can hardly be called an amusing complaint, and I would

have purchased a franc's worth of iodine for almost anybody on earth.

Not then. On the contrary, I grew positively low-spirited when, after

three more days, the lamentations began to diminish in volume. They were

sweet music to my ears, at the time. They are sweeter by far, in

retrospect. If only one could extract the same amount of innocent and

durable pleasure out of all other landladies!...

My second joyful memory centres round another thing of beauty--a spiky

agave (miscalled aloe) of monstrous dimensions which may be seen in the

garden of a certain hill-side hotel. Many are the growths of this kind

which I have admired in various lands; none can vaunt as proud and

harmonious a development as this one. You would say it had been cast in

some dull blue metal. The glaucous wonder stands by itself, a prodigy of

good style, more pleasing to the eye than all that painfully generated

tropicality of Mr. Hanbury's Mortola paradise. It is flawless. Vainly

have I teased my fancy, endeavouring to discover the slightest defect in

shape or hue. Firm-seated on the turf, in exultant pose, with a pallid

virginal bloom upon those mighty writhing leaves, this plant has drawn

me like a magnet, day after day, to drink deep draughts of contentment

from its exquisite lines.

For the rest, the whole agave family thrives at Mentone; the ferox is

particularly well represented; one misses, among others, that delightful

medio-picta variety, of which I have noticed only a few indifferent

specimens. [1] It is the same with the yuccas; they flourish here,

though one kind, again, is conspicuous by its absence-- the Atkinsi

(some such name, for it is long since I planted my last yucca) with

drooping leaves of golden-purple. You will be surprised at the number of

agaves in flower here. The reason is, that they are liable to be moved

about for ornamental purposes when they want to be at rest; the plant,

more sensitive and fastidious than it looks, is outraged by this

forceful perambulation and, in an access of premature senility, or

suicidal mania, or sheer despair, gives birth to its only flower--herald

of death. The fatal climax could be delayed if gardeners, in

transplanting, would at least take the trouble to set them in their old

accustomed exposure so far as the cardinal points are concerned. But

your professional gardener knows everything; it is useless for an

amateur to offer him advice; worse than useless, of course, to ask him

for it. Indeed, the flowers, even the wild ones, might almost reconcile

one to a life on the Riviera. Almost.... I recall a comely plant, for

instance, seven feet high at the end of June, though now slumbering

underground, in the Chemin de Saint Jacques--there, where the steps

begin----

Almost....

And here my afternoon musings, up yonder, took on a more acrid

complexion. I remembered a recent talk with one of the teachers at the

local college who lamented that his pupils displayed a singular dullness

in their essays; never, in his long career at different schools, had he

met with boys more destitute of originality. What could be expected, we

both agreed? Mentone was of recent growth--the old settlement, Mentone

of Symonds, proclaims its existence only by a ceaseless and infernal

clanging of bells, rivalling Malta--no history, no character, no

tradition--a mushroom town inhabited by shopkeepers and hôteliers who

are there for the sole purpose of plucking foreigners: how should a

youngster's imagination be nurtured in this atmosphere of savourless

modernism? Then I asked myself: who comes to these regions, now that

invalids have learnt the drawbacks of their climate? Decayed Muscovites,

Englishmen such as you will vainly seek in England, and their painted

women-folk with stony, Medusa-like gambling eyes, a Turk or two, Jews

and cosmopolitan sharks and sharpers, flamboyant Americans, Brazilian,

Peruvian, Chilian, Bolivian rastaqueros with names that read like a

nightmare (see "List of Arrivals" in New York Herald)--the whole exotic

riff-raff enlivened and perfumed by a copious sprinkling of

horizontales.

And I let my glance wander along that ancient Roman road which led from

Italy to Arles and can still be traced, here and there; I took in the

section from Genoa to Marseille, an enormous stretch of country, and

wondered: what has this coast ever produced in the way of thought or

action, of great men or great women? There is Doria at Genoa, and Gaby

Deslys at Marseille; that may well exhaust the list. Ah, and half-way

through, a couple of generals, born at Nice. It is really an instructive

phenomenon, and one that should appeal to students of Buckle--this

relative dearth of every form of human genius in one of the most

favoured regions of the globe. Here, for unexplained reasons, the

Italian loses his better qualities; so does the Frenchman. Are the

natives descended from those mysterious Ligurians? Their reputation was

none of the best; they were more prompt, says Crinagoras, in devising

evil than good. That Mentone man, to be sure, whose remains you may

study at Monaco and elsewhere, was a fine fellow, without a doubt. He

lived rather long ago. Even he, by the way, was a tourist on these

shores. And were the air of Mentone not unpropitious to the composition

of anything save a kind of literary omelette soufflée, one might like to

expatiate on Sergi's remarkable book, and devise thereto an incongruous

footnote dealing with the African origin of sundry Greek gods, and

another one referring to the extinction of these splendid races of men;

how they came to perish so utterly, and what might be said in favour of

that novel theory of the influence of an ice-age on the germplasm

producing mutations--new races which breed true ... enough! Let us

remain at the Riviera level.

In the little museum under those cliffs by the sea, where the Grimaldi

caves are, I found myself lately together with a young French couple,

newly married. The little bride was vastly interested in the attendant's

explanations of the habits of those remote folk, but, as I could plainly

see, growing more and more distrustful of his statements as to what

happened all those hundreds of thousands of years ago.

"And this, Messieurs, is the jaw-bone of a cave-bear--the competitor,

one might say, in the matter of lodging-houses, with the gentleman whose

anatomy we have just inspected. Here are bones of hippopotamus, and

rhinoceros, which he hunted with the weapons you saw. And the object on

which your arm is reposing, Madame, is the tooth of an elephant. Our

ancestor must have been pretty costaud to kill an elephant with a

stone."

"Elephants?" she queried. "Did elephants scramble about these precipices

and ravines? I should like to have seen that."

"Pardon me, Madame. He probably killed them down there," and his arm

swept over the blue Mediterranean, lying at our feet. "Do you mean to

say that elephants paddled across from Algiers in order to be

assassinated by your old skeleton? I should like to have seen that."

"Pardon me, Madame. The Mediterranean did not exist in those days."

The suggestion that this boundless sea should ever have been dry land,

and in the time of her own ancestors, was too much for the young lady.

She smiled politely, and soon I heard her whispering to her husband:

"I had him there, eh? Quel farceur!"

"Yes. You caught him nicely, I must say. But one must not be too hard on

these poor devils. They have got to earn their bread somehow."

This will never do.

Italiam petimus....