THE charms of Monte Carlo are many. Our first morning there, to the sound of a horn blowing reveille in the distance, I was up betimes enjoying the wonderful spectacles from my balcony. The sun was just peeping up over the surface of an indigo sea, shooting sharp golden glances in every direction. Up on the mountains, which rise sharp and clear like great unornamented cathedrals back of the jeweled villages of this coast, it was picking out shepherd’s hut and fallen mementoes of the glory that was Rome. A sailboat or two was already making its way out to sea, and below me on that long point of land which is Cap Martin, stretching like a thin green spear into the sea, was the splendid olive orchard which I noted the day before, its gleaming leaves showing a different shade of green from what it had then. I did not know it until the subject came up that olive trees live to be a thousand years old and that they do as well here on this little strip of coast, protected by the high mountains at their back, as they do anywhere in Italy. In fact, as I think of it, this lovely projection of land, no wider than to permit of a few small villages and cities crowding between the sea and the mountains, is a true projection of Italy itself, its palms, olive trees, cypresses, umbrella trees and its peasants and architecture. I understand that a bastard French—half French, half Italian—is spoken here and that only here are the hill cities truly the same as they are in Italy.
While I was gazing at the morning sun and the blue sea and marveling how quickly the comfortable Riviera Express had whirled us out of the cold winds of Paris into this sun-kissed land, Barfleur must have been up and shaving, for presently he appeared, pink and clean in his brown dressing-gown, to sit out on my lovely balcony with me.
“You know,” he said, after he had commented on the wonder of the morning and the delicious soothing quality of the cool air, “Scorp is certainly an old fuss-button. There he lies in there now, ready to pounce on us. Of course he isn’t very strong physically and that makes him irritable. He does so love to be contrary.”
“I think he is a good running-mate for you,” I observed. “If he leans to asceticism in the matter of food, you certainly run to the other extreme. Sybaritic is a mild expression for your character.”
“You don’t mean it?”
“I certainly do.”
“In what way have I shown myself sybaritic?”
I charged him with various crimes. My amicable lecture was interrupted by the arrival of rolls and coffee and we decided to take breakfast in the company of Scorp. We knocked at his door.
“Entrez!”
There he was, propped up in bed, his ascetic face crowned by his brownish black hair and set with those burning dark eyes—a figure of almost classic significance.
“Ah!” he exclaimed grimly, “here he comes. The gourmet’s guide to Europe!”
“Now, do be cheerful this morning, Scorp, do be,” cooed Barfleur. “Remember it is a lovely morning. You are on the Riviera. We are going to have a charming time.”
“You are, anyway!” commented Scorp.
“I am the most sacrificial of men, I assure you,” commented Barfleur. “I would do anything to make you happy. We will go up to La Turbie to-day, if you say, and order a charming lunch. After that we will go to Eze, if you say, and on to Nice for dinner, if you think fit. We will go into the Casino there for a little while and then return. Isn’t that a simple and satisfactory program? Dreiser and I will walk up to La Turbie. You can join us at one for lunch. You think he ought to see Eze, don’t you?”
“Yes, if there isn’t some Café de Paris hidden away up there somewhere where you can gormandize again. If we can just manage to get you past the restaurants!”
So it was agreed: Barfleur and I would walk; Sir Scorp was to follow by train. As the day was balmy and perfect, all those special articles of adornment purchased in London for this trip were extracted from our luggage and duly put on—light weight suits, straw hats and ties of delicate tints; and then we set forth. The road lay in easy swinging S’s, up and up past terraced vineyards and garden patches and old stone cottages and ambling muleteers with their patient little donkeys heavily burdened. Automobiles, I noticed, even at this height came grumbling up or tearing down—and always the cypress tree with its whispering black-green needles and the graceful umbrella tree made artistic architectural frames for the vistas of the sea.
Here and now I should like to pay my tribute to the cypress tree. I saw it later in all its perfection at Pisa, Rome, Florence, Spello, Assisi and elsewhere in Italy, but here at Monte Carlo, or rather outside of it, I saw it first. I never saw it connected with anything tawdry or commonplace and wherever it grows there is dignity and beauty. It is not to be seen anywhere in immediate contact with this feverish Casino world of Monte Carlo. It is as proud as beauty itself, as haughty as achievement. By old ruins, in sacred burial grounds, by worn gates and forgotten palaces it sways and sighs. It is as mournful as death—as somber in its mien as great age and experience—a tree of the elders. Where Rome grew it grew, and to Greek and Roman temples in their prime and pride it added its sacred company.
Plant a cypress tree near my grave when I am dead. To think of its tall spearlike body towering like a stately monument over me would be all that I could artistically ask. If some of this illusory substance which seems to be that which is I, physically, here on this earth, should mingle with its fretted roots and be builded into the noble shaft of its body I should be glad. It would be a graceful and artistic way to disappear into the unknown.
Our climb to La Turbie was in every respect delightful. We stopped often to comment on the cathedral-like character of the peaks, to speculate as to the age of the stone huts.
About half way up we came to a little inn called the Corniche, which really hangs on the cornice of this great range, commanding the wide, blue sweep of the Mediterranean below; and here, under the shade of umbrella trees and cypresses and with the mimosa in full bloom and with some blossom which Barfleur called “cherry-pie” blowing everywhere, we took seats at a little green table to have a pot of tea. It is an American inn—this Corniche—with an American flag fluttering high on a white pole, and an American atmosphere not unlike that of a country farmhouse in Indiana. There were some chickens scratching about the door; and at least three canaries in separate bright brass cages hung in the branches of the surrounding trees. They sang with tremendous energy. With the passing of a muleteer, whose spotted cotton shirt and earth-colored trousers and dusty skin bespoke the lean, narrow life of the peasant, we discussed wealth and poverty, lavish expenditure and meager subsistence, the locust-like quality of the women of fashion and of pleasure, who eat and eat and gorge and glut themselves of the showy things of life without aim or even thought; the peasant on this mountainside, with perhaps no more than ten cents a day to set his beggar board, while below the idle company in the Casino, shining like a white temple from where we sat, were wasting thousands upon thousands of dollars hourly. Barfleur agreed most solemnly with it all. He was quite sympathetic. The tables there, he said, even while we looked, were glutted with gold, and the Prince of Monaco was building, with his surplus earnings, useless marine museums which no one visited.
I was constantly forgetting in our peregrinations about the neighborhood how small the Principality of Monaco is. I am sure it would fit nicely into ten city blocks. A large portion of Monte Carlo encroaches on French territory—only the Casino, the terrace, the heights of Monaco belong to the Principality. One-half of a well-known restaurant there, I believe, is in Monaco and the other half in France. La Turbie, on the heights here, the long road we had come, almost everything in fact, was in France. We went into the French post-office to mail cards and then on to the French restaurant commanding the heights. This particular restaurant commands a magnificent view. A circle about which the automobiles turned in front of its door was supported by a stone wall resting on the sharp slope of the mountain below. All the windows of its principal dining-room looked out over the sea, and of the wonderful view I was never weary. The room had an oriental touch, and the white tables and black-coated waiters accorded ill with this. Still it offered that smartness of service which only the French restaurants possess.
Barfleur was for waiting for Scorp who had not arrived. I was for eating, as I was hungry. Finally we sat down to luncheon and we were consuming the sweet when in he came. His brownish-black eyes burned with their usual critical fire. If Sir Scorp had been born with a religious, reforming spirit instead of a penchant for art he would have been a St. Francis of Assisi. As it was, without anything to base it on, except Barfleur’s gormandizing propensities, he had already established moral censorship over our actions.
“Ah, here you are, eating as usual,” he observed with that touch of lofty sarcasm which at once amused and irritated me. “No excursion without a meal as its object.”
“Sit down, El Greco,” I commented, “and note the beautiful view. This should delight your esthetic soul.”
“It might delight mine, but I am not so sure about yours. Barfleur would certainly see nothing in it if there were not a restaurant here—ha!”
“I found a waiter here who used to serve me in the Café Royal in London,” observed Barfleur cheerfully.
“Now we can die content,” sighed Scorp. “We have been recognized by a French waiter on the Riviera. Ha! Never happy,” he added, turning to me, “unless he is being recognized by waiters somewhere—his one claim to glory.”
We went out to see the ruined monument to Augustus Cæsar, crumbling on this high mountain and commanding the great blue sweep of the Mediterranean below. There were a number of things in connection with this monument which were exceedingly interesting. It illustrated so well the Roman method of construction: a vast core of rubble and brick, faced with marble. Barfleur informed me that only recently the French government had issued an order preventing the removal of any more of the marble, much of which had already been stolen, carted away or cut up here into other forms. Immense marble drums of pure white stone were still lying about, fallen from their places; and in the surrounding huts of the peasant residents of La Turbie could be seen parts of once noble pillars set into the fabric of their shabby doorways or used as corner-stones to support their pathetic little shelters. I recall seeing several of these immense drums of stone set at queer angles under the paper walls of the huts, the native peasants having built on them as a base, quite as a spider might attach its gossamer net to a substantial bush or stone. I reflected at length on the fate of greatness and how little the treasures of one age may be entrusted to another. Time and chance, dullness and wasteful ignorance, lie in wait for them all.
The village of La Turbie, although in France, gave me my first real taste of the Italian village. High up on this mountain above Monte Carlo, in touch really with the quintessence of showy expenditure—clothes, jewels, architecture, food—here it stood, quite as it must have been standing for the last three or four hundred years—its narrow streets clambering up and down between houses of gray stone or brick, covered with gray lichens. I thought of Benvenuto Cellini—how he always turned the corners of the dark, narrow streets of Rome in as wide a circle as possible in order to save himself from any lurking assassin—that he might draw his own knife quickly. Dirt and age and quaintness and romance: it was in these terms that La Turbie spoke to us. Although anxious to proceed to Eze, not so very far away, which they both assured me was so much more picturesque and characteristic, yet we lingered, looking lovingly up and down narrow passages where stairs clambered gracefully, where arches curved picturesquely over streets, and where plants bloomed bravely in spotted, crumbling windows. Age! age! And with it men, women and children of the usual poverty-stricken Italian type—not French, but Italians. Women with bunchy blue or purple skirts, white or colored kerchiefs, black hair, wrinkled, yellow or blackish-brown faces, glittering dark eyes and claw-like hands.
Not far from the center of this moldy scene, flourishing like a great lichen at the foot of Augustus, his magnificent column, was a public fountain, of what date I do not know. The housewives of the community were hard at their washing, piling the wet clothes in soapy masses on the stone rim of the basin. They were pattering and chattering, their skirts looped up at their hips, their heads wound about with cloths of various colors. It brought back to my mind, by way of contrast, the gloomy wash- and bath-house in Bethnal Green, which I have previously commented on. Despite poverty and ignorance, the scene here was so much more inviting—even inspiring. Under a blue sky, in the rays of a bright afternoon sun, beside a moldering but none the less lovely fountain, they seemed a very different kind of mortal—far more fortunate than those I had seen in Bethnal Green and Stepney. What can governments do toward supplying blue skies, broken fountains and humanly stirring and delightful atmosphere? Would Socialism provide these things?
With many backward glances, we departed, conveyed hence in an inadequate little vehicle drawn by one of the boniest horses it has ever been my lot to ride behind. The cheerful driver was as fat as his horse was lean, and as dusty as the road itself. We were wedged tightly in the single green cloth seat, Scorp on one side, I on the other, Barfleur in the middle, expatiating as usual on the charm of life and enduring cheerfully all the cares and difficulties of his exalted and self-constituted office of guide, mentor and friend.
Deep green valleys, dizzy precipices along which the narrow road skirted nervously, tall tops of hills that rose about you craggily or pastorally—so runs the road to Eze and we followed it jestingly, Sir Scorp so dizzy contemplating the depths that we had to hold him in. Barfleur was gay and ebullient. I never knew a man who could become so easily intoxicated with life.
“There you have it,” said Sir Scorp, pointing far down a green slope to where a shepherd was watching his sheep, a cape coat over his arm, a crooked staff in his hand; “there is your pastoral, lineally descended from the ancient Greeks. Barfleur pretends to love nature, but that would not bring him out here. There is no canard à la presse attached to it—no sole walewski.”
“And see the goose-girl!” I exclaimed, as a maiden in bare feet, her skirt falling half way below her knees, crossed the road.
“All provided, my dear boy,” assured Barfleur, beaming on me through his monocle. “Everything as it should be for you. You see how I do. Goose-girls, shepherds, public fountains, old monuments to Cæsar, anything you like. I will show you Eze now. Nothing finer in Europe.”
We were nearing Eze around the green edge of a mountain—its top—and there I saw it, my first hill-city. Not unlike La Turbie, it was old and gray, but with that spectacular dignity which anything set on a hill possesses. Barfleur carefully explained to me that in the olden days—some few hundred years before—the inhabitants of the seashore and plain were compelled to take to the hills to protect themselves against marauding pirates—that the hill-city dates from the earliest times in Italy and was common to the Latins before the dawn of history. Eze towered up, completely surrounded by a wall, the only road leading to it being the one on which we were traveling. By a bridge we crossed a narrow gully, dividing one mountain height from another, and then, discharging our fat cabman and his bony horse, mounted to the open gate or arched door, now quite unguarded. Some of the village children were selling the common flowers of the field, and a native in tight dusty trousers and soft hat was entering.
I think I devoured the strangeness and glamour of Eze as one very hungry would eat a meal. I examined all the peculiarities of this outer entrance and noted how like a hole in a snail shell it was, giving not directly into the old city, or village, but into a path that skirted the outer wall. Above were holes through which defenders could shower arrows and boiling oil upon those who might have penetrated this outer defense. There was a blind passage at one point, luring the invaders into a devilish pocket where their fate was sealed. If one gained this first gate and the second, which gave into a narrow, winding, upward-climbing street, the fighting would be hand to hand and always upward against men on a higher level. The citadel, as we found at last, was now a red and gray brick ruin, only some arches and angles of which were left, crowning the summit, from which the streets descended like the whorls of a snail-shell. Gray cobble-stone, and long narrow bricks set on their sides, form the streets or passages. The squat houses of brick and gray stone followed closely the convolutions of the street. It was a silent, sleepy little city. Few people were about. The small shops were guarded by old women or children. The men were sheep-herders, muleteers, gardeners and farmers on the slopes below. Anything that is sold in this high-placed city is brought up to it on the backs of slow-climbing, recalcitrant donkeys. One blessed thing, the sewage problem of these older Italian-French cities, because of their situation on the hillside, solves itself—otherwise, God help the cities. Barfleur insisted that there was leprosy hereabouts—a depressing thought.
Climbing up and around these various streets, peering in at the meager little windows where tobacco, fruit, cheese and modest staples were sold, we reached finally the summit of Eze, where for the first time in Italy—I count the Riviera Italian—the guide nuisance began. An old woman, in patois French, insisted on chanting about the ruins. Sir Scorp kept repeating, “No, no, my good woman, go away,” and I said in English, “Run, tell it to Barfleur. He is the bell-wether of this flock.”
Barfleur clambered to safety up a cracked wall of the ruin and from his dizzy height eyed her calmly and bade her “Run along, now.” But it was like King Canute bidding the sea to retreat, till she had successfully taken toll of us. Meanwhile we stared in delight at the Mediterranean, at the olive groves, the distant shepherds, at the lovely blue vistas and the pale threads of roads.
We were so anxious to get to Nice in time for dinner, and so opposed to making our way by the long dusty road which lay down the mountain, that we decided to make a short cut of it and go down the rocky side of the hill by a foot-wide path which was pointed out to us by the village priest, a haggard specimen of a man who, in thin cassock and beggarly shoes and hat, paraded before his crumbling little church door. We were a noble company, if somewhat out of the picture, as we piled down this narrow mountaineer’s track—Barfleur in a brilliant checked suit and white hat, and Sir Scorp in very smart black. My best yellow shoes (ninety francs in Paris) lent a pleasing note to my otherwise inconspicuous attire, and gave me some concern, for the going was most rough and uncertain.
We passed shepherds tending sheep on sharp slopes, a donkey-driver making his way upward with three donkeys all heavily laden, an umbrella-tree sheltering a peasant so ancient that he must have endured from Grecian days, and olive groves whose shadows were as rich as that bronze which time has favored with its patina. It seemed impossible that half way between Monte Carlo and Nice—those twin worlds of spendthrift fashion and pampered vice—should endure a scene so idyllic. The Vale of Arcady is here; all that art could suggest or fancy desire, a world of simple things. Such scenes as this, remarked Sir Scorp, were favored by his great artistic admiration—Daubigny.
We found a railway station somewhere, and then we got to Nice for dinner. Once more a soul-stirring argument between Barfleur and Sir Scorp. We would take tea at Rumpelmeyer’s—we would not take tea at Rumpelmeyer’s. We would dine at The Regence; we would not dine at The Regence. We would pay I-forget-how-many louis and enter the baccarat chambers of the Casino; we would not do anything of the sort. It was desired by Barfleur that I should see the wonders of the sea-walk with the waves spraying the protecting wall. It was desired by Scorp that I should look in all the jewelry shop windows with him and hear him instruct in the jeweler’s art. How these matters were finally adjusted is lost in the haze of succeeding impressions. We did have tea at Rumpelmeyer’s, however—a very commonplace but bright affair—and then we loitered in front of shop windows where Sir Scorp pointed out really astounding jewels offered to the public for fabulous sums. One great diamond he knew to have been in the possession of the Sultan of Turkey, and you may well trust his word and his understanding. A certain necklace here displayed had once been in his possession and was now offered at exactly ten times what he had originally sold it for. A certain cut steel brooch—very large and very handsome—was designed by himself, and was first given as a remembrance to a friend. Result—endless imitation by the best shops. He dallied over rubies and emeralds, suggesting charming uses for them. And then finally we came to the Casino—the Casino Municipale—with its baccarat chambers, its great dining-rooms, its public lounging-room with such a world of green wicker chairs and tables as I have never seen. The great piers at Atlantic City are not so large. Being the height of the season, it was of course filled to overflowing by a brilliant throng—cocottes and gamblers drawn here from all parts of Europe; and tourists of all nationalities.
Sir Scorp, as usual, in his gentle but decided way, raised an argument concerning what we should have for dinner. The mere suggestion that it should be canard à la presse and champagne threw him into a dyspeptic chill. “I will not pay for it. You can spend your money showing off if you choose; but I will eat a simple meal somewhere else.”
“Oh, no,” protested Barfleur. “We are here for a pleasant evening. I think it important that Dreiser should see this. It need not be canard à la presse. We can have sole and a light Burgundy.”
So sole it was, and a light Burgundy, and a bottle of water for Sir Scorp.