Roman Holidays, and Others Part 11

He was an Italian, but in the employment of the French republic, and I have not been able since to credit with certainty his incorruptibility to his native or his adoptive country; I might easily be mistaken in deciding either way.

What I am certain of, and certainly sorry for, is the superiority of the French company's railway carriage, from Ventimiglia on, to the Italian carriage which had brought us so far, and it is still with unwillingness that I own the corporation's greater care for our comfort. If we had been in the paternal care of the administration of the gambling-house.

at Monte Carlo, we could not have been more tenderly or cleanly cushioned about, or borne away on softer springs; and very possibly a measure of wickedness in the means is a condition of comfort in the end to which we are so tempted to abandon ourselves in a world which is not yet so sternly collectivist as I could wish. It was not quite dark when we arrived at Monte Carlo and began to experience, in the beautiful keeping of the place, how admirably a gambling-house can manage the affairs of a princ.i.p.ality when it pays all the taxes. There were many two-horse landaus waiting our pleasure outside the station, and the horses were all so robust and handsome that we were not put to our usual painful endeavor in seeking the best and getting the worst. All those stately equipages were good, and the one that fell to us mounted the hill to our hotel by a grade so insinuating that the balkiest horse in Frascati could hardly have suspected it.

In our easy ascent we were aware of the gray-and-blond houses behind their walls among their groves and gardens, among flowers and blossoms; of the varying inclines and levels from which some lovely difference of prospect appeared at every step; of the admirably tended roadways, and the walks that followed them up hill and down, and crossed to little parks, or led to streets brilliant with shops and hotels, cl.u.s.tering about the great gambling-house, the centre of the common prosperity and animation. The air had softened with the setting sun, and the weather which had at Leghorn and Genoa delayed through two weeks of rain and cold, seemed to confess the control of the Casino administration, as everything else does at Monte Carlo, and promised an amiability to which we eagerly trusted.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 51 MONACO]

It was of course warmer out-doors than in-doors, and while the fire was kindling on our hearth we gave the quarter hour before dinner to looking over our garden-wall into the comely town in the valley below, and to the palace and capital of the Prince of Monaco on the heights beyond.

Nothing by day or by night could be more exquisite than the little harbor, a perfect horseshoe in shape, and now, at our first sight of it, set round with electric lights, like diamonds in the scarf-pin of some sporty t.i.tan, or perhaps of Hercules Monoecus himself, who is said to have founded Monaco. In the morning we saw that the waters arranged themselves in the rainbow colors of such a scarf round the sh.o.r.es, and that there were only pleasure-craft moored in them: the yacht of the Prince of Monaco and the yacht of some American Prince, whose t.i.tle I did not ascertain, but whose flag was unmistakable. There must have been other yachts, but I do not remember them, and possibly there were some workaday craft, of which I do not now recall the impression; but I am certain of the festive air of disoccupation pervading the port from the adjacent towns, both Monte Carlo and Monaco, which its wicked suburb has cleansed in corrupting, and rendered attractive by the example of its elegant leisure. There remains from both places, and from Condamine in the plain between them the sense of a perpetual round of holidays. There seemed to be no more creative business in one place than another, but I do not say there is none; there is certainly a polite distillery of perfumes and liqueurs in Condamine, but what one sees is the commerce of the shops, and the building up of more and more villas and hotels, on every shelf and ledge, to harden and whiten in the sun, and let their gardens hang over the verges of the cliffs. On the northeast, the mountains rise into magnificent steeps whose names would say nothing to the reader, except that of Turbia, which he will recall as the cla.s.sic Tropaea of Augustus, who marked there the bounds between Italy and Gaul.

But we were as yet in no mood to climb this height, even with the help of a funicular railway, and I made my explorations at such convenient elevations as I could reach on foot, or by the help of one of those luxurious landaus peculiar to Monte Carlo.

One such point was undoubtedly the headland of Monaco, where the Greeks of Ma.r.s.eilles, long enough before Augustus, built a temple to Hercules Monoecus. The Grimaldi family which gave Genoa many doges, came early into the sovereignty of Monaco, by the hook or crook those days, but whether it was they who fostered its piracy in the fourteenth century, does not distinctly appear, though it seems certain that one of the Grimaldi princes served against the English under Philip of Valois, and was wounded at Crecy. In 1524 a successor went over to the empire under Charles V. Still later the princ.i.p.ality returned to the sovereignty of France, and in 1793 the French republicans frankly annexed it, but it was given back to the Grimaldi in 1814.

The Grimaldi on the whole were a baddish line of potentates, and only lacked largeness of scene to have left the memory of world-tragedies.

They murdered one another, at least in two cases; in another, the people killed their ruler by publicly drowning him in the sea for insulting their women; the princes were the protectors of piracy, and in the very late times following their restoration by the Congress of Vienna, the reigning prince confiscated the property of the churches for his own behoof, and took into his hands the whole trade of the princ.i.p.ality. He alone bought and ground the grain, and baked the bread, which he sold to his people at an extortionate price; he bought damaged flour in Genoa and fed it to his subjects at the same rate as good. When they murmured and threatened rebellion, he threatened in turn that he would rule them with a rod of iron, as if their actual conditions were not bad enough.

Some of his oppressions were of a fantasticality bordering on comic opera: travellers had to give up their provisions at the frontier and eat the official bread of Monaco; ships entering the port were confiscated if they had brought more loaves than sufficed them for their voyage thither; no man might cut his own wood without leave of the police, or prune his trees, or till his land, or irrigate it; the birth and death of every animal must be publicly registered, with the payment of a given tax, and n.o.body could go out after ten at night without carrying a taxed lantern. When Nice was annexed to France in 1860 Monaco pa.s.sed under French protection again, and now it is subject to conscription like the rest of France. Ten years after the beginning of this new order of things the great M. Blanc was expelled from Hombourg, and the Prince of Monaco rented to him the-gambling privilege of Monte Carlo.

Then the modern splendor of the place began. The entire population of the three towns, Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Condamine, is not above fifteen thousand, and apparently the greater part of the inhabitants depend upon the gay industry of the Casino for their livelihood. I should say that the most of the houses in Monte Carlo were hotels, or pensions, or furnished villas, or furnished apartments, and if one could be content to live in the atmosphere of the Casino, which is not meteorologically lurid, I do not know where one could live in greater comfort. It is said that everything is rather dearer than in Nice, for instance, but such things as I wanted to buy I did not find very dear.

The rates at the most expensive hotels did not seem exhorbitant when reduced to dollars, and if you went a little way from the Casino the hotels were very reasonable, so that you could spend a great deal of money at the tables which in America you would spend in board and lodging. I fancy that a villa could be got there very reasonably, and as the morals of all the inhabitants are scrupulously cared for by the administration of the Casino, and no one living in the princ.i.p.ality is allowed to frequent the gaming-tables, it is probable that domestic service is good and cheap. If I may speak from our experience at our very simple little hotel, it is admirable, one waiter sufficing for ten or twelve guests, with leisure for much friendly conversation in the office, between the breakfasts served in our rooms and the excellent dinners at the small tables in the salon. If you liked, he would speak French or Italian, though he spoke English as well as any one, and he was of that excellent Piedmontese race which has been the saving salt of the whole peninsula. As for the food, it was far beyond that of our cold-storage, and it must have been cheap, since it was provided for us at the rate we paid.

The cost of dress varies, according to the taste of and the purse, everywhere. White serge seemed the favorite wear of most of the ladies one saw in the street at Monte Carlo, especially in the region of the Casino. This may have expressed an inner condition, or it may have been a sympathetic response to the advances of the flowers in the pretty beds and parterres so fancifully designed by the gardeners of the administration, or it may have been a token of the helpless submission to which the windows of the milliners and modistes reduced all comers of the dressful s.e.x. Many of the men with the women, or without them, were also in white serge, but they seemed more variably attired; there was a prevailing suggestion of yachting or automobiling in their dress, though doubtless most of them had not sailed or motored to the spot.

Some few, say four or five, may have motored away from it, for in the centre of the charming square before the Casino there was an automobile of some newest type being raffled for in the interest of that chiefest of the Christian virtues which makes its most successful appeals in the vicinity of games of chance. Some one must have won the machine and carried a party of his friends away, and triumphantly turned turtle with it over the first of the precipices which abound at Monte Carlo. More than the tables within this opportunity of fortune tempted me, and it was only by the repeated recurrence to my principles that I was able to get away alive. In spite of myself, I did not get away without, however guiltlessly, having yielded to the spirit of the place. It was at the Administrational Art Exhibition, where there were really some good pictures, and where, on my entering, I was given a small bra.s.s disk. On going out I attempted to restore this to the door-keeper, but he went back with me to a certain piece of mechanism, where he instructed me to put the disk into a slot. Then the disk ran its course, and a small bra.s.s ball came out at the bottom. The door-keeper opened this, and showed me that it was empty; but he gave me to understand that it might have been full of diamonds, or rubies, or seed-pearls, which might have implanted in me a l.u.s.t of gambling I should never have overcome. Monte Carlo was in every way tempting. A vast oblong, brilliant with flowers in artistic patterns, stretched upward from the Casino, and there was an agreeable park where one might sit. On every other side there were costly hotels and costly restaurants, including that of the unexampled, the insurpa.s.sable Giro, where one saw people eating and drinking at the windows whenever one pa.s.sed, by day or night. Beyond the Casino seaward were the beautiful terraces, planted with palms and other tropic growths, where people might come out and kill themselves when they had nothing left to lose but their lives; and against the dark green of their fronds the temple of fortune lifted a frosted-cake-like front of long extent. I do not know just what type of architecture it is of, but it distinctly suggests the art of the pastry cook when he has triumphed in some edifice crowning the centre of the table at a great public dinner. What mars the pleasing effect most is a detail which enforces this suggestion, for the region of the Casino is thickly frequented by a species of black doves, and when these gather in close lines of black dots along the eaves, they have exactly the effect of flies cl.u.s.tering on the sugary surfaces of the cake. At intervals are bronze statues of what seem a sort of adolescent cherubs, but which have, I do not know why, a peculiarly devilish appearance. No doubt they are harmless enough; but certainly they do nothing to keep the flies off the cake.

In fine, as an edifice the Casino disappoints, and if one is not pressingly curious about the interior, one rather lingers on the terrace overlooking the sea, and the lines of the railroad following the sh.o.r.e, and the panorama of the several towns. It is charming to sit there, and if it is in the afternoon, you may see an artist there painting water-colors of the scenery. Even if he were not painting, you could not help knowing him for an artist, because he wears a black velvet jacket and knickerbockers, and a soft slouch hat, and has a curled black mustache and pointed beard; there is no mistaking him; and at a given moment, after he has been working long enough, he puts above his sketch the sign, "For Sale," as artists always do, and then, if you want a masterpiece, you go down a few steps from where you are sitting and buy it. But I never did that any more than I took tickets for the charity automobile, though there is no telling what I might not have done if I had broken the bank when at last I went into the Casino.

It seems to open about eleven o'clock in the morning, for gamblers are hard-working, impatient people, and do not want to lose time. A broad stretch of red carpet is laid down the steps from the portal and they begin to go in at once, and people keep going in until I know not what hour at night. But I think mid-afternoon is the best hour to see them, and it is then that I will invite the reader to accompany me, instructing him to turn to the left on entering, and get his gratis billet of admission to the rooms from the polite officials there in charge, who will ask for his card, and inquire his country and city, but will not insist upon his street and his number in it. This form is apparently to make sure that you are not a resident of the princ.i.p.ality, and that if you suffer in your morals from your visit to the Casino you shall not be a source of local corruption thereafter. They bow you away, first audibly p.r.o.nouncing your name with polyglottic accuracy, and then you are free to wander where you like. But probably you will want to go at once from the large, n.o.bly colonnaded reception-hall or atrium, into that series of salons where wickeder visitors than yourself are already closely seated at the oblong tables, and standing one or two deep round them. The salons of the series are four, and the tables in each are from two to five, according to the demands of the season; some are Trente et Quarante-tables, and some, by far the greater number, are Roulette-tables. Roulette seems the simpler game, and the more popular; I formed the notion that there was a sort of aristocratic quality in Trente et Quarante, and that the players of that game were of higher rank and longer purse, but I can allege no reason justifying my notion.

All that I can say is that the tables devoted to it commanded the seaward views, and the tops of the gardens where the players withdrew when they wished to commit suicide. The rooms are decorated by several French painters of note, and the whole interior is designed by the famous architect Gamier, to as little effect of beauty as could well be.

It is as if these French artists had worked in the German taste, rather than their own, and in any case they have achieved in their several allegories and impersonations something uniformly heavy and dull. One might fancy that the mood of the players at the tables had imparted itself to the figures in the panels, but very likely this is not so, for the players had apparently parted with none of their unpleasing dulness.

They were in about equal number men and women, and they partook equally of a look of hard repression. The repression may not have been wholly from within; a little away from each table hovered, with an air of detachment, certain plain and quiet men, who, for all their apparent inattention, may have been agents of the Administration vigilant to subdue the slightest show of drama in the players. I myself saw no drama, unless I may call so the att.i.tude of a certain tall, handsome young man, who stood at the corner of one of the tables, and, with nervously working jaws, staked his money at each invitation of the croupiers. I did not know whether he won or lost, and I could not decide from their faces which of the other men or women were winning or losing.

I had supposed that I might see distinguished faces, distinguished figures, but I saw none. The players were of the average of the spectators in dress and carriage, but in the heavy atmosphere of the rooms, which was very hot and very bad, they all alike looked dull. At a psychological moment it suddenly came to me in their presence, that if there was such a place as h.e.l.l, it must be very dull, like that, and that the finest misery of perdition must be the stupid dulness of it.

For some unascertained reason, but probably from a mistaken purpose of ornament, there hung over the centre of each table, almost down to the level of the players' heads, lengths of large-linked chains, and it was imaginable, though not very probable, that if any of the lost souls rose violently up, or made an unseemly outcry, or other rebellious demonstration, those plain, quiet men, the agents of the Administration, would fling themselves upon him or her, and bind them with those chains, and cast them into such outer darkness as could be symbolized by the shade of the terrace trees. The thing was improbable, as I say, but not impossible, if there is truth in Swedenborg's relation that the h.e.l.ls are vigilantly policed, and from time to time put in order by angels detailed for that office. To be sure the plain, quiet men did not look like angels, and the Administration of which they were agents, could not, except in its love of order, be likened to any celestial authority.

Commonly in the afternoon there is music in the great atrium from which the gambling-rooms open, and then there is a pleasant movement of people up and down. They are kept in motion perhaps by their preference, somewhat, but also largely by the want of seats. If you can secure one of these you may amuse yourself very well by looking on at the fashion and beauty of those who have not secured any. Here you will see much more distinction than in the gambling-rooms; the air is better, and if you choose to fancy this the limbo of that inferno, it will not be by a violent strain. In the crowd will be many pretty young girls, in proper chaperonage, and dressed in the latest effects of Paris; if they happen to be wearing the mob-cap hats of the moment it is your greater gain; they could not be so charming in anything else, or look more innocent, or more consciously innocent. You could only hope, however, such were the malign a.s.sociations of the place, that their chaperons would not neglect them for the gaming-tables beyond, but you could not be sure, if the chaperons were all like that old English lady one evening at the opera in the Casino, who came in charge of her niece, or possibly some friend's daughter. She remained dutifully enough beside the girl through the first act of the stupid musical comedy, and even through the ensuing ballet, and when a flaunting female, in a hat of cart-wheel circ.u.mference, came in and shut out the whole stage from the hapless stranger behind, this good old lady authorized her charge to ask him to take the seat next them where he could see something of the action if he wished. But at the end of the ballet, she rose, and bidding the girl wait her return, she vanished in the direction of the gaming-rooms. She may merely have gone to look on at a spectacle which, dulness for dulness, was no worse than that of the musical comedy, and I have no proof that she risked her money there. The girl sat through the next act, and then in a sudden fine alarm, like that of a bird which, from no visible cause, starts from its perch, she took flight, and I hope she found her aunt, or her mother's friend, quietly sleeping on one of those seats in the atrium. It was one of those tacit, eventless dramas which in travel are always offering themselves to your witness. They begin in silence, and go quietly on to their unfinish, and leave you steeped in an interest which is life-long, whereas a story whose end you know soon perishes from your mind. Art has not yet learned the supreme lesson of life, which is never a tale that is told within the knowledge of the living.

Nowhere, I think, is the "sweet security of streets" felt more than in Monte Carlo. Whether the control of that good Administration of the Casino reaches to the policing of the place in other respects or not, I cannot say, but one walks home at night from the theatre of the Casino with the same sense of safety that one enjoys under that paternal roof.

At eleven o'clock all Monte Carlo sleeps the sleep of the innocent and the just in the dwellings of the citizens and permanent residents; though it cannot be denied that there appear to be late suppers in the hotels and restaurants surrounding the Casino, which the iniquitous may be giving to the guilty. Away from the flare of their bold lights the town reposes in a demi-dark, and presents to the more strenuous fancy the effect of a mezzotint study of itself; by day it is a group of wash-drawings near to, and farther off, of water-colors, very richly and broadly treated. I could not insist too much upon this notion with the reader who has never been there, or has not received picture postal-cards from sojourning correspondents. These would afford him a portrait of the chief features and characteristics of the place not too highly flattered, for in fact it would be impossible for even a picture postal-card to exaggerate its beauty. They will besides convey one of the few convincing proofs that in spite of the Blanc Casino and the French Republic the Prince of Monaco is still a reigning sovereign, for the postage-stamps bear the tastefully printed head of that potentate.

If the visitor requires other proofs he may take a landau at the station in Monaco, and drive up over the heights of the capital into the piazza before the prince's palace. When the prince is not at home he can readily get leave to visit the palace for twenty minutes, but on my unlucky day the prince was doubly at home, for he was sick as well as in residence. I satisfied myself as well as I could, and I am very easy to satisfy, with my drive through the pleasant town, which is entirely Italian in effect, with its people standing about or looking out of their windows in their Sunday leisure, and quite Roman in the cleanliness of its streets. I took due pleasure in the unfinished exterior of the Oceanographic Museum and the newly finished interior of the Monaco Cathedral. The cathedral, which is so new as to make one rejoice that most other cathedrals are old, is of a glaring freshness, but is very handsome; somehow in spite of its newness it contains the tombs of the reigning family, and perhaps it has only been newly done over. The museum which is ultimately to be the greatest of its kind in the world, already contains somewhere in its raw inaccessible recesses the collections made by Prince Albert in his many cruises, and is of a palatiality worthy of a sovereign with a tenant so generous and prompt in its rent as the Administration of the Casino of Monte Carlo.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 52 THE CASINO, MONTE CARLO]

This fact, namely, that the princely grandeur and splendor of Monaco all came out of the gaming-tables, was something that the driver of my landau made me observe, when our intimacy had mounted with our road, and we paused for the magnificent view of the sea from the headland near the museum. He was otherwise a shrewd and conversible Piedmontese who did not make me pay much above the tariff, and who had pity on my poor French after awhile, and consented to speak Italian with me. In the sort of French glare over the whole local civilization of the princ.i.p.ality, everybody will wish to seem French, but after you break through the surface, the natives will be as comfortably and endearingly Italian as anybody in the peninsula. Among themselves they speak a Ligurian patois, but with the stranger they will use an Italian easily much better than his, and also much better than their own French. I think they prefer you in their racial parlance after you have shown some knowledge of it, and two kind women of whom I asked my way in Monte Carlo, one day when I was trying for the station of the funicular to Turbia, grew more volubly kind when I asked it in such Tuscan as I could command. That station is really not hard to find when once you know where it is, and at three o'clock in the afternoon I was mounting the precipitous incline of the alp on whose summit Augustus divided Italy from Gaul, and left the stupendous trophy which one sees there in ruins to-day.

I should like to render the sense of my upward progress dramatic by pretending that we mounted from a zone of flowers at Monte Carlo into regions where only the hardiest blossoms greeted us, but what I really noticed was that by-and-by the little patches of vineyard seemed to grow less and the olive-trees scraggier. Perhaps even this was partly fancy; as for the flowers, I cannot bring myself to partake of their deceit; for they are the most shameless fakers, as regards climate, in nature.

It is, for instance, perfectly true that they are in bloom along the Riviera all winter long, but this does not prove that the winter of the Riviera is always warm. It merely proves that flowers can stand a degree of cold that nips the nose bent to hale their perfume, and brings tears into the eyes dwelling in rapture on their loveliness. They are like women; they look so fragile and delicate that you think they cannot stand anything, but they can stand pretty much everything, or at least everything they wish to. Throughout that week at Monte Carlo, while we cowered round our fires or went out into a frigid sunshine, the flowers smiled from every garden-ground in a gayety emulous of that of their sisters pa.s.sing in white serge. So probably I gave less attention to the details of the scenery through which my funicular was pa.s.sing than to the stupendous prospects of sea and sh.o.r.e which it varyingly commanded.

If words could paint these I should not spare the words, but when I recall them, my richest treasure of adjectives seems a beggarly array of color tubes, flattened and twisted past all col-lapsibility. Nothing less than an old-fashioned panoramic show would impart any notion of it, and even that must fail where it should most abound, namely, in the delicacy of that ineffable majesty.

We climbed and climbed, with many a muted hope and many a muted fear of the mechanism which carried us so safely, and then we ran across a stretch of comparative level and reached the last station, under the cliff on which the local hotel stood, with the mighty ruin behind it.

Our pa.s.sengers flocked up to the terrace of the hotel, much shoved and shouldered by automobiles bearing the company which seems proper to those vehicles, and dispersed themselves at the many little tables set about for tea, and the glory of the matchless outlook. While one could yet have the ruin mostly to one's self, it seemed the most favorable moment to visit the crumbling walls and broken tower, whose fragments strewed the slopes around. The tower was of Augustus, and the fortress into which it was turned in the Middle Ages was of unknown authority, but the ruin was the work of Marshal Villars, who blew up both trophy and stronghold sometime in the French king's wars with the imperialists in the first half of the eighteenth century. The destruction was incomplete, though probably sufficient for the purpose, but as a ruin, nothing could be more admirable. There seems to be at present something like a restoration going on; it has not gone very far, however; it has developed some fragments of majestic pillars, and some breadths of Roman brick-work; a few s.p.a.ces about the base of the tower are cleared; but the rehabilitation will probably never proceed to such an extreme that you may not sit down on some carven remnant of the past, and closing your eyes to the surrounding glory of alp and sea find yourself again on the Palatine or amid the memorials of the Forum.

THE END