Roman Holidays And Others, By W. D. Howells

























































































 -  Perhaps even this was partly fancy;
as for the flowers, I cannot bring myself to partake of their deceit;
for - Page 185
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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 passing in white serge. So probably I gave less attention to the details of the scenery through which my funicular was passing than to the stupendous prospects of sea and shore 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 passengers 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 spaces 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.

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