It Is
A Charming Old Town, Far More Charming Than The Stranger Who Never Has
Time To Walk Into It
From the station can imagine, and there is a
palm-bordered avenue leading from the railway to the sea, with
The shops
and cafes of Italy on one side and the shops and cafes of France on the
other. So late as six o'clock in the evening those cafes and shops
preserved a reciprocal integrity which I could not praise too highly,
but after dark there must be a ghostly interchange of forbidden
commodities among them which no force of customs officers could wholly
suppress. At any rate, I should have liked to see them try it, though I
should not have liked to be kept in Ventimiglia overnight for any less
reason; it seemed a lonesome place, though mighty picturesque, with old
walls, and a magnificent old fort toward the sea, and a fine bridge
spanning, though for the moment superfluously spanning, the perfectly
dry bed of a river.
I wished to ask what the name of the river was, but out of all the files
of people coming and going I chose an aged man who could not tell me; he
excused himself with real regret on the ground that he was a stranger in
those parts. Then there was nothing for me to do but go back to the
station and renew my attempt on the inspector, who still remained proof
against me. What added to the hardship of the situation was that it was
Italy at one end of the station and France at the other, and in one
extremity it was an hour earlier than it was at the other, by the time
of Central Europe at the east and by the time of Paris at the west, so
that I do not know but we were two hours and forty minutes at
Ventimiglia instead of one hour and forty minutes. Of this period little
could be employed at tea, and we were not otherwise hungry; we could
give something of our interminable leisure to counting our baggage and
suffering unfounded alarms at failing to make it come out right, but we
could not give much.
The weather had turned chilly, the long station was full of draughts,
and the invalid of the party, without whom no American party is
perfectly national, was rapidly taking cold. We were quite incredulous
when the examination actually began, but at last it really did, and it
began with our pieces, with such a show of favoring us on the
inspector's part, that when it was over, in about two minutes, one trunk
serving as a type of the innocence of all, I furtively held up a piece
of five francs in recognition of his kindness. But he slowly shook his
head, whether in regret or whether in stern refusal I shall never know.
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 principality 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, clustering
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 eargerly trusted.
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 Titan, or perhaps of Hercules Mon-oecus himself, who is said to
have founded Monaco.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 90 of 95
Words from 91491 to 92499
of 97259
