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.
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 principality,
everybody will wish to seem Erench, 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.
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