The Kingmakers

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

MONTE CARLO, like all other pleasure resorts, has its inexorable routine, and the feature of the morning is a walk upon the terrace. This is followed by an apéritif and half an hour of gossip under a sun-shade in front of the Café de Paris, these two items occupying the time pleasantly until lunch, when the day really commences.

The terrace pedestrians begin to gather about eleven o’clock, reach their densest an hour later, and then gradually thin away. To sit during that hour on one of the benches which face the walk is a rare privilege.

For the human stream is of never-ceasing interest. There is the nouveau-riche and his family, not yet accustomed to the wealth the war showered upon them, ill at ease in their new clothes, glancing apprehensively at every one as though expecting an accusation; there is the prognathous Englishman masking his mental vacuity with an air of aloofness, but alert to salute every one he considers his social equal; there are old roués of every nationality, hair plastered down (if there is any left), moustaches waxed to a point, great pouches under the eyes, ogling the women, especially the very young ones, and turning around for another look at their legs and the motion of their hips; there is the stream of semi-paralytics, neurasthenics, and debile generally, flowing ceaselessly in and out of the hydropathic establishment at the end of the terrace, seeking relief from the results of unimaginable forms of debauchery; there are fat Turks and lithe Greeks who glare at each other; tall Russians and little Italians who fraternize; as well as a scattering of all the nationalities, scarcely yet knowing their own names, created since the war over the breadth of central Europe.

And then there are the women—the women who are the raison d’être for Monte Carlo and all resorts like it. It is to see the women, to permit them to exhibit themselves, that this morning parade takes place; it is to please the women the chefs in the great hotels labour; it is for them the orchestras play; it is to them the little expensive shops cater; it is for them the casino operates. And they are at their best, these women, on the terrace in the morning. The old ones are still in bed, the ugly ones shun the merciless morning light. Only the young and beautiful venture to sally forth, and some of them are superb.

There are celebrities, too, of a sort, and decorations of every degree, from the grand rosette of the Legion down to the humble “poireau”; there are grey-bearded Academicians, monocled diplomats, pallid artists, heavy-sterned generals, portly financiers. There is the Gargantuan McCormack, his hat pulled down over his eyes, his lithe little wife trotting beside him; there is the sallow Venizelos, not yet recovered from the shock of defeat, in close confab with some other exile; there is the talented but enslaved Chalmino with his ridiculous fat mistress; there is Marlborough and his next duchess; there is Suzanne, fresh from her victories at La Festa and twittering like a sparrow to two tall worshippers in flannels; there is Chevrillet, the great journalist, whose passion for play destroys him—these and a hundred others like them pass and repass, watch for a time the stupid slaughter of pigeons going ceaselessly forward on the semi-circle of lawn down near the water, and finally fade away.

Among this throng, Selden presently appeared in obedience to a command of the Countess Rémond, delivered to him that morning with his breakfast:

“I am in the mood for walking,” she had written. “Please wait for me on the terrace.”

So, since he had made up his mind to see the adventure through, here he was, walking up and down, looking at the crowd, and breathing deep draughts of the wonderful air. It was one of those exquisite mornings, bright and yet soft, which make the Riviera the most favoured of winter resorts. The air was full of ozone, there was a tang in it which gave a fillip to the blood; the sea was of a deep and lustrous blue defying description, flecked here and there with whitecaps and dotted with the sails of a flotilla of little sloops engaged in a race. On the landward side, steep slopes, clad with vine and olive and dotted with white villas, rose up and up, until they culminated with a mighty rush in the rocky summit of the Tête de Chien, two thousand feet above.

A fairy-land; a land of wonder and delight.

Selden turned from this loveliness and looked again with a feeling of disgust at the people loitering past. Was it for this crowd of parasites and voluptuaries that this superb corner of the world had been created? He had asked himself the same question once before as he sat in the dining-saloon of a great new ship, homeward bound from Europe—was it merely to minister to the pleasures of that crowd, and other crowds like it, that men had laboured and sweated and died in the fabrication of that marvellous boat? What mockery, what waste! No wonder socialists see red! And then he had remembered the hundreds in the steerage—to them the ship was an ark, a sanctuary. It was bearing them to the land of freedom.