“At least he can choose his master.”
“But not at all. The peasant can never choose his master. Do you imagine the Russian peasants chose Lenin?”
“No, of course not.”
“Or that the peasants of my own country chose Jeneski?”
There was something in her voice, a strange vibrancy, as she uttered the name, which made him look at her. She was gazing straight ahead, her nostrils distended with passion, her lips quivering—and then suddenly her face changed and she threw up her hand with a little cry.
“Ah, look there!”
They had come to a turn in the road—that marvellous road, so wide, so perfect, hung miraculously against the mountain-side, one of Napoleon’s masterpieces—and below them lay the village of Eze, unaltered since the Dark Ages.
Its founders, whoever they were, must have had the fear of pirates driven deep into their souls; perhaps they came from a town which had been stormed and looted, and were resolved to run no risk the second time. So they had chosen for their new abode the top of a precipitous pinnacle, unapproachable on any side save one, and almost unapproachable on that. With unimaginable labour they had contrived a village there, half dug from the rock, half built of the rock fragments. At the extreme summit they had reared a great citadel, as a last refuge if the town was stormed, and around the whole they had flung a heavy wall pierced by a single gate, flanked with defending towers.
So well they built, so solidly, that the town still stands as it has stood for twenty centuries, the wonder of the twentieth. Only the citadel, no longer needed with the passing of the sea-robber, has fallen into ruin and been despoiled for the repair of the other houses.
Selden and the countess stood spellbound, gazing down upon it and upon the marvellous background against which it is silhouetted—a background of hill and water and curving coast; then by a common impulse they turned into a by-path, and started to clamber down toward it through the vineyards and olive groves, past little houses, to the highway—the Lower Corniche—which runs at the foot of the summit upon which Eze stands; then up again along a steep and narrow road, through the gateway, past the frowning walls, around the little church, and between the dismal houses leaning precariously forward above the steep and narrow passages which serve as streets—passages redolent of the Middle Ages, reeking still with the bloody deeds of Roman and Lombard, Sicilian and Saracen, Guelph and Ghibelline; for each in turn held Eze and made of it the foulest den of thieves in Europe, a haven for the scoundrels of every land....