There are no two buildings alike. Many may be only a hundred years old, but, in any case, they are incongruous dwellings with windows at odd levels and with doors in unexpected places. There are, on the other hand, buildings which show evidence of greater age and of much distinction. There are towers which have been converted into common habitations and relics of mansions of no little pretence. On a few of these the corbels are still to be seen which once supported the balconies from which fair ladies scattered flowers upon victorious troops tramping up to the castle. There are many fine doorways in stone. Some show traces of the Moorish taste, others belong to the thirteenth century, while a few display the pointed arch of later years. There are some beautiful stone windows and many stoutly worked doors of wood and other odd details which recall a less squalid past. The lounger in the streets of Eze will meet with crypt-like and cavernous stables for goats, cellars open to the sky owing to collapse of the roof, and chilly tunnels without apparent purpose. One or two passages are wide and vaulted and provided with a long stone bench against the wall. Here, in the shadow, soldiers will have sat to clean their arms and old men to gossip.
The public buildings are, of course, few. The Mairie is rather pretentiously humble and is the least authoritative building I have ever seen. The post office clings precariously to the side of a steep lane, the Rue du Brek, and looks out upon a wall of rock covered with cactus. It seems incongruous that from this half-unconscious place it is possible both to telegraph and telephone. There is a dejected café but it is closed.
The church is of little interest. It was enlarged and restored—that is to say spoiled—in 1765. It contains, besides a font of the sixteenth century and an old cross, a painting ascribed to the seventeenth century in the left lower corner of which is a picture of Eze as it was. The castle in the picture is intact, is solid, square and arrogant looking. It quite overwhelms the jumbled-up little brown-red town at its foot. From the top of the tower floats a red flag with a white cross on it.
The castle is on the highest point of the town and is reached by a path fashioned out of the rock. This is a path with indeed a story to tell, if only it could utter it; if it could but speak of the footsteps it has listened to—the halting feet of men led up to be judged, the trembling feet of men led down to be hanged, the heavy tread of the well-laden robber, the nervous step of the spy, the rustle of the foot of the damosel. Of this castle of the Lords of Eze nothing remains but a wall and a fragment of a vaulted chamber. In the castle yard is a wretched, shamefaced hut on which is painted “Bar des Touristes.” It is happily derelict and a victim to the general coma which has spread over Eze, for it is as out of place as a roulette table in a nunnery.
High up on the side of a house on the south of the town is a little old window. It has a rounded arch of weathered stone and is probably the oldest window in Eze, for it follows the mode that we in England call “Norman.” It looks across the sea while on the sill is a bunch of scarlet geranium in a broken jar. I like to think that this is the window of Blacas, the troubadour, that he lived in this house on the cliff and that from this casement he poured forth his songs of love and of gallant deeds.
A love song—as I have said—would seem strange in Eze in its old ruffian days. It may seem as strange even now. But love is eternal and so long as men and women walk the alleys of this ancient town it will linger within its walls. All the fiercer passions of Eze have died away—the lust for power, the thirst for revenge, the mad fever for the fray—but love, it would seem, still remains as, possibly, its only heritage; for I came upon a document in the Mairie that announced the coming marriage of two young people in Eze. It was not a troubadour’s sonnet, it is true; but it served to show that the old lanes near by may still be paths for lovers, that there are still steep places where he may help her down and still a parapet where the two may lean, gaze over the sea and dream.
One walks down the path from the town as one would leave a chamber of death; for Eze is slowly dying, dying like a doddering old man—once the captain of a host—who is breathing his last in a garret, with around him pathetic relics of his virile past and piteous evidences of his present poverty.
XVIII
THE HARBOUR OF MONACO
THE history of Monaco from its early days to the time when it came upon peace is a breathless story full of incident, clamour and surprise. It may not be unfitly compared to an account—from moment to moment—of the flights and rebuffs of a football in a long contested game. Now and again the bewildered ball is lost sight of in a mêlée of panting men. At another moment it rolls quietly into the open to be at once pounced upon by two furious packs. At times it is “out of bounds” and at peace, only to be thrown again into the fight where it is harried and battered and driven now to this quarter and now to that. Monaco was the ball in the fierce game between the Grimaldi, on the one side, and the powers of the Eastern Mediterranean on the other and in the end the Grimaldi won.
Until about the end of the twelfth century Monaco was merely a lonely rock, almost inaccessible, uninhabited and waterless. Projecting as it does into the sea it afforded so good a shelter for ships that the little bay in its shadow became famous as a harbour of refuge. Fringing the bay was a pebble beach where a galley could be hauled up or a caravel unloaded.