These are the facts of ‘The Romantic Suicide at Monte Carlo.’ It is not a moral story; it is not a new story. I have told it simply as it happened.
One morning I went over to breakfast with a friend of mine at Roquebrune, a picturesque point near Monte Carlo. The proprietor showed me over his villa and his grounds. While we were in the back garden a Frenchman, who rented a villa in the neighbourhood, came in, in a towering rage, to complain of my friend’s cat trespassing on his grounds. After a heated discussion, the Frenchman exclaimed angrily, ‘Very well, sir, I shall lodge my complaint with the mayor. Where is the mayor?’ My friend’s gardener, who was busy digging up new potatoes, suddenly looked up, and, raising his battered hat, exclaimed with dignity, ‘M’sieu, je suis le Maire de Roquebrune.’ Tableau and curtain.
CHAPTER XII.
GENOA.
From Monte Carlo to Genoa by rail in a hurricane doesn’t sound anything very tremendous, unless you happen to know that the rail runs for almost the entire distance at the extreme foot of the Maritime Alps, on the uttermost verge of the coast; so close, in fact, to the sea, that in many places if you dropped your hat out of the window it would fall into the ocean. To walk along the line would turn many people unaccustomed to exercise upon the tight-rope giddy, for, as well as running along the beach, it occasionally takes the outside edge of precipices, against which the deep waters of the Mediterranean are dashing themselves in their mad fury at not being able to get at the train and swallow it up.
Under ordinary circumstances the journey, which takes ten hours by the ‘omnibus’ train, is romantic. Taken as we took it, with a hurricane spending its full force on the coast, it was absolutely thrilling. Over and over again our trim little engine, as it toiled up cliffs and crept cautiously over massive rocks, was nearly blown to a full stop, and the way in which the whole train rocked from side to side made several of the passengers sea-sick. Our guard told us that he had never made such a journey in all his experience; and, after we had left the Italian frontier at Ventimiglia, and had passed San Remo, it began to look as though we should have to let discretion be the better part of valour, and pull up until the storm, which came rushing down the mountains and lashing the sea to fury, had abated. Over and over again the seas dashed up, and flung a great volume of water and small pebbles against the carriage windows. It was a question whether further on the sea would not have made the line unsafe, or perhaps washed it away altogether. But at every station we got the signal that it was all right at present, and that we could come on; and so on we went, recompensed for all our doubts and delays by the grand sight which the storm-swept coast and seething sea presented to our anxious and yet delighted gaze.
It was nearly eleven o’clock at night when we reached Genoa. We had taken eleven hours to perform a journey of about 112 miles, and all that time we had had nothing to eat. There was no buffet all along the line after Ventimiglia until we reached Savona, and then it was past nine o’clock. We grew so desperately hungry about six o’clock that when the train stopped for a few minutes we rushed out into the rain and the hurricane and requisitioned supplies of a small wine-shed by the roadside. All we could get was some dry bread, and some mysterious slices of something, which we were assured was ‘carne,’ or meat. The word isn’t appetizing, and, hungry as we were, we couldn’t tackle the food. It was so strongly impregnated with garlic that after we had given it to a dog our carriage retained the odour, and for days afterwards our clothes reeked of the pungent esculent. In despair we fell back upon the dry bread, and when we had eaten that we tried to remember what people did on rafts, and we unpacked our portmanteaus and looked out our boots, and wondered whether patent leather or ordinary walking boots would be the easier of digestion. So ravenous did we become that we sent on a telegram from one of the stations to the hotel at Genoa ordering beefsteaks to be ready for us the instant we arrived, and when at midnight the omnibus deposited us at the Grand Hotel we didn’t stop to wash or take off our overcoats or look at our rooms, but rushed into the salle-à-manger and fell on our knees to the head waiter and begged that, ready or not, our beefsteaks ordered by telegram might be brought to us; and when they came we fell upon them with savage glee and short, sharp cries of joy, and the manager and the waiters and the porters came crowding in to watch the extraordinary spectacle. I think they fancied we were mad or cannibals, or that we had escaped from a penal settlement and had not tasted food for months.
Genova la Superba, Genoa the Proud, has indeed something to be proud of. She is proud of her port, of her people, of her palaces, and of her prosperity. Her people, high and low, rich and poor, are brave, independent, and public spirited, and her nobility stands at the head of the nobility of the world for deeds of good citizenship and benevolence. From the days of Christopher Columbus, who, when Genoa was stricken with the plague, wrote to his bankers to give half his fortune to the poor, to the present year of grace, when the Duchess Ferrari-Galliera spends hundreds of thousands of pounds on colleges and hospitals and model dwellings for the poor, the rich and the titled of Genoa have been world-famous for their deeds of noble charity.
Genoa itself is a stately city; seen from the sea, with its villa and palace-crowned amphitheatre of hills, it is superb. It has whole streets of marble palaces, full of wonders for the eye of the connoisseur to feast upon; and beyond its ancient grandeurs and its modern magnificences, its heart pulses with the vigorous, healthy blood of modern progress and prosperity.
Genoa delighted me from the moment I set my foot in it and began to take its measure. I liked its busy port, with thousands of bronzed, red-bonneted porters hard at work upon the huge quays, crowded with merchandise. I liked its blue houses and its pink houses, its yellow and green houses, and its houses painted all over with pictures of lovely ladies. I liked the Municipal Palace, in which I was shown Paganini’s very own fiddle, and several letters written by Christopher Columbus with his very own hand, and I liked its Campo Santo, or cemetery, which is one of the wonders of Italy.
Imagine a glorious garden rising in terraces—a garden all aglow with red and white roses and fragrant with blossom—imagine this garden surrounded with noble open galleries lined with magnificent white marble monuments, and all shut in by great sunny green hills, which stand around it like sentinels guarding the silent and sacred camp of the dead. Imagine all this, then put above the roses and the blossoms and the fragrant trees, and the yellow immortelles and the green wreaths and the glorious marble statuary, a blue sky and a bright sun, and you have a faint idea of ‘Genoa’s Holy Field.’