The name of Monaco is properly the Italian name of this principality, although it is widely used nowadays in French, the French terms Mourgues and Monéghe having fallen into desuetude.
However the Italians call Monaco, not only the principality which bears that name but also the capital of Bavaria which the French call Munich. The messenger accordingly gave the baron tickets for Monaco-Munich instead of Monaco-principality. Before the baron and the baroness had noticed their error they were already at the Swiss frontier, and after having recovered from their astonishment, they decided to finish the voyage to Munich in order to see at close hand all that the anti-artistic spirit of modern Germany could conceive of ugliness in architecture, sculpture, painting and the decorative arts...
* * *
The cold winds of March made the couple shiver in this stone-box Athens.
"Beer," the baron des Ygrées had said, "is excellent for women who are enceinte."
And so he led his wife to the royal brewery of Pschorr, to the Augustinerbräu, to the Münchnerkindl and other great breweries. They penetrated to the Nockerberg where there is a great garden. They drank there, as long as it held out, the famous March beer, Salvator, and it didn't last very long, for the Munich people are great drunkards.
* * *
When the baron and his wife entered the garden they found it thronged with a mob of drinkers, who were already under-the-weather and sang head to head and danced dizzily, breaking all the empty steins.
Peddlers sold roast fowl, grilled herrings, pretzels, rolls, sausages, sweets, souvenirs, post-cards. And there was also Hans Irlbeck, the King of Drinkers. Since Perkeo, the midget drunkard of the great cask of Heidelberg, no such boozer had ever been seen. At the time of the March beer, and in May, Bock-time, Hans Irlbeck drank his forty quarts of beer a day. Ordinarily he did not have occasion to drink more than twenty-five.
Just as the gracious Ygrées pair passed by, Hans placed his colossal buttocks on a bench which, bearing already the weight of some twenty huge men and women, cracked disconsolately. The drinkers fell, their legs in the air. Some bare thighs could be seen because Munich ladies never wear their stockings above their knees. Bursts of laughter everywhere. Hans Irlbeck who had also been floored, but had not let go of his stein, spilled its contents over the belly of a girl who had rolled near him, and the beer bubbling under her resembled that which she did when she got to her feet after swallowing a quart at one gulp in order to recover her composure.