Aix is handsome, and is handsomely situated, too, on its hill slope, with its stately prospect of mountain range and plain spread out before it and about it. The streets are mainly narrow, and steep and crooked and interesting, and offer considerable variety in the way of names; on the corner of one of them you read this: “Rue du Puits d’Enfer” (“Pit of Hell Street”). Some of the sidewalks are only eighteen inches wide; they are for the cats, probably. There is a pleasant park, and there are spacious and beautiful grounds connected with the two great pleasure resorts, the Cercle and the Villa des Fleurs. The town consists of big hotels, little hotels, and pensions. The season lasts about six months, beginning with May. When it is at its height there are thousands of visitors here, and in the course of the season as many as 20,000 in the aggregate come and go.
These are not all here for the baths; some come for the gambling facilities and some for the climate. It is a climate where the field strawberry flourishes through the spring, summer, and fall. It is hot in the summer, and hot in earnest; but this is only in the daytime; it is not hot at night. The English season is May and June; they get a good deal of rain then, and they like that. The Americans take July, and the French take August. By the 1st of July the open-air music and the evening concerts and operas and plays are fairly under way, and from that time onward the rush of pleasure has a steadily increasing boom. It is said that in August the great grounds and the gambling rooms are crowded all the time and no end of ostensible fun going on.
It is a good place for rest and sleep and general recuperation of forces. The book of Doctor Wakefield says there is something about this atmosphere which is the deadly enemy of insomnia, and I think this must be true, for if I am any judge, this town is at times the noisiest one in Europe, and yet a body gets more sleep here than he would at home, I don’t care where his home is. Now, we are living at a most comfortable and satisfactory pension, with a garden of shade trees and flowers and shrubs, and a convincing air of quiet and repose. But just across the narrow street is the little market square, and at the corner of that is the church that is neighbor to the Roman arch, and that narrow street, and that billiard table of a market place, and that church are able, on a bet, to turn out more noise to a cubic yard at the wrong time than any other similar combination in the earth or out of it. In the street you have the skull-bursting thunder of the passing hack, a volume of sound not producible by six hacks anywhere else; on the hack is a lunatic with a whip which he cracks to notify the public to get out of his way. This crack is as keen and sharp and penetrating and ear-splitting as a pistol shot at close range, and the lunatic delivers it in volleys, not single shots. You think you will not be able to live till he gets by, and when he does get by he leaves only a vacancy for the bandit who sells Le Petit Journal to fill with his strange and awful yell. He arrives with the early morning and the market people, and there is a dog that arrives at about the same time and barks steadily at nothing till he dies, and they fetch another dog just like him. The bark of this breed is the twin of the whip volley, and stabs like a knife. By and by, what is left of you the church bell gets. There are many bells, and apparently six or seven thousand town clocks, and as they are all five minutes apart--probably by law--there are no intervals. Some of them are striking all the time--at least, after you go to bed they are. There is one clock that strikes the hour and then strikes it over again to see if it was right. Then for evenings and Sundays there is a chime--a chime that starts in pleasantly and musically, then suddenly breaks into a frantic roar, and boom, and crash of warring sounds that makes you think Paris is up and the Revolution come again. And yet, as I have said, one sleeps here--sleeps like the dead. Once he gets his grip on his sleep, neither hack, nor whip, nor news fiend, nor dog, nor bell cyclone, nor all of them together, can wrench it loose or mar its deep and tranquil continuity. Yes, there is indeed something in this air that is death to insomnia.
The buildings of the Cercle and the Villa des Fleurs are huge in size, and each has a theater in it, and a great restaurant, also conveniences for gambling and general and variegated entertainment. They stand in ornamental grounds of great extent and beauty. The multitudes of fashionable folk sit at refreshment tables in the open air, afternoons, and listen to the music, and it is there that they mainly go to break the Sabbath.
To get the privilege of entering these grounds and buildings you buy a ticket for a few francs, which is good for the whole season. You are then free to go and come at all hours, attend the plays and concerts free, except on special occasions, gamble, buy refreshments, and make yourself symmetrically comfortable.
Nothing could be handier than those two little theaters. The curtain doesn’t rise until 8.30; then between the acts one can idle for half an hour in the other departments of the building, damaging his appetite in the restaurants or his pocketbook in the baccarat room. The singers and actors are from Paris, and their performance is beyond praise.
I was never in a fashionable gambling hell until I came here. I had read several millions of descriptions of such places, but the reality was new to me. I very much wanted to see this animal, especially the new historic game of baccarat, and this was a good place, for Aix ranks next to Monte Carlo for high play and plenty of it. But the result was what I might have expected--the interest of the looker-on perishes with the novelty of the spectacle; that is to say, in a few minutes. A permanent and intense interest is acquirable in baccarat, or in any other game, but you have to buy it. You don’t get it by standing around and looking on.
The baccarat table is covered with green cloth and is marked off in divisions with chalk or something. The banker sits in the middle, the croupier opposite. The customers fill all the chairs at the table, and the rest of the crowd are massed at their back and leaning over them to deposit chips or gold coins. Constantly money and chips are flung upon the table, and the game seems to consist in the croupier’s reaching for these things with a flexible sculling oar, and raking them home. It appeared to be a rational enough game for him, and if I could have borrowed his oar I would have stayed, but I didn’t see where the entertainment of the others came in. This was because I saw without perceiving, and observed without understanding. For the widow and the orphan and the others do win money there. Once an old gray mother in Israel or elsewhere pulled out, and I heard her say to her daughter or her granddaughter as they passed me, “There, I’ve won six louis, and I’m going to quit while I’m ahead.” Also there was this statistic. A friend pointed to a young man with the dead stub of a cigar in his mouth, which he kept munching nervously all the time and pitching hundred-dollar chips on the board while two sweet young girls reached down over his shoulders to deposit modest little gold pieces, and said: “He’s only funning, now; wasting a few hundred to pass the time--waiting for the gold room to open, you know, which won’t be till after midnight--then you’ll see him bet! He won £14,000 there last night. They don’t bet anything there but big money.”
The thing I chiefly missed was the haggard people with the intense eye, the hunted look, the desperate mien, candidates for suicide and the pauper’s grave. They are in the description, as a rule, but they were off duty that night. All the gamblers, male and female, old and young, looked abnormally cheerful and prosperous.
However, all the nations were there, clothed richly and speaking all the languages. Some of the women were painted, and were evidently shaky as to character. These items tallied with the descriptions well enough.