"But what is that?" she asked, pointing to a sort of jetty topped with sickly green, like a worn and dirty billiard table, and dotted with rough deal boxes, that projected its squalor into the pure blue waves below.
The crack of a shot from under their feet startled her, and the simultaneous opening of a box, out of which fluttered a wounded pigeon, pursued to the edge of the billiard-table and killed there by a dog, answered her question, telling her that this sordid hideousness drawing every eye, in the very centre of the fairy-like beauty, was the world-famed Tir aux Pigeons.
There was no escaping from the sight except by turning from the lovely circle of bays and mountain spurs, to look upon the flaring vulgarity of the Casino, with its sprawling nudities affronting the pure sky, and flocks of tail-clipped birds flitting about the cornices and pediments, scurrying out at every shot that slaughtered one of their kindred in full sight below. Crack! Crack! Crack! the shots jarred on the nerves. Ermengarde hurried her halting escort away through the strange Arabian Nights' magnificence of the gardens that spread everywhere, flowing round hotels and shops and houses, and glowing in weird luxuriance beneath the grim grey mountain bluff and its dark wooded gorge.
Here was every variety of palm, with agaves and pepper-trees, caroubs and myrtles, geraniums in trees many feet high, or trailing over rocks, ruddy-leaved and grey-stemmed; here great cacti writhed and swelled in reptilian forms, and certain huge bushes of prickly pears, their broad fleshy leaves like goblin hands outspread, their grey, distorted stems like the fossil bones of huge extinct animals, and their dull-red, prickly fruit like oozing blood, suggested nothing so much as those trees in the Inferno, that bled at touch and were lost, living souls.
This strange exotic luxuriance has something infernal in its beauty; the darkly massed foliage, in hard contrast with the white glare of flaunting hotels and restaurants and the marble and gilding and flamboyant style of the Casino, gives the whole a violence, a crude insistence of wealth and luxury, in harmony with the spirit of the place, and much at variance with its superb natural setting and associations.
"And what people! Oh, what people!" Ermengarde murmured to the thin man, who was glad to sit down and pretend to listen to the band and watch the crowd strolling and sitting outside the Café de Paris. "What tawdriness, what dowdiness, what Parisian elegance run wild! Look at that woman; she has six purses at her belt. You can see the gold through the net. She's going into the Casino—let us go too!"
"So young, so fair, and so very business-like! Yes, beneath that Parisian hat, in that expensive Parisian raiment, is the cool and calculating brain and steady nerve of a financier. She has a system and works it, Mrs. Allonby."
How tawdry and tarnished was the vaunted splendour of the Casino, and how wearisome the formalities exacted before admittance to the gaming-hall!
"Such meddlesome impertinence. The man actually asked my age," Ermengarde complained.
"Ah! they don't ask mine," sighed the artist, whose head already showed the silver touch of time; "they are quite sure that I am of âge majeur."