After a minute's uncertitude, I remembered that I was in Nice, the motherland of the famous Carnival. This complicated construction could only be the skeleton of His Majesty King Carnival himself, the jolly deity who presides at the Riviera winter festivities.
"I thought you always burnt your King Carnival at the end of the season," I said to a native. "How is it that you preserved last year's dummy?"
"This, sir," he answered, "is not the last Roi Carnival, but the next Roi Carnival. Nobody thought we were going to take him round the town this year, but we shall probably have him finished up with canvas and plaster all the same.
"Of course, it will not be one of our great Carnivals; we have no money to throw away this winter, but His Majesty will go round the streets with a German helmet on his head and two upstanding moustaches, and everybody will enjoy more than usual the moment, at the beginning of Lent, when the figure will be set on fire."
Really, Nice does not look like a town which will, this year, have festivities of any kind. There are too many wounded and too many hospitals; the restrictions imposed by the Government are too strict, and the people do not seem to want any such amusement. Most of the luxury shops remain closed, and there is no chance of having an opera season or the famous Veglione at the Opera.
When walking about in Nice one gets the impression that France's military resources are almost unlimited. I don't know how many soldiers are in the town at the present moment, but certainly more than half the men one meets in the streets are in uniform. The long, straight Avenue de la Gare, the Oxford Street of Nice, is the favourite promenade of the military element.
Chasseurs des Alpes and Turcos, Colonial troops and helmeted cavalry, lend a gay look to the wide, handsome street, and the red and gold of their uniforms moving about in all directions reminds one of the bright setting of a patriotic ballet.
Here are the offices of the leading local newspaper. The latest war news is written in large characters on a huge board hanging from the second-floor windows. A permanent crowd waits there, commenting on the cables, with an astonishing abundance of gestures, in a curious mixed dialect of Italian, French, and Provençal.
Inside the offices is a sort of picture gallery. Photographs of all the officers and soldiers, natives of Nice who have fallen during the war, with a record of their deeds, and newspaper cuttings about them, sometimes in English as well as in French, are hung round the room, to the respectful admiration of the people.
Pious hands daily place fresh flowers beneath these photographs. All the men inspect the collection with hats off. An old lady placed some superb white roses round the picture of a young lieutenant; a black-haired young girl of the working-class went round with a bunch of scarlet carnations, and decorated the photos of those soldiers who had no other fresh flowers.