CHAPTER XXVII
WE GO TO EZE
The charms of Monte Carlo are many. Our first morning there, to the sound of a horn blowing reveille in the distance, I was up betimes enjoying the wonderful spectacles from my balcony. The sun was just peeping up over the surface of an indigo sea, shooting sharp golden glances in every direction. Up on the mountains, which rise sharp and clear like great unornamented cathedrals back of the jeweled villages of this coast, it was picking out shepherd’s hut and fallen mementoes of the glory that was Rome. A sailboat or two was already making its way out to sea, and below me on that long point of land which is Cap Martin, stretching like a thin green spear into the sea, was the splendid olive orchard which I noted the day before, its gleaming leaves showing a different shade of green from what it had then. I did not know it until the subject came up that olive trees live to be a thousand years old and that they do as well here on this little strip of coast, protected by the high mountains at their back, as they do anywhere in Italy. In fact, as I think of it, this lovely projection of land, no wider than to permit of a few small villages and cities crowding between the sea and the mountains, is a true projection of Italy itself, its palms, olive trees, cypresses, umbrella trees and its peasants and architecture. I understand that a bastard French—half French, half Italian—is spoken here and that only here are the hill cities truly the same as they are in Italy.
While I was gazing at the morning sun and the blue sea and marveling how quickly the comfortable Riviera Express had whirled us out of the cold winds of Paris into this sun-kissed land, Barfleur must have been up and shaving, for presently he appeared, pink and clean in his brown dressing-gown, to sit out on my lovely balcony with me.
“You know,” he said, after he had commented on the wonder of the morning and the delicious soothing quality of the cool air, “Scorp is certainly an old fuss-button. There he lies in there now, ready to pounce on us. Of course he isn’t very strong physically and that makes him irritable. He does so love to be contrary.”
“I think he is a good running-mate for you,” I observed. “If he leans to asceticism in the matter of food, you certainly run to the other extreme. Sybaritic is a mild expression for your character.”
“You don’t mean it?”
“I certainly do.”
“In what way have I shown myself sybaritic?”
I charged him with various crimes. My amicable lecture was interrupted by the arrival of rolls and coffee and we decided to take breakfast in the company of Scorp. We knocked at his door.