“Io son Monaco; sopra un scoglio,
Non seme, non coglie,
E pure vuol mangiar.”[74]
It is true indeed that he does eat, the prince of the ancient name, and exquisitely beautiful little town, of Monaco. But it is food that would give an indigestion to any man with a conscience. The prince has reserved to himself of his lovely tiny principality very little more than his large palace and the surrounding gardens. The rest is let to the keeper of a gambling establishment built and organized on a very magnificent scale, and standing, with its hotel and several gay shops, in the most exquisite Italian gardens that imagination can picture—veritable gardens of Armida, with terrace above terrace, flights of white, gleaming steps, handsome balustrades, and all the glorious flowers and foliage of far-distant and still more sunny regions. They command a view of unspeakable beauty. They are full of all the sweet, peaceful suggestions of lovely nature, heightened and enhanced by the order and arrangement of subtle art. As I wandered up and down the marble stairs, and from beneath the shade of eucalyptus, palm, mimosa, tamarisk, and cypress, into the sunny walks bright with flowers, my heart sank within me at the dreadful thought that all this had been brought together for no other purpose than to minister to human passions of the worst kind, and to accumulate sordid gains by trading on vice. Games of chance may not, in themselves, be wrong. Far be it from me to assert that they are. But if the chronicles of Monaco could be truly written for only one season, we should look on this beautiful scene, where God's best gifts in bountiful nature have been used to decorate and adorn it to the utmost, as simply one of the gates of hell, and probably one of its broadest and largest. The moon was riding through a pure expanse of spotless blue, her reflection dancing on the rippling sea with silver footsteps, as we passed down the flights of broad stairs from terrace to terrace to join the night-train to Mentone. The journey took us barely twenty minutes; and we were silent and depressed. We had seen no startling sight: all was perfectly decorous and calm. A slight click, click, very occasionally, as the heaps of gold had been piled on the tapis vert, and a subdued, muffled noise, hardly perceptible, as the croupiers dragged forward the gains and the losses of silent figures that sat or stood around the numerous gambling-tables—that was all. Hours passed. People came and went with noiseless tread and controlled countenance. No man committed [pg 210] suicide in our presence. No woman shrieked at her loss or laughed at her success. Outwardly, it was calm, silent, and intense. But there is a wordless language which speaks from one human soul to another, and which, whether we will or no, reveals something of the inner state and the unspoken secrets. The very air teemed with these secrets. And as I passed out into the quiet night, I wondered whether perhaps in hell there will be the same decorous silence, without the exterior beauty, and all the fire of anguish be hidden beneath the outer garb—so entirely did it seem that, to many, it might be but one step from this to that.
“O tu che, siasi tua fortuna o voglia,
Al paese fatal d'Armida arrive,
Pensi indarno al fuggire; or l'arme spoglia,
E porgi ai lacci suoi le man cattive.”[75]
—Gerusalemme Liberata, Canto 7, stanza 32.
The rusticity of Mentone was a relief after the sort of nightmare to which we had so needlessly subjected ourselves at Monaco. It was carnival time, and the peasantry were making merry. A motley crew came pouring down the only street worthy of the name, in fantastic dresses, making hideous sounds through huge horns, shouting and dancing. They had two bears with them, which, I afterwards heard, in their frolic they had let loose, to the alarm of quiet folks. For myself, I scrambled up a steep, narrow, and very dirty vicolo,[76] part of which was composed of broken steps, glad to be out of their way. And so, climbing higher and higher, I found myself at the parish church, where there was an Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, and where the noise of the masks and merry-makers could not penetrate.