I left Moscow on the 10th of September and arrived at Brest on the following day. It was the first time in my life that I travelled alone, and it frightened me somewhat. I never left my compartment until Brest, and allayed my hunger by cramming myself with bonbons. My husband was waiting for me at the station and we continued our journey together.
We took a day’s rest at Verona. It was the anniversary of the occupation of Rome by the Italian troops, and the town was dressed all over with flags. On our way to the hotel we passed the house which had belonged to the Capulet family, and saw the balcony on which Juliet appeared to Romeo and listened to his serenades. After dinner we visited the splendid “Giusti Gardens,” where we were shown a marble statue worth a fortune, resounding like bronze when you touched it, and for which an American collector of works of art had offered the sum of forty thousand francs.
Next afternoon we beheld Genoa, at the foot of the Apennines and the Mediterranean spreading far and wide, where we stopped a whole day. An old guide, aged seventy-five, took us through the town. That old man had been a brave soldier in his day, one of the 1,200 warriors who had fought and landed with Garibaldi in Sicily. He took us to his private dwelling to show us his Garibaldian costume, a piece of Garibaldi’s famous red shirt, and the tip of a cigar which had been smoked by Garibaldi, which he kept as relics. On our way back to the hotel we passed before the monuments of Christopher Columbus, Garibaldi and Verdi. On the front of Garibaldi’s house the Free Masons have carved a garland of flowers surrounded by hieroglyphics. After dinner we drove to the Villa Pallavicini. At the entrance into the park stand white marble statues of Leda, Pomona, Hebe, and Flora. We walked through alleys of lemon, laurel, cypress and myrtle trees in full bloom. We passed a lake in which salmon-trout swam, and mounted on the top of a castle of the Middle-Ages. We entered then a stalactite grotto, with an artificial lake in the middle, where a mysterious Carcarollo invited us to take a row in his boat, carrying the arms of the Dukes of Pallavicini. Further on we saw a pavilion bearing the tempting inscription tête-à-tête amoureux, and wanted to enter it, but our guide said that we had better keep outside, for as soon as you open the door a tub of water pours over your head, cooling instantly your amorous ardour.
On the following morning we started for Nice by the Corniche Railway. The road runs all the time by the sea-shore; here and there it is barricaded with stones, in order to prevent the railway line from being washed away by the waves which broke against our carriage wheels.
We put up at Nice at the Hôtel des Étrangers. On entering the apartment that we were to occupy, we saw a placard stuck to the wall begging the visitors to turn the key in the lock when going to bed. This warning made me spend a restless night. I could not sleep, fearing that someone would come and strangle me; it seemed to me all the time as if a hand fumbled at the door. The mosquitoes were also awfully troublesome; I began to chase these little vampires and execute them on the spot, I who could never hurt a fly! Next morning directly after breakfast, we went to the Villa Bermont in which the Grand Duke Nicholas, our heir to the throne, had expired. A chapel has been built on the place where his bedroom stood. This villa is surrounded by a plantation of 10,000 orange trees. On our way back we visited the Russian Church; the altar is constructed of oak brought from Russia, and a big silver cross is made of different objects taken away by our Cossacks from the French in 1812.
We continued our journey on the following day and arrived at sunset at Toulon, where we had to wait patiently for the train, which left for Biarritz at four o’clock in the morning, in a bare room at the station, where we had the privilege of dozing on hard horse-hair chairs given us. Our travelling companions lay curled up in uncomfortable armchairs, nevertheless their noses very soon emitted trumpet-sounds. I drowsed also, all in a lump on my chair and was chilled to the bone.
When we arrived at Lourdes on the following afternoon, we saw the platform crowded with pilgrims, crippled and impotent, who come here from all parts of the world in the hope of a miraculous cure.
The road from Lourdes to Bayonne has a desolate look, without any vegetation whatever, only groups of trees here and there. We saw labourers in the fields tilling the ground with oxen harnessed to ploughs, just as we do in Russia. During the twenty minutes’ run from Bayonne to Biarritz two very prim, stately old ladies entered our compartment. They looked extremely haughty and unapproachable, and gave no outward signs of wishing to enter into conversation. But their manner changed instantly, when they found out that we were Russians; they became amiability itself, and expressed their great sympathy for our country.
We put up at Biarritz at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, and had to be satisfied with a small room at the very top. Our windows looked seawards and showed the wide expanse of the Atlantic and the agglomeration of rocks of the most fantastic forms named The Chaos. From below we heard the thunder of mighty waves dashing on the cliffs with a sound like the booming of many guns.
In the night the noise of the ocean hindered our sleep, and we decided to move to the Villa Gaston, a comfortable boarding-house, where we paid five francs a day for an apartment of two rooms.