Youth does nothing else. Dancing is a sort of sacred rite, prohibited during the war; and people are all devoting themselves in dancing now, with the fervor of zealots finally celebrating the triumphs of their persecuted religion.
The Prince recalls his recent passage through Paris. He had never seen the women better dressed, with so manifest a hunger for pleasure and luxury. The tango of the violins on the Boulevard is answered like an echo by the tango of the violins all along the Riviera, and at the summer resorts which are beginning to open. Woman's dearest wish, at the moment, is to dance the latest dance with a fighter from the United States!
The nightmare of war has vanished; everything has been forgotten. For many people nothing remains to recall the conflict save the uniforms, more numerous than formerly in the thés dansants.
Michael confines his meditation to this coast, which was always the domain of the blessed! For four long years war has turned Monaco upside down and filled it with darkness.
His imagination runs up and down the gulfs and promontories. There is a cemetery on each. In Mentone thousands and thousands of negroes lie under the earth. The combatants from Africa, whose fathers knew only the lance and the breech-clout, have chanced to perish like gladiators on this shore of European millionaires. In Cap-Martin the English have left their dead; in Monaco, there are some of every nationality; in Cap-Ferrat, the Belgians sleep, under wreaths already old; in Nice, are the bodies of the Americans; and everywhere, from Esterel to the Italian frontier, there are Frenchmen, Frenchmen, Frenchmen.
The dead are innumerable. Were they all to rise together, those who come to prolong their lives under the palm tree and the olive on the shores of the Violet Sea, would flee aghast.
But the aim of life is to live. Life is an endless Springtime, and covers everything it touches with the eager moss of pleasure, with the swiftly creeping ivy of dreams.
The cemeteries, strikingly white, seem to take on a duller tone, and are lost in the smiling landscape, like an unessential note in a song. The softness of the skies and the surrounding country changes them to gardens. A body occupies so little space and the earth is so large!... The hotels which were hospitals, are regilding their signs, disinfecting their rooms and sending advertisements to the great newspapers of the world. Already people may come and dream between the walls which just now shook with cries of pain, or the rattle of death agonies. Music is beginning sweetly to moan along the happy coast, amid the murmur of the waves and the rustling of the orange trees, of epithalamial perfume. The old shepherd of the Alps, who, after sixty years, has not yet recovered from his amazement at the Monte Carlo which has arisen there below on the once deserted tableland, will see it grow with new palaces and new towers, further expanding its opulence like a city of dreams.
The passage of death has made love of life more keen. Every one, seeing the black banner of the Adversary vanish in the darkness, finds new zest in pleasure.
Lubimoff stops in the middle of the square. It is beginning to grow dark. With one ear he hears the musical swing of a dance invented by the negroes of North America for the enjoyment of the whites; and with the other he hears other negro music, the South American tango. In the adjoining streets new orchestras are playing wherever there is a public place, café, hotel, or restaurant—with a sign in English at the door, to attract the heroes of the hour: Dancing.