Part 20

Blest in itself, Nice is cursed in its surroundings. So near is that plague spot of Europe, Monte Carlo, that it may almost be regarded as a suburb. For a few pence, in half-an-hour, you may transport yourself from a veritable earthly Paradise to what can only be described as a gilded Inferno. Unfortunately evil is more contagious than good. Certain medical authorities aver that the atmosphere of Mentone used to be impregnated with microbes of phthisis; the germs of moral disease infecting the immediate neighbourhood of Nice are far more appalling. Nor are symptoms wanting of the spread of that moral disease. The municipal council of this beautiful city, like Esau, had just sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. They had conceded the right of gambling to the Casino, the proprietors purchasing the right by certain outlays in the way of improvements, a new public garden, and so on. As yet roulette and rouge-et-noir are not permitted at Nice, the gambling at present carried on being apparently harmless. It is in reality even more insidious, being a stepping-stone to vice, a gradual initiation into desperate play. Just as addiction to absinthe is imbibed by potions quite innocuous in the beginning, so the new Casino at Nice schools the gamester from the outset, slowly and by infinitesimal degrees preparing him for ruin, dishonour and suicide.

The game played is called Petits Chevaux, and somewhat resembles our nursery game of steeplechase. The stakes are only two francs, but as there are eight to each horse, and you may take as many as you please, it is quite easy to lose several hundred francs in one evening--or, for the matter of that, one afternoon. Here, as at Monte Carlo, the gambling rooms remain open from noon till midnight. The buildings are on an imposing scale: reading rooms, a winter garden, concerts, entertainments of various kinds blinding the uninitiated to the real attraction of the place, namely, the miniature horses spinning around the tables. Already--I write of October--eager crowds stood around, and we heard the incessant chink of falling coin. This modified form of gambling is especially dangerous to the young. Parents, who on no account would let their children toss a five-franc piece on to the tables of Monte Carlo, see no harm in watching them play at petits chevaux. They should, first of all, make a certain ghastly pilgrimage I will now relate.

Monaco does not as yet, politically speaking, form a part of French territory; from a geographical point of view we are obliged so to regard it. Thus French geographers and writers of handbooks include the tiny principality, which for the good of humanity, let us hope, may ere long be swallowed up by an earthquake--or moralized! The traveller then is advised to take train to Monaco, and, arrived at the little station, whisper his errand in the cab-driver's ear, "To the suicides' cemetery."

For the matter of that, it is an easy walk enough for all who can stand the burning sun and glare of white walls and buildings. Very lovely, too, is the scene as we slowly wind upwards, the road bordered with aloes and cypresses; above, handsome villas standing amid orange groves and flowers; below, the sparkling sea.

A French cemetery, with its wreaths of beadwork and artificial violets, has ever a most depressing appearance. That of Monaco is like any other, we find the usual magnificence, and usual tinsel. Many beautiful trees, shrubs, and flowers, however, relieve the gloom, and every inch is exquisitely kept.

Quite apart from this vast burial-ground, on the other side of the main entrance, is a small enclosure, walled in and having a gate of open ironwork always locked. Here, in close proximity to heaps of garden rubbish, broken bottles and other refuse, rest the suicides of Monte Carlo, buried by the parish gravedigger, without funeral and without any kind of religious ceremony. Each grave is marked by an upright bit of wood, somewhat larger than that by which gardeners mark their seeds, and on which is painted a number, nothing more. Apart from these, are stakes driven into the ground which mark as yet unappropriated spots. The indescribable dreariness of the scene is heightened by two monumental stones garlanded with wreaths and surrounded by flowers. The first records the memory of a young artisan, and was raised by his fellow-workmen; the second commemorates brotherly and sisterly affection. Both suicides were driven to self-murder by play. The remainder are mere numbers. There are poor gamesters as well as rich, and it is only or chiefly these who are put into the ground here. The bodies of rich folks' relatives, if identified, are immediately removed, and, by means of family influence, interred with religious rites. Many suicides are buried at Nice and Mentone, but the larger proportion, farther off still. Not to descant further on this grim topic, let me now say something about Monte Carlo itself.

Never anywhere was snare more plainly set in the sight of any bird. There is little in the way of amusement that you do not get for nothing here, a beautiful pleasure-ground, reading-rooms as luxurious and well-supplied as those of a West End club, one of the best orchestras in Europe, and all without cost of a farthing.

The very lavishness arouses suspicion in the minds of the wary. Why should we be supplied, not only with every English newspaper we ever heard of, but with Punch, Truth, and similar publications to boot? Why should Germans, Russians, Dutch, every other European nation, receive treatment equally generous? Again, to be able to sit down at elegant writing-tables and use up a quire of fine notepaper and a packet of envelopes to match, if we chose, how is all this managed? The concerts awaken a feeling of even intenser bewilderment. Not so much as a penny are we allowed to pay for a programme, to say nothing of the trained musicians. Where is the compensation of such liberality?

The gambling tables, crowded even at three o'clock on an October afternoon, answer our question. The season begins later, but gamblers cannot wait. "Faites le jeu, messieurs; messieurs, faites le jeu," is already heard from noon to midnight, and the faster people ruin themselves and send a pistol shot through their heads, the faster others take their place. It is indeed melancholy to reflect how many once respectable lives, heads of families, even wives and mothers, are being gradually lured on to bankruptcy and suicide.

In cruellest contrast to the moral degradation fostered below, is the enormous cathedral, at the time of my visit in course of erection directly above the gambling rooms. The millions of francs expended on this sumptuous basilica were supplied by the proprietors of the Casino and the Prince of Monaco. Nothing can strike the stranger with a stronger sense of incongruity--a church rising from the very heart of a Pandemonium!

Monaco is a pretty, toy-like, Lilliputian kingdom compared with which the smallest German principality of former days was enormous. Curiously enough, whilst Monte Carlo is peopled with gamesters, the only tenants of Monaco seem to be priests, nuns and their pupils. The miniature capital, state and kingdom in one, consists chiefly of convents and seminaries, and wherever you go you come upon these Jesuit fathers with their carefully-guarded troops of lads in uniform. A survey of the entire principality of Monaco, Monte Carlo included, requires about a quarter of an hour. Nowhere, surely, on the face of the civilized globe is so much mischief contained in so small a space. Fortunately, the poisonous atmosphere of the Casino does not seem to affect the native poor. Everywhere we are struck by the thrifty, sober, hard-working population; beggars or ragged, wretched-looking creatures are very rare. If the authorities of the Alpes Maritimes have set themselves to put down vagrancy, they have certainly succeeded.

Nice is a home for the millionaire and the working man. The intermediate class is not wanted. Visitors are expected to have money, are welcomed on that account, and if they have to look to pounds, shillings, and pence, had much better remain at home.

Woe betide the needy invalid sent thither in search of sunshine! Sunshine is indeed a far more expensive luxury on the Riviera than we imagine, seeing that only rooms with a north aspect are cheap, and a sunless room is much more comfortless and unwholesome than a well-warmed one, no matter its aspect, in England. The only cheap commodity, one unfortunately we cannot live upon, is the bouquet. In October, that is to say, before the arrival of winter visitors, flowers are to be had for the asking; on the market-place an enormous bouquet of tuberoses, violets, carnations, myrtle, priced at two or three francs, the price in Paris being twenty. Fruit also I found cheap, figs fourpence a dozen, and other kinds in proportion. This market is the great sight of Nice, and seen on a cloudless day--indeed it would be difficult to see it on any other--is a glory of colour of which it is impossible to give the remotest notion. I was somewhat taken aback to find Sunday less observed here as a day of rest than in any other French town I know, and not many French towns are unknown to me. The flower and fruit markets were crowded, drapers', grocers', booksellers' shops open all day long, traffic unbroken as usual. I should have imagined that a city, for generations taken possession of by English visitors, would by this time have fallen into our habit of respecting Sunday alike in the interests of man and beast. Of churches, both English and American, there is no lack. Let us hope that the Protestant clergy will turn their attention to this subject. Let us hope also that the entire English-speaking community will second their efforts in this direction. Further, I will put in a good word for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals founded at Nice some years since, and sadly in need of funds. The Society is backed up by the Government in accordance with the admirable Loi Grammont, but, as is the case with local societies in England, requires extraneous help. Surely rich English valetudinarians will not let this humane work stand still, seeing, as they must do daily, the urgent necessity of such interference! From the windows of a beautiful villa on the road to Villefranche, I saw baskets of chickens brought in from Italy, the half of which were dead or dying from suffocation. As the owner of the villa said, "Not even self-interest teaches this Italian humanity." By packing his fowls so as to afford them breathing space, he would double his gains. The habit of cruelty is too inveterate. My host assured me that large numbers of poultry sent across the frontier are suffocated on the way.

Horrible also is the pigeon-shooting at Monte Carlo. Hundreds of these wretched birds are killed for sport every day during the winter. The wounded or escaped fly back after a while to be shot at next day.

The word "villa" calls for comment. Such a designation is appropriate here. The palatial villas of Nice, standing amid orangeries and palm groves, are worthy of their Roman forerunners. For the future I shall resent the term as applied in England to eight-roomed, semi-detached constructions, poorly built, and with a square yard of flower-bed in front. Many of the Niçois villas are veritable palaces, and what adds to their sumptuousness is the indoor greenery, dwarf palms, india-rubber trees, and other handsome evergreens decorating corridor and landing-places. The English misnomer has, nevertheless, compensations in snug little kitchen and decent servant's bedroom. I looked over a handsome villa here, type, I imagine, of the rest. The servants' bedrooms were mere closets with openings on to a dark corridor, no windows, fireplace, cupboard, or any convenience. The kitchen was a long, narrow room, after the manner of French kitchens, with space by the window for two or three chairs. I ventured to ask the mistress of the house where the servants sat when work was done. Her answer was suggestive--

"They have no time to sit anywhere."

It will be seen that our grey skies and mean-looking dwellings have compensations.

XIII

GUEST OF FARMER AND MILLER

"Nine hours' rolling at anchor" was Arthur Young's experience of a Channel passage in 1787, and on the return journey he was compelled to wait three days for a wind. Two years later, what is in our own time a delightful little pleasure cruise of one hour and a quarter, the journey from Dover to Calais occupied fourteen hours.

We might suppose from the hundreds of thousands of English travellers who yearly cross the Manche, that Picardy, Artois, and French Flanders would overflow with them, that we should hear English speech wherever we go, and find ourselves amid more distinctly English surroundings than even in Switzerland or Norway; but no such thing. From the moment I quitted Boulogne to that of my departure from Calais, having made the round by way of Hesdin, Arras, Vitry-en-Artois, Douai, Lille, St. Omer, I no more encountered an English tourist than on the Causses of the Lozère a few years before. Many years later, on going over much of the same ground, with a halt at Étaples and Le Touquet, it was much the same. Yet such a tour, costing so little as regards money, time and fatigue, teems with interest of very varied and unlooked-for kind.

Every inch of ground is historic to begin with, and has contributed its page to Anglo-French annals or English romance. We may take the little railway from Hesdin to Abbeville, traversing the forest of Crécy, and drive across the cornfields to Agincourt. We may stop at Montreuil, which now looks well, not only "on the map," but from the railway carriage, reviving our recollections of Tristram Shandy. At Douai we find eighty English boys playing cricket and football under the eye of English Benedictine monks--their college being a survival of the persecutions of Good Queen Bess.

And to come down from history and romance to astounding prose, we find, a few years ago, Roubaix, a town of 114,000 souls, that is to say, a fourth of the population of Lyons--a town whose financial transactions with the Bank of France exceed those of Rheims, Nîmes, Toulouse, or Montpellier, represented by a man of the people, the important functions of mayor being filled by the proprietor of a humble estaminet and vendor of newspapers, character and convictions only having raised the Socialist leader to such a post!

In rural districts there is also much to learn. Peasant property exists more or less in every part of France, but we are here more especially in presence of agriculture on a large scale. In the Pas-de-Calais and the Nord we find high farming in right good earnest, holdings of from ten to fifteen hundred acres conducted on the footing of large industrial concerns, capital, science and enterprise being alike brought to bear upon the cultivation of the soil and by private individuals.

I travelled from Boulogne to Hesdin, in time for the first beautiful effect of spring-tide flower and foliage. The blackthorn and pear trees were already in full blossom, and the elm, poplar and chestnut just bursting into leaf. Everything was very advanced, and around the one-storeyed, white-washed cottages the lilacs showed masses of bloom, field and garden being a month ahead of less favoured years.

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Near Étaples the wide estuary of the Canche showed clear, lake-like sheets of water amid the brilliant greenery; later are passed sandy downs with few trees or breaks in the landscape. This part of France should be seen during the budding season; of itself unpicturesque, it is yet beautified by the early foliage. Hesdin is an ancient, quiet little town on the Canche, with tanneries making pictures--and smells--by the river, unpaved streets, and a very curious bit of civic architecture, the triple-storeyed portico of the Hôtel de Ville. Its 7000 and odd souls were soon to have their museum, the nucleus being a splendid set of tapestries representing the battle of Agincourt, in loveliest shades of subdued blue and grey. The little inn is very clean and comfortable; for five francs a day you obtain the services of the master, who is cook; the mistress, who is chambermaid; and the daughters of the house, who wait at table. Such, at least, was my experience.

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