The Perspective There Is Often Like The Perspective
In Old Naples, But The Uproar In Genoa Does Not Break In
Music as it
does in Naples, and the chill lingering in the sunless depths of those
chasms is the cold
Of a winter that begins earlier and a spring that
loiters later than the genial seasons of the South.
X
EDEN AFTER THE FALL
A few years ago an Englishman who had lived our neighbor in the same
villa at San Remo, came and said that he was going away because it was
so dull at San Remo. He was going with his wife to Monte Carlo, because
you could find amusement every day in the week at the tables of the
different games of chance, and Sundays there was a very nice little
English church. He did not seem to think there was anything out of the
way in his grouping of these advantages, but he did not strongly urge
them upon us, and we restricted ourselves in turn to our tacit
reflections on the indifference of the English to a point of morals on
which the American conscience is apt to suffer more or less anguish if
it offends. So far as I know they do not think it wrong to take money
won at any game; but possibly their depravity in this matter rather
comforted us than offended. At any rate, I am sure of the superiority of
our own morals in visiting Monte Carlo after we left Genoa. If we did
not look forward with our Englishman's complacency to the nice little
church there, we certainly did not mean to risk our money at the tables
of Roulette, nor yet at the tables of Trente et Quarante, in the Casino.
What we really wished to do was to look on in the spiritual security of
saints while the sinners of both sexes lost and gained to the equal hurt
of their souls. We perhaps expected to hear the report of a pistol in
the gardens of the Casino, if we did not actually see the ruined gambler
falling among the flowers, or if not so much as this, we thought we
might witness his dramatic despair as the croupier drew in the last
remnant of his fortune and mechanically invited the other Messieurs and
Mesdames to make their game; secretly, we might even have been willing
to see something hysterical on the part of the Mesdames if fate frowned
upon them, or something scandalously exuberant if it smiled. If our
motives were not the worst, they were, at any rate, not the best; I
suppose they were the usual human motives, and I am afraid they were
mixed.
We found it rather long from Genoa to Monte Carlo, but this was not so
much because of the distance as because of the delays of our train,
which, having started late, grew reckless on the way, and before we
reached the Italian frontier at Ventimiglia, had lost all shame and
failed to connect there with the French train for the rest of our
journey.
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