Perhaps Even This Was Partly Fancy;
As For The Flowers, I Cannot Bring Myself To Partake Of Their Deceit;
For
They are the most shameless fakers, as regards climate, in nature.
It is, for instance, perfectly true that they are
In bloom along the
Riviera all winter long, but this does not prove that the winter of the
Riviera is always warm. It merely proves that flowers can stand a degree
of cold that nips the nose bent to hale their perfume, and brings tears
into the eyes dwelling in rapture on their loveliness. They are like
women; they look so fragile and delicate that you think they cannot
stand anything, but they can stand pretty much everything, or at least
everything they wish to. Throughout that week at Monte Carlo, while we
cowered round our fires or went out into a frigid sunshine, the flowers
smiled from every garden-ground in a gayety emulous of that of their
sisters passing in white serge. So probably I gave less attention to the
details of the scenery through which my funicular was passing than to
the stupendous prospects of sea and shore which it varyingly commanded.
If words could paint these I should not spare the words, but when I
recall them, my richest treasure of adjectives seems a beggarly array of
color tubes, flattened and twisted past all col-lapsibility. Nothing
less than an old-fashioned panoramic show would impart any notion of it,
and even that must fail where it should most abound, namely, in the
delicacy of that ineffable majesty.
We climbed and climbed, with many a muted hope and many a muted fear of
the mechanism which carried us so safely, and then we ran across a
stretch of comparative level and reached the last station, under the
cliff on which the local hotel stood, with the mighty ruin behind it.
Our passengers flocked up to the terrace of the hotel, much shoved and
shouldered by automobiles bearing the company which seems proper to
those vehicles, and dispersed themselves at the many little tables set
about for tea, and the glory of the matchless outlook. While one could
yet have the ruin mostly to one's self, it seemed the most favorable
moment to visit the crumbling walls and broken tower, whose fragments
strewed the slopes around. The tower was of Augustus, and the fortress
into which it was turned in the Middle Ages was of unknown authority,
but the ruin was the work of Marshal Villars, who blew up both trophy
and stronghold sometime in the French king's wars with the imperialists
in the first half of the eighteenth century. The destruction was
incomplete, though probably sufficient for the purpose, but as a ruin,
nothing could be more admirable. There seems to be at present something
like a restoration going on; it has not gone very far, however; it has
developed some fragments of majestic pillars, and some breadths of Roman
brick-work; a few spaces about the base of the tower are cleared; but
the rehabilitation will probably never proceed to such an extreme that
you may not sit down on some carven remnant of the past, and closing
your eyes to the surrounding glory of alp and sea find yourself again on
the Palatine or amid the memorials of the Forum.
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