He Was Otherwise A Shrewd And Conversible Piedmontese Who Did
Not Make Me Pay Much Above The Tariff, And Who Had Pity On My Poor
French After Awhile, And Consented To Speak Italian With Me.
In the sort
of French glare over the whole local civilization of the principality,
everybody will wish to seem Erench, but after you break through the
surface, the natives will be as comfortably and endearingly Italian as
anybody in the peninsula.
Among themselves they speak a Ligurian patois,
but with the stranger they will use an Italian easily much better than
his, and also much better than their own French. I think they prefer you
in their racial parlance after you have shown some knowledge of it, and
two kind women of whom I asked my way in Monte Carlo, one day when I was
trying for the station of the funicular to Turbia, grew more volubly
kind when I asked it in such Tuscan as I could command. That station is
really not hard to find when once you know where it is, and at three
o'clock in the afternoon I was mounting the precipitous incline of the
alp on whose summit Augustus divided Italy from Gaul, and left the
stupendous trophy which one sees there in ruins to-day.
I should like to render the sense of my upward progress dramatic by
pretending that we mounted from a zone of flowers at Monte Carlo into
regions where only the hardiest blossoms greeted us, but what I really
noticed was that by-and-by the little patches of vineyard seemed to grow
less and the olive-trees scraggier.
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