Page:Book of the Riviera.djvu/306

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244
THE RIVIERA

there the body was laid. Her festival is on January 27th, and on that day a procession leaves the cathedral at Monaco and descends to the Church of Ste. Devota in the gulley.

The great charm of Monte Carlo consists in the gardens with tropical plants. As to the buildings of Casino and Theatre, they are by Charles Gamier, who was also the architect of the Grand Opera House at Paris.—enough to say that they are vulgar and display no token of genius and sense of beauty. They are appropriate to a gambling hell. That is all that can be said of them.


"The Casino," says Miss Dempster, the authoress of Vera, "is the thing that all Europe, Asia, and America talk of, that all moralists decry, and that all pleasure-seekers declare to be a paradise. It is the Casino that gives wealth and fashion to this section of the coast. It is the Casino that causes a dozen trains to stop daily at Monte Carlo; that keeps up the palace, the army, the roads, the opera-house, and the Hôtel de Paris. It is the green table that keeps the gardens green and the violins in tune; that has brought 3,000 residents and so many hundred prostitutes to the town; that gives work to 1,000 servants, and causes the annual issue of about 335,000 tickets. When we consider these facts, the fabulous beauty of the site, the mildness of the climate, the good dinners, the better music, the pigeon-shooting, and the many exciting chances, can we wonder that Monte Carlo is in every mouth?"


It is just the fact that the site is so exquisitely beautiful that is the pity of it all. Why should the moral cesspool of Europe be precisely there? How much better were it in the Maremma or the Campagna, where the risk to health and life would add zest to the speculation with gold. As long as men people the globe there