Catherine de Medici and Robespierre slinking away, poor, guilty
things, into the pale twilight of the Dawn!
"Names! Names! Only names? I am not just so sure about that. In any event,
what a roll call! We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little
life is rounded by a sleep; the selfsame sleep which these, our living dead
men and women in steel armor and gauzy muslins, in silken hose and sock and
buskin, epaulettes and top boots, brocades and buff facings, have endured
so long and know so well!
"If I should die in Paris I should expect them--or some of them--to meet me
at the barriers and to say, 'Behold, the wickedness that was done in the
world, the cruelty and the wrong, dwelt in the body, not in the soul of
man, which freed from its foul incasement, purified and made eternal by the
hand of death, shall see both the glory and the hand of God!'"
It was not to be. I shall not die in Paris. I shall never come again.
Neither shall I make apology for this long quotation by myself from myself,
for am I not inditing an autobiography, so called?
Chapter the Sixteenth
Monte Carlo--The European Shrine of Sport and Fashion--Apocryphal
Gambling Stories--Leopold, King of the Belgians--An Able and
Picturesque Man of Business
I
Having disported ourselves in and about Paris, next in order comes a
journey to the South of France--that is to the Riviera--by geography the
main circle of the Mediterranean Sea, by proclamation Cannes, Nice, and
Mentone, by actual fact and count, Monte Carlo--even the swells adopting a
certain hypocrisy as due to virtue.
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