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. So,
instead of having barely time to affirm our innocence
of tobacco, spirits, or perfumes to the customs officers,
and to wash down a sandwich with a cup of coffee at
the restaurant, we had an hour and forty minutes at
Ventimiglia, which I partly spent in vain attempts
to buy the poverty of the inspector so far as to prevail
with him not to delay the examination of our baggage,
but to proceed to it at once, in order that we might
have it all off our minds, and devote our long leisure
