In Vanity Fair: A Tale of Frocks and Femininity

It has been said that Cannes, Nice, and Monte Carlo represent, respectively, the world, the flesh, and the devil; and the classification is roughly accurate. Cannes has the most exclusive social life along the coast; its villas are occupied by folk whose names rank high in the social blue-books of the European capitals; the registers of its hotels bristle with sounding titles and its swell clubs have membership lists calculated to impress anyone who loves a lord. The Napoule Golf Club at Cannes has a Russian Grand Duke for president and an English Duke for vice-president; and, on the links, counts and barons, belted earls and multi-millionaires, are thick as leaves in Vallambrosa. Even princes and potentates drive off the tees and struggle in the bunkers. One sees rather more of London than of Paris in the crowd, but there are Parisians, too, and they are even more English than the English in their sporting proclivities, for fashion is a more aggressive thing than nature. The whole atmosphere is English at Napoule. From the architecture of the picturesque timbered club-house to the h's of the servants, everything has a fine British flavour, and save for the frocks of the women and the fluent Parisian French dividing honours with English on the links and in the club-house, there is little to remind the guest that he is in France.

Down in the town, and along the famous Promenade de la Croisette, there is a different story. Here, too, a large percentage of the fashionable crowd is English, but the setting is French where it is not Italian. The Croisette, the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, the terrace at Monte Carlo, are three of the most beautiful, the most fashionable, the most amusing promenades in the world, and the idler may spend many profitable hours upon any one of the three; but each has its distinctive flavour just as each of the three towns has its own local colour and its own crowd, though all share alike in the sparkling beauty of the Riviera summer land.

Yachting is an institution even more important than golf in the programme of Cannes. The Cercle Nautique, one of the chief rendezvous for the society set, is exclusive to the last degree, and out in the beautiful harbour splendid sea-going yachts from all parts of Europe and from America are anchored during the season. Some of the yacht owners prefer living in hotels or villas during their sojourn and use the boats for cruising only; but more live aboard their floating palaces, and there is constant going and coming twixt yachts and quai, to the immense entertainment of outsiders who get no nearer than this to the social life at Cannes. Carriages roll up to the landing and deposit wonderfully gowned women and men whose names are whispered knowingly by the watching throng. Launches are waiting to receive the load of fashion and celebrity. There is a tableau of coquetry and chiffons, a shuffling of royal highnesses and wealthy commoners, and the little boats move off toward the yacht, where luncheon will be served on deck under the awnings, to the accompaniment of tinkling mandolins and guitars.

There are worse things even for royalty than to sit at a violet-strewn table under awnings that flap in the soft sea breeze of a sunshiny February day, and, in the intervals of a luncheon prepared by an artist for an epicure, to look off across dimpling blue water to a curving white line of shore where promenaders make bright impressionistic dashes of colour in the sunlight, and to the grove-embowered villas, the imposing, many-pillared hotels, the mediæval little villages that climb the verdure-clad mountains behind the town.

Cannes is lovely, – far lovelier than Nice in its natural scenery, but Cannes is cold to tourists, dull for those who have not the open sesame to its charmed social circle. The ordinary visitor will find Nice far more gay. Here, too, there is an exclusive villa and hotel set, but it does not dominate the situation as at Cannes. There is welcome and entertainment for everyone at Nice. On the Promenade des Anglais stroll men and women from all countries and all classes, and queer groups collect at "la potinière," the gossip rendezvous which ends the promenade. The new town with its public parks, its fascinating shops, its luxurious hotels and modest hostelries, its gorgeous restaurants and its cheap eating-places, its clubs, its gambling, its flower markets, its tide of restless pleasure seekers, is as gay a place as the world holds when the Riviera season is at its height, and though one may live there cheaply or extravagantly, it would be difficult to live there dully, unless one were a hardened misanthrope; for all things woo to pleasant folly, and jollity is in the air.

To stroll from one's hotel to the famous promenade on a bright morning is to snap one's fingers at carking care. The sunshine is such fluid gold as no northern country knows, the air is fresh, intoxicating, full of warring sea scents and flower perfumes, a sky wonderfully soft, deeply blue is overhead, the Mediterranean is a marvellous changing sea of turquoise and sapphire and amethyst and beryl, with here and there high golden lights where the sun catches a ripple of foam. Boys and girls hold out great handfuls of big, long-stemmed purple violets to you and the fragrance comes sweet and heavy to your nostrils. Women in light summer frocks stroll along the broad white walk, stopping to chat with friends; on the roadway which the promenade borders, roll luxurious private carriages, smart dog-carts, hired fiacres, hotel wagons, all loaded with smiling folk, for one smiles perforce in this world of sunshine and flowers and laughter.

On the inland side of the roadway is a line of hotels and villas and cafés and shops, with tropical gardens breaking the line of gleaming white buildings; and in those shops one may find the best that European merchants have to offer to extravagant womankind; for the famous jewellers and milliners and dressmakers of Paris, London, and Vienna have branch establishments here, and the proprietors of the great houses often spend the season in villas at Nice or Monte Carlo and oversee in person their lively Riviera trade.

Paquin, Beer, Doeuillet, and their peers are familiar figures at Nice and Monte Carlo; and these mighty ones of the fashion world may well feel, with a glow of satisfaction, that they are responsible for much of the glittering show that passes in review under their critical eyes.

Nice is not given over wholly to fresh air and promenading.

Down in the Casino of the jetty, a pavilion of many minarets which opens off from the promenade and under whose foundations the sea washes listlessly, there is gambling – trente et quarante, roulette, and, in the more exclusive club-rooms to which one is admitted only by card, baccarat; but gambling is an incident at Nice. All things save gambling are incidental at Monte Carlo, and while a host of folk live in Nice without playing at the jetty Casino or the municipal Casino, but few visitors to Monte Carlo resist the fascination of the gaming tables. There is always a crowd at the jetty Casino after luncheon, lounging, gossiping, gaming, listening to the excellent orchestra; and the crowd about the gambling tables is the mixed and motley crowd one always finds in such a situation, but there are fewer smart folk at the trente et quarante and roulette tables than one sees at corresponding tables in Monte Carlo. The fashionables of Nice choose the baccarat club-rooms for their rendezvous, and it is there that you must go to see modish women and well-known men gossiping, flirting, and playing high.

There is a popular restaurant adjoining the gambling rooms, – a gorgeous restaurant, brilliant with scarlet lacquer and Chinese decorations, though chop suey is not on the menu, – and many of the baccarat players dine or sup there; but there are so many places in which to lunch or dine or sup in Nice that one may find a meal to suit any palate, and a price to suit any purse.

The Helder has the same proprietor as Armenonville and the Café de Paris, and much the same crowd. The Regence is the Helder's great rival, and after these comes a long line of town restaurants, each with its individual claim upon the diner's attention, while out on the hills and all along the coast are famous hotel restaurants and cafés to which the gay Nicois resort.

There is tea-drinking, too, and the places where women flock at the tea hour are many, but while my lady of aristocratic Cannes is likely to drink her tea at the Cercle Nautique or in some other exclusive haunt, Madame of Nice frequents tea-rooms such as those of Paris; and tea hour at a place like Vogades offers an interesting study in femininity, though the crowd is frightfully mixed and, sometimes, unconscionably gay.

It is during carnival time that gaiety becomes a trifle furious at Vogades. The regular winter visitors and residents of Nice frown upon King Carnival and dread his advent; but for the transient visitor the show is an amusing one and the common folk of Nice throw themselves into the celebration with a gay abandon that sometimes approaches objectionable license. Who cares whether a few fastidious critics are holding aloof from carnival gaieties when ninety per cent of the motley populace of Nice is eating, drinking, dancing, and making merry, when fun and folly are running riot, when all the town is ablaze with garlands of electric lights and artificial flowers, when confetti is raining through the air and grotesque figures fill the streets.

Vulgar, of course. All carnivals are vulgar and the line between mirth and horse-play is easily crossed, but it is a pity not to see the carnival at Nice at least once, and not to enter into the spirit of the thing, without a handicap of aristocratic prejudices. The age of spontaneous mummery is past and carnival foolery has a strained and artificial note in this self-conscious day, but one may be merry in Nice when King Carnival sits enthroned and a multitude, hiding its irresponsibility behind masks, gives itself up to folly.

All through the season there are fêtes in Nice. The Battle of Flowers is more like the real thing than is the Parisian imitation; the Corso Automobile Fleuri brings out a brave array of flower-decorated automobiles; the children's flower fête is the prettiest thing of its kind in Europe; and there is a water fête in the bay of Villefranche, where flower-decorated boats and floats loaded with musicians and merry-makers swarm on the blue water, and flower battles rage amid music and laughter and the murmur of the waves. Grim war-vessels are usually lying in the harbour and the revellers row out to pelt the monsters derisively with flowers and jests, and to aim violet bunches impartially at the cannon's mouth and the ranking officer's head.

Yes, Nice is gay, – absurdly gay; and if, at its gayest, it is not smart, still one will see the loveliest of Parisian toilettes in the restaurants and the Casino, and on the promenade.

There are lovely villas in Nice, hidden away, even in the more crowded parts of the town, among palms and aloes and banana trees and eucalyptus, and gay with yellow mimosa and other flowering things while behind the town on the hillsides are villas lovelier still, gleaming white amid groves of orange and lemon trees and tropical vegetation, and overlooking shore and sea. Wherever there is space for them flowers grow, and every breath of air is sweet-scented. In the distance, beyond the grey-green slopes where the olives thrive, are misty, snow-capped mountains, and far away along the coast stretches the white thread of the Corniche road, that road of marvellous views and picturesque surprises, which is the heart's delight of the motor maniacs on the Riviera.

Motoring is a passion with the Riviera crowd as with every holiday crowd to-day, and though many of the roads are too steep and narrow and rugged for motors, or even for comfortable driving, the few that are practicable are beautiful enough not to grow monotonous. From one resort to another, all along the coast, the automobiles go scudding, and even the steep hills of Monte Carlo swarm with puffing cars. A little danger more or less makes small impression upon the Monte Carlo crowd. Skidding recklessly down hill is, figuratively speaking, the metier of so many of the throng that haunts the Casino and fills the great hotels.

Life at Monte Carlo is essentially sensational. A continual whirl of excitement seems to be the ideal of the habitué, and the class that centres there spends money recklessly, without reserve and without calculation. There are gamblers who haven't the money to spend; but they live cheaply at some one of the nearby resorts, where they may lose themselves between Casino hours, and in the little town of fine hotels and cafés and shops which clings to the skirts of the Casino, life goes to a merry tune. Perhaps the unwholesome fever of the gaming rooms infects the district; but, whatever the cause, Monte Carlo sees little of the sanely joyous life that may be found at other Riviera resorts. Everything is brilliant, luxurious, dramatic, but of restfulness and simple pleasure the beautiful spot knows nothing, and though, for a few days, even the fastidious traveller may be well amused there, for a longer stay it is wise to go outside of the miasmic circle.

The incongruity between drama and setting is one of the most striking things about the place, though familiarity dulls the first swift impression of the contrast. If ever man diverted God-given beauty to the devil's uses, he has done it there upon the Monaco shore, and the serpent was no more out of place in Paradise than is a gambling Casino on that picturesque promontory overlooking the Mediterranean – but the daughters of Eve have smiled upon the Casino as their ancestors smiled upon the serpent, and though their gambling has been for smaller stakes than hers, they have made a somewhat spectacular record of their own. The feminine element at Monte Carlo is one of the most characteristic and dramatic features of the resort. Nowhere else in the world will one see women of all classes gambling openly and heavily; nowhere else are the alpha and omega of feminine folly so sharply and obviously contrasted – and so gaily and recklessly ignored. Around the tables, from opening until closing hour, crowd women derelicts; each train that stops at the station below the wonderful terraces brings more. The veriest ingénue might read the stories of wreck and disaster, yet the warning makes not the faintest impression upon the fair feminine craft steering head on toward the rocks.

How can Fifi of the wonderful frocks and jewels guess that she will lose once too often at the little green tables, that the day of adorers ready and eager to pay her losses will pass, that youth and beauty will make way for such shrivelled and haggard age as that of the painted and bedizened harpies who haunt the gaming rooms, staking their few francs and watching for opportunities of making way with the stakes of other players.

For the average casual visitor to Monte Carlo, these hags of the Casino are among the sharpest and cleanest cut of first impressions. Later one grows used to them, ignores them, allows them to take their places in the shifting human panorama that is in its way as fascinating as the roulette and trente et quarante which brings the crowd together; but at first these hideous old women of the furrowed faces plastered with rouge, of the furtive eyes, of the loose lips, the trembling claw-like hands, the dirty laces, the false jewels, have a hateful fascination, obscure all other impressions.

There are many of the harpies living entirely by fraud, and though croupiers, detectives, and attendants know some of them and suspect others, it seems impossible to keep them out of the Casino. Occasionally the doors are barred to someone, but under the present administration admission rules are more lax than they were in the old days, and the whole character of the Casino crowd, while perhaps not more vicious, is certainly more vulgar than it was under M. Blanc's régime.

The system of the women thieves is a simple one. An excited crowd surrounds a roulette table; many of the players know comparatively little about the game. The stakes are placed, money is lost or won, and raked in or distributed, in less time than is required for the telling of it. While a novice hesitates, wondering whether the money on a certain number is really hers, a yellow hand reaches across her shoulder and snatches the stakes. Even if the victim is sure that she knows the offender, she hesitates to make a scene, to be implicated in a gaming-room scandal, and the thief audaciously counts upon this immunity. Sometimes, however, an attendant sees the transaction and lays a firm hand upon the old woman's arm before she can get away. Or perhaps the croupier of the immobile face and the eyes that see all things notices the hand closing upon money to which it has no right and brings his rake down sharply upon the thin wrist in time to stop the move.

There are other wrinkled and haggard old women in the Casino crowd, – women less contemptible, more pitiable, but unpleasant sights for all that. They come to the gambling rooms to play, not to steal; but the gambling fever has burned out all that was pure womanly in them and nothing is left to them in life save the vice they hug to their hearts. Some of them have been playing there ever since the first years of the Casino, missing never a day from the opening to the closing of the season, and usually staying all day long in the hot, ill-ventilated rooms. They have but little money and they play cautiously, watching the run of the game, making innumerable notes in little note-books, taking no great risks.

One Russian princess is among the number. Old habitués of the Casino say that when she came there first, twenty-five years ago, she was beautiful, superbly gowned, magnificently bejewelled, but gaming is in the Russian blood and the princess was a born gambler. She squandered her fortune, pawned her jewels, sank lower and lower in the gambling mire, gave herself up more and more unreservedly to her absorbing passion. To-day, she lives in a cheap pension at Mentone and belongs to the class known in Monte Carlo as "the bread-winners," – a class of gamblers making a regular daily visit to the Casino, playing until perhaps ten, fifteen, or fifty francs ahead of the bank, and then leaving. If one is content with making a mere daily pittance out of the tables, the thing can be surely and systematically done; and, every morning the first train brings an army of these bread-winners, together with hundreds of bolder gamblers. There is always a crowd waiting at the Casino doors when they are opened, always a wild scramble for the chairs around the tables; and, once comfortably seated, these early comers are usually good for the day, or at least until dinner-time. They are the most economical and persistent, though not the most profitable, of the Casino's patrons.

Fashionable folk favour shorter gambling hours. If Madame is staying at one of the Monte Carlo hotels, – at the famous Hôtel de Paris, let us say, a hotel beloved of Parisian demi-mondaines and their satellites, but patronized by cosmopolitan great folk as well, – she arises very late and has her breakfast on a terrace with a sunlit sapphire sea stretching out before her and an awning sheltering her from the too ardent sun. The chances are that it is a delectable breakfast, for there is good cooking in Monte Carlo. The prodigal crowd that spends its money there demands high living, and the Café de Paris, with its Indian interior and its famous grill-room, has seen gay dinners and suppers in its time and has appropriated a generous share of the winnings of lucky gamblers, beside helping the Casino to rid the unlucky player of his money.

Ciro's, too, has played its part in nineteenth-century romance and scandal and had its share in the Monte Carlo harvest. The proprietor, an energetic and diplomatic Italian, has made a large fortune and deserves it, for he can produce for his cosmopolitan patrons on demand any dish from buckwheat cakes to the most delicate frittura, and any drink from vodka to Jersey apple-jack. Perhaps that is stating the case too strongly, but he is a remarkable restaurateur, this Ciro.

These are but two restaurants of the many; and if one tires of the town, there is the mountain restaurant at la Turbie, to which one climbs by a funicular and where the air is keen and cool from the snowy mountain peaks. Even the view alone is worth the trip to la Turbie; for, from the restaurant terrace, one looks down upon Monaco with its palace and cathedral, upon Monte Carlo with its snowy villas and Casino amid their groves and gardens, and upon miles of summer sea.

When déjeuner is ended there are many ways of passing what is left of the day. The terrace is thronged during the late morning hours, and if one has breakfasted early enough there is time for a stroll there – a stroll that calls for a smart costume, if one makes pretence of being truly chic. Up and down the beautiful promenade saunter the idlers – a crowd as interesting and as mixed as that of the promenade des Anglais or the promenade at Trouville. Past they file, rosy-cheeked, middle-class Englishwomen in ill-fitting frocks, consummately modish Parisiennes, notorious in Monte Carlo as at home, fat German Jewesses, American girls chaperoning their tired and patient parents, French, American, and English actresses, great ladies from all countries, men of every type, from hard-faced chevalier d'industrie to reigning monarch, from gilded youth to elderly roué.

One sees many a new fashion note on the Monte Carlo terrace, and, later, costumes still more chic are in evidence at the Casino concert, to which come music lovers from all the neighbouring resorts, for the Monte Carlo orchestra is one of the best in Europe and even moralists who have serious scruples to forbid their gambling do not hesitate to take advantage of the concerts provided by the profits of the tables.

For the sporting contingent there is driving and motoring during the early afternoon, before the chill creeps into the air; and on the terrace overlooking the grounds of the International Pigeon Shooting Club there is always a crowd watching the shooting below. Butchery rather than sport, this pigeon shooting, but the Monte Carlo club is the most famous in the world and draws the crack shots from all countries. Betting runs high among the sportsmen and the onlookers, and the club events are a great source of entertainment to those who have heart and stomach for such sport.

After the tea hour, the Casino begins to fill with the crowd that is its mainstay, the high-playing, heavily plunging, extravagant crowd, willing to buy excitement at any price, and some of the heaviest gambling is done in those hours just before the dinner. The hush grows more pronounced, more oppressive, and the croupier's monotonous voice sounds more clearly in its maddening iteration, "Messieurs, Mesdames, faites vos jeux. – Les jeux sont faits. Rien ne va plus."

Every seat at the tables is filled, crowds are clustering behind the chairs, leaning forward to play, watching with excitement an unusual run of good or bad luck, but quiet, intent, absorbed. There is never noise and confusion, never an outbreak that can create scandal. A battalion of official employees attends to that, and quickly, effectually suppresses any objectionable scene.

Monsieur François Blanc, who was responsible for Monte Carlo, was fond of saying that he had made and kept the place "absolutely respectable." He is dead now, this M. Blanc, but before he died he built a cathedral not far from his Casino, and in a mortuary chapel of the cathedral reposes the old Prince of Monaco, who granted to M. Blanc the rights that made Monte Carlo possible.

The scoffer smiles at that cathedral; and yet M. Blanc offered it to le bon Dieu in all sincerity. He was a quiet, unpretentious little man, devoted to his family, charitable, abstemious in his habits, playing no game save billiards, gambling not at all, a good man so far as personal life went, and without scruples concerning his gambling paradise. He insisted rigidly that play at Monte Carlo should be under absolutely fair conditions. As for running a great gambling establishment – it was a business like another. He was not ashamed of his metier and allowed no threats nor pleas nor argument to disturb him. Men and women would gamble. – Eh bien, here was a beautiful place in which they might indulge their propensity without fear of dishonest treatment. If they ruined themselves, if they committed suicide, – that was their affair. They would have done the same thing elsewhere and he would have preferred their doing it elsewhere, for suicides and scenes interfered somewhat with prosperous business. A host of detectives and attendants was employed by M. Blanc to prevent suicide or hush it up if it occurred, and an official department was established for the purpose of furnishing unlucky patrons of the Casino with money enough to betake themselves elsewhere. Ruined gamblers were eloquently urged not to die upon the premises. Railroad tickets and certain sums of money were supplied to worthy applicants to whose hard luck and financial collapse officials of the gambling rooms could testify. The system was not, however, purely charitable, – M. Blanc did not believe in pauperizing the poor. An I. O. U. was accepted in exchange for funds supplied, and it was understood that this note must be met before the holder could ever again be admitted to the Casino. Some time ago statistics showed that forty thousand pounds had been distributed by this department of ways and means – but that thirty thousand pounds had been repaid. From which one may argue a large proportion of human integrity or of gambling mania, as one is optimist or cynic.