Monsieur Jonquelle by Melville Davisson Post Read Free Book Online

joie
when we mean the pit?”
    And he turned back at the gangplank of his boat for a final word:
    â€œKeep out of the chill at sunset,
mon cher ami
, and the game at Monte Carlo.”
    If there is any sun in one’s blood it will come out in France: the people are so genial. I traveled up to Nice on the express. An old Frenchman got into my compartment. He was big and stooped, and he had a wilderness of beard; but he was a suave and pleasant person. He read
La Patrie
through his big, dim spectacles, with his nose against the page; but when we were on the way, and he had got the news of Paris, he put it down, addressed me with a little courteous apology for the monotony and asperities of travel—and we fell into a pleasant talk.
    He had a distressing weakness of the chest that ejected him out of Paris in the winter months, andhe was on his way to Mentone. He had the history of the Côte-d’Azur upon his fingertips, and he passed from the first days of the world into the last with a charming ease of manner. He pointed out the Roman monuments and the English golf course at Cannes. He spoke of Caesar and Lord Brougham in the same sentence, and the island where Paganini lay for so long unburied, listening to the great orchestra of the Mediterranean and the winds.
    He envied me the holiday in Nice. To be an American, young, rich and traveling for his pleasure, was to have God’s blessings bound together in a bundle. Had I a hostelry in Nice arranged for? The city would be crowded, now that the rains were ended. I told him I would go to the Imperial Palais on the Boulevard des Cimiez. Ah, I was very rich, then! And he coughed to lay dear the great contrast in our fortunes. He seemed depressed after that; and when I got out at Nice I left him huddled over in a corner of the compartment, his big shoulders shaking and his fingers pressed to his mouth, as though he feared a hemorrhage. The thing saddened me—thus to pass by age and its inevitable weaknesses as one entered into the gate of pleasure!
    There had come on a little gust of rain and I went up through the city in a thin batter of white mud. I found the hostelry to be very nearly equalto its name. It is in a great semicircle above rising terraces set with orange trees—formal, as though painted upon the scenery of a theater. The interior is upon a plan strikingly unique. The building is in segments opening into the arc of a corridor; each of these segments has its separate stairway and its tiny elevator that ascends in the open hollow of the stair—a little gilded and paneled cage, operated by electric buttons.
    And here one has a curious experience of service. Every creature, from Monsieur Boularde descending, will run to fling open the doors to this dainty mite of a box, bow one in, close the doors, and send one on the way skyward. But one has to pilot this craft for himself and, when he has alighted, close the doors and return it. It is all cleverly worked upon a little nest of buttons. Each of the segments in the structure is a section of exquisite apartments.
    The lower and larger ones were taken for the season; but I was shown two farther up, looking out over Nice, that were vacant—each with a balcony and some extravagances in mirrors that added a hundred francs. I chose the top one; and in the morning when I came out from my bath and flung open the long window, and the balmy air and the sun entered, I decided that the balcony was worth the hundred francs. One needed just that above this fairy city, with its clean, red roofs,its mountains of dull-green olive trees, its inimitable sky, and the motionless sea with its vast changing patches of color. There was no breath of wind; there was no wisp of cloud. I stood before it as before some illusion of the senses. How could Nature stage a thing like that? Yes, this balcony was clearly worth the money. At that minute the window below opened and some one stepped out. I looked down.
    A woman