Part 10

All this time the Turks, in single file, were crawling up the zigzag path from the boats, like a great brown serpent, a mile long, gliding up out of the water. They poured in through the gate, panting and yelling, and continued to pour in for hours. Barbarossa now could laugh aloud and did no doubt guffaw heartily enough for Eze the impregnable was taken with scarcely the loss of a man.

What followed is, in the language of novelists, “better imagined than described”; simply because it is easy to imagine but difficult to describe.

Eze the betrayed became the scene of a blurred orgy of house burning, murder and pillage. The town with all that was in it was to be wiped off the face of the earth. The order could not have been carried out more thoroughly or more heartily if it had been executed by the Germans of the present day. There was no resistance. There was to be no quarter and no prisoners. Everything went “according to plan.”

The narrowness of the lanes rendered the process of hacking a population to death cramped, slow and very horrible. Every street and alley was soon blocked with the dead and the dying. The first clatter of hurrying feet was soon hushed; for those who pressed on and those who fled trod upon yielding bodies. A whole family would be lying dead in an entry; the man at the front, the baby and the mother behind.

Here would be the corpse of a Turk sprawling over the bundle of loot he was in the act of carrying away. Here would be a woman’s dead hand cut off at the wrist, but still clinging to the handle of a door. Here a disembowelled man, still alive, trying to crawl into a cellar and there a half-charred body dangling from the window of a burning house.

It is always customary to say, in the account of scenes like this, that “the streets ran with blood,” but it is not so. The state is far more hideous, since blood clots so soon that it will not run.

The noise must have been peculiarly dreadful, an awful medley of the shouts of men, the shrieks of the butchered, the moans of the dying, mingled with the roaring of flames and the fall of blazing timbers. Now and then, among the din, would be heard the crash of an axe upon a skull, the crack of a sword upon the tense bones of a bent back, the muffled thud of a dagger, the hammer-blow of a club.

The sunlight and the blue of heaven were shut off by a pall of smoke; while suffocating clouds filled many a lane with the blackness of night.

Such fortifications as could be destroyed were levelled to the ground, and the castle that crowned the hill was blown up by its own magazine. The gate—the fatal gate—was untouched and stands to this day to testify to the supreme villainy of the traitor, Gaspard de Caïs.

The work was well done. Redbeard the pirate may have had his faults, but in the business details of town-sacking he was thorough and singularly expert. When he beached his galleys in the bay, Eze was a prosperous and busy town, living at ease and confident in its strength. When the pirate left it, it was a black, smouldering ruin, empty and helpless, stripped of all that it possessed and occupied only by the dead, by such wounded as survived and by the few who, hidden in vaults and secret places, had escaped death from suffocation. There was no need to leave a guard in the town for there was nothing to guard. Eze, as a stronghold had ceased to exist.

After all was over the Turks and their ruffianly allies rattled down the hill to the boats, tired no doubt, blood-bespattered and blackened by smoke, but jubilant and disposed to bellow and sing. Every man was laden with loot like a pack-horse. Even the wounded would grab the shoulder of a friend with one hand and a bundle of booty with the other. They chattered as they stumbled along, chuckling over the “fun” they had had and announcing what they would have done if only they had had more time. Others would be appraising the value of their respective spoils, would draw strange articles half out of their pockets for inspection, or would rub a sticky mess of blood and hair from a vase to see better the fineness of its moulding. They reached the sea without further adventure, boarded their galleys and sailed away towards the East, a proud and happy company, pleased with their day’s work and grateful to Allah for his abounding mercies.

It only remains to tell what happened to Gaspard de Caïs and his friend from Gorbio with the unpleasant title. They were, of course, overjoyed by the result of their labours and must have congratulated one another fervently with hearty slaps upon the shoulder. They did not go down the hill to join the ships. They had either been paid in advance for their distinguished service or had got enough loot out of Eze to reward them for their efforts. They had done with Barbarossa and were disposed to do a little now on their own account.

Their action at Eze had been attended with such excellent results that they proposed to try the same manœuvre at the gate of La Turbie. So Gaspard and the Lord of Gorbio started in high spirits for this well-to-do little town. They were to approach it as friends. They were to warn the governor that the Turks were coming and were to offer their patriotic services as they had done at Eze. They had with them a substantial body of men—blackguards all of the first water—among whom were no doubt some of Barbarossa’s crew who had reached the hill too late to make a really good bag. Indeed La Turbie was to be Eze over again.

The two gentle traitors, having hidden their men near by, advanced to the gate of the town as the night was falling. Unhappily for them the governor had been secretly warned of their coming and of their methods for helping their fellow countrymen. The result was that they were received, not with gratitude, but with bullets and stones.

They fled and, as it was dark, made good their escape. The Bastard of Gorbio took refuge in a church. There he was found and seized by two brave priests, Gianfret Mossen of Eze and Marcellino Mossen of Villefranche. Gaspard de Caïs hid in a cave. He also was discovered and arrested. Very probably his colleague from Gorbio revealed his hiding place to those who were in pursuit. Anyhow these two snivelling ruffians were both marched off to the Castle at Nice where they were tried for high treason, convicted and sentenced to death.[30]

According to one account Gaspard was drawn and quartered and the Bastard of Gorbio was hanged; while another record states that De Caïs was broken on the wheel and that his friend committed suicide in his cell. It matters little which account is true. They both came to a fitting end and passed out into the darkness with the curses of their countrymen ringing in their ears.

With the sacking and massacre of 1543 the story of Eze comes to an end. It ceased to be a town to reckon with, to be cajoled or threatened, to be bought or sold. It became a place of no account and has remained humble and unhonoured ever since. The walls were not restored, the fortifications were not remade and the castle was allowed to crumble into dust. He who was Lord of Eze was lord over a hollow heap of tainted ruins and his title was as much a shadow as was his town.

The new Eze, which in course of time came into being, had its foundations set upon the ruins of 1543. The castle appears to have been more completely dismantled in 1604. On February 23rd, 1887, the earthquake which destroyed Castillon—a place singularly like Eze in its position—did some damage to the hapless town and also to its castle. But it would seem as if the forces of both heaven and earth were conspiring to rid the world of this battered and ill-omened house, for in the terrific storm of May, 1887, its remaining walls were so split by lightning that the arrogant old stronghold was reduced to the mean condition in which it is found to-day.

[30] “Mentone,” by Dr. George Müller, London, 1910. Durante’s “History of Nice,” Vol. 2, p. 313.

XVII THE TOWN THAT CANNOT FORGET

AMID the deep valleys and the titanic ridges of bare rock which slope down to the sea from the Alps stands Eze. It stands alone in a scene of wild disorder. From a huge gash in the flank of the earth, lined with trees as with grass, rises a pinnacle of rock, a solitary isolated bare pinnacle, 980 feet high, with sides sheer as a wall. It rises, clear and grey, out of the abyss and on its summit is Eze. It seems as if some fearful power had lifted the town aloft for safety; while, to compare the stupendous with the trivial, it tops the cone like a tee-ed ball.

The most impressive view of Eze is obtained from the road that leads from La Turbie to Cap d’Ail, at about the time of the setting of the sun. It is then seen from afar as a tiny town on a crag among a tumbled mass of mountains which lie deep in shade. It is the only sign of human habitation in the waste. The sun shines full upon it.

Against the dark background of pines it appears as a brilliant object in silver grey. Its houses, its church and its castle are as clean cut as a many-pointed piece of plate lying upon folds of dark green velvet. No visible road leads to it. It looks unreal, like a town in an allegory, such a town as Christian saw in the Pilgrim’s Progress, such a little city as is graved upon the background of an old print by Albert Dürer.

Eze is approached only from the north, from the side towards the Corniche Road. Viewed from this nearer point it suggests a small Mont St. Michel rising out of the land instead of the sea. The town seems a part of the rock. It is not at once apparent where the rock ends and the dwellings begin, for they are all of the same tint and substance. It is easy, from the highroad, to pass the town by without perceiving it, for its “protective colouring” is so perfect and its camouflage so apt that it may be taken for the notched summit of the rock itself.

A closer inspection shows walls dotted with dark apertures. These are windows; but they suggest the black nest-holes that sand-martins make on the face of a cliff. There are faint touches of colour too, a heap of rust-tinted roofs, a grey church tower, a splash of red to mark the nave, the brown ruin of a castle like a broken and jagged pot, a tiny ledge of green with a line of white stones to mark the burying place.

A zigzag path mounts up to an arched gateway in the face of the wall. It is the only entrance into Eze. This portal will admit a laden mule or a hand-cart but not a carriage; for no “vehicle” can find admittance into this exclusive town. A curve of smoke alone shows that it is inhabited. In the distance is the blue Mediterranean lying in the sun.

Before entering Eze it is well to remember that it is an ancient place in the last stages of decrepitude and decay and that it has had a terrible history and centuries of sorrow. It is poor, half empty and partly ruinous. Those who expect to find a mediæval fortress will be disappointed since its houses differ but little from such as exist in many an old neighbouring town; while those who are unaware of its past may adopt the expression of a tourist I met, leaving the rock, who informed his friend—as a piece of considered criticism—that Eze was “a rotten hole.” Such a man would, no doubt, describe Jerusalem also as “a rotten hole.”

The gate of Eze—the Moor’s Gate as it is still called—is supported by a double tower with evil-looking loop-holes. It is very old and very worn. Its machicolations are covered with ferns which make its harsh front almost tender. Within this entry is another gate and a second tower upon which is a commonplace house reached by a flight of steps. Here we stand in an ancient feudal fortress. Here is the station of the guard and here has taken place such hand-to-hand fighting and such slaughter of men as should make the walls shudder to all eternity. It was here that the stand was made by the faithful garrison when the last siege of Eze took place, the siege led by Barbarossa in 1543. It was at this very gate that the traitor Gaspard de Caïs parleyed with the governor.

Within the second gate is a platform for the inner guard, from the ramparts of which one can look down into the chasm from which Eze arises and judge of the formidable position of the place.

The streets of Eze are mediæval in arrangement being mere alleys—each as narrow as a trench—between the houses. They are paved with cobble stones at the sides and with red bricks in the centre and are lit—such is the anomaly—by electric light. These lanes wander about in an uneasy and disconsolate way. They sometimes mount upwards; they sometimes glide down as if undecided. They dip under houses through black, vaulted ways: they lead to stone stairs that disappear round a corner: they turn warily to the right and then to the left, as if someone followed.

There comes upon the visitor the sense of being lost, of wandering in a nightmare town, of being entrapped in a maze, of never being able to get out again. They are dreadful streets for an ambush and there is many a corner where an assassin in a cloak must assuredly have waited for the unsuspecting step. They are full of ghosts, of reeling, bellowing men rolling down the steep arm in arm, of half-awakened soldiers, buckling on their arms and hurrying to the clamour at the gate, of clinging, terror-stricken women and of the stalwart prince with his solemn guard.

As to the place itself it is a town, tumbled and deranged, made up of rocks and ruins and of melancholy houses of great age. It is a sorrowful town, for Eze is oppressed by the burden of a doleful past and bears on every side traces of its woes and evidences of its manifold disasters. It is a town, it would seem, that can never forget. It is a silent town and desolate. On the occasion of a certain visit the only occupant I came upon was a half-demented beggar who gibbered in an unknown tongue, while the only sound that fell upon the ear was that of a crowing cock. Many of the houses are shuttered close, many are roofless and not a few are without doors. It recalls at every turn the words of Dante of “the steep stairs and the bitter bread.”

It is a colourless town for there is nothing to break the ever abiding tint of oyster-shell grey. There are two trees in Eze and, in a back yard, a vine. With these exceptions there is hardly a green leaf within its confines. The only thing that grows in Eze is a monstrous and deformed cactus, a bloated and horrible thing covered with prickles. A botanical ogre rather than a plant it seems to be a survival from an extinct age and to belong to a world over whose plains saurians and other obscene reptiles crawled. This senile and unlovely shrub would appear to be appropriate in some way to the poor, sad town that cannot forget.

There is by the way no water in Eze except such rain-water as is collected in tanks by the provident. To obtain water it is necessary to leave the town and journey to the bottom of the path. There, on the road where the carriage of the tourist draws up, is the fountain.

Eze too is a place suggestive of craft and secret doings, a town which might have been planned by a man with a guilty conscience, for it is a veritable rabbit warren in which to burrow or to hide while its shuffling lanes, which dodge so cunningly, would seem to have been devised to favour the panting culprit with justice at his heels.

Rock crops up everywhere. Certain buildings would seem to be compounded of the native rock below and of worked stones above. Caverns are cut out of the cliff as well as curious paths, although some of these now lead nowhere.

There are no two buildings alike. Many may be only a hundred years old, but, in any case, they are incongruous dwellings with windows at odd levels and with doors in unexpected places. There are, on the other hand, buildings which show evidence of greater age and of much distinction. There are towers which have been converted into common habitations and relics of mansions of no little pretence. On a few of these the corbels are still to be seen which once supported the balconies from which fair ladies scattered flowers upon victorious troops tramping up to the castle. There are many fine doorways in stone. Some show traces of the Moorish taste, others belong to the thirteenth century, while a few display the pointed arch of later years. There are some beautiful stone windows and many stoutly worked doors of wood and other odd details which recall a less squalid past. The lounger in the streets of Eze will meet with crypt-like and cavernous stables for goats, cellars open to the sky owing to collapse of the roof, and chilly tunnels without apparent purpose. One or two passages are wide and vaulted and provided with a long stone bench against the wall. Here, in the shadow, soldiers will have sat to clean their arms and old men to gossip.

The public buildings are, of course, few. The _Mairie_ is rather pretentiously humble and is the least authoritative building I have ever seen. The post office clings precariously to the side of a steep lane, the Rue du Brek, and looks out upon a wall of rock covered with cactus. It seems incongruous that from this half-unconscious place it is possible both to telegraph and telephone. There is a dejected café but it is closed.

The church is of little interest. It was enlarged and restored—that is to say spoiled—in 1765. It contains, besides a font of the sixteenth century and an old cross, a painting ascribed to the seventeenth century in the left lower corner of which is a picture of Eze as it was. The castle in the picture is intact, is solid, square and arrogant looking. It quite overwhelms the jumbled-up little brown-red town at its foot. From the top of the tower floats a red flag with a white cross on it.

The castle is on the highest point of the town and is reached by a path fashioned out of the rock. This is a path with indeed a story to tell, if only it could utter it; if it could but speak of the footsteps it has listened to—the halting feet of men led up to be judged, the trembling feet of men led down to be hanged, the heavy tread of the well-laden robber, the nervous step of the spy, the rustle of the foot of the damosel. Of this castle of the Lords of Eze nothing remains but a wall and a fragment of a vaulted chamber. In the castle yard is a wretched, shamefaced hut on which is painted “Bar des Touristes.” It is happily derelict and a victim to the general coma which has spread over Eze, for it is as out of place as a roulette table in a nunnery.

High up on the side of a house on the south of the town is a little old window. It has a rounded arch of weathered stone and is probably the oldest window in Eze, for it follows the mode that we in England call “Norman.” It looks across the sea while on the sill is a bunch of scarlet geranium in a broken jar. I like to think that this is the window of Blacas, the troubadour, that he lived in this house on the cliff and that from this casement he poured forth his songs of love and of gallant deeds.

A love song—as I have said—would seem strange in Eze in its old ruffian days. It may seem as strange even now. But love is eternal and so long as men and women walk the alleys of this ancient town it will linger within its walls. All the fiercer passions of Eze have died away—the lust for power, the thirst for revenge, the mad fever for the fray—but love, it would seem, still remains as, possibly, its only heritage; for I came upon a document in the _Mairie_ that announced the coming marriage of two young people in Eze. It was not a troubadour’s sonnet, it is true; but it served to show that the old lanes near by may still be paths for lovers, that there are still steep places where he may help her down and still a parapet where the two may lean, gaze over the sea and dream.

One walks down the path from the town as one would leave a chamber of death; for Eze is slowly dying, dying like a doddering old man—once the captain of a host—who is breathing his last in a garret, with around him pathetic relics of his virile past and piteous evidences of his present poverty.

XVIII THE HARBOUR OF MONACO

THE history of Monaco from its early days to the time when it came upon peace is a breathless story full of incident, clamour and surprise. It may not be unfitly compared to an account—from moment to moment—of the flights and rebuffs of a football in a long contested game. Now and again the bewildered ball is lost sight of in a mêlée of panting men. At another moment it rolls quietly into the open to be at once pounced upon by two furious packs. At times it is “out of bounds” and at peace, only to be thrown again into the fight where it is harried and battered and driven now to this quarter and now to that. Monaco was the ball in the fierce game between the Grimaldi, on the one side, and the powers of the Eastern Mediterranean on the other and in the end the Grimaldi won.

Until about the end of the twelfth century Monaco was merely a lonely rock, almost inaccessible, uninhabited and waterless. Projecting as it does into the sea it afforded so good a shelter for ships that the little bay in its shadow became famous as a harbour of refuge. Fringing the bay was a pebble beach where a galley could be hauled up or a caravel unloaded.

Monaco was known as a port in Roman days. Indeed it was from this unpretentious haven that Augustus Cæsar embarked for Genoa on his way to Rome when his victories in southern Gaul had been accomplished. The departure of the Emperor was, no doubt, a scene of much pomp, made brilliant by many-coloured standards and flashing spears. As the Emperor stepped on board his ship the blare of trumpets and the shout of the troops drawn up on the plain must have been heard far beyond La Turbie.

The boats of Greek and Phœnician traders have made for this harbour and have deposited their strange cargoes here to the amazement of gaping natives. Here in Monaco Bay wild Saracens have tumbled ashore with such unearthly shouts as to cause the sea birds on the rock to rise in one fluttering cloud. The beach too has been lit often enough by a camp fire around which a company of pirates would be drinking and singing, while they waited for the return of the marauding party that had left at dawn.

Although the harbour was often alive with men the rock remained untenanted. I should imagine that the first adventurer to set foot on Monaco would be a Phœnician cabin boy. He would climb the cliff and gaining the summit would explore it with all the curiosity and alert imagination of a boy landed on a desert island.

It is said that in 1078 two pious men, who lived at La Turbie, built on Monaco a tiny chapel to St. Mary. They built it with their own hands and employed, in the making, stones from the Roman monument in their native town. If this be true the only building that for a hundred years stood upon this barren plateau was the child-like chapel, a speck of white on the dark expanse of rock.

In 1191 the Emperor Henry VI granted Monaco to the wealthy and prosperous town of Genoa. The Emperor’s rights over this fragment of territory might be questioned, but there was none to gainsay him. His gift was coupled with the requirement that a fortress should be built on Monaco which should be ready to serve the Emperor in his wars with the pestilential people of Marseilles and of other towns in Provence.