I arrived at the principality on Christmas Eve and, owing to some train derangement, at an hour a little short of midnight. I approached this place—which those who are careless of terms describe as “a Hell”—with anxious interest. When the train came to a standstill I found myself in a quiet, ill-lit station, precisely like fifty other stations on the line. I resented this. I resented even the fact that the magic name “Monte Carlo” was portrayed in quite homely and decorous letters. I expected to see a number of peculiarly evil men alight from the train; but they were not in evidence. They probably “slipped away in the gloom,” as they do in the books. The only passengers I noticed were a very weary old lady and her maid. The lady was respectable almost to extinction and was absorbed by concern for her many hand bags and her obtuse dog.
I had been led to think that at midnight the grosser revels of Monte Carlo would be at their height; so in the drive to the hotel I expected to be shocked and grieved. I found myself, on the contrary, passing through pleasant streets as silent as those that encircle a cathedral close. The streets, moreover, were practically empty and for the morality and integrity of the few who passed by I was prepared to vouch even in the dark.
I thought I might see through some open window a room glaring with light and reeking with the ill odours, the ribald sounds and the drunken antics of a supper table. Possibly, through another window, I should behold wild-haired men and shamelessly dressed women bending over a green cloth speckled with cards. I saw only sleeping villas and drowsy gardens that breathed nothing but content and peace. With the romances working in my mind it would have been hardly a matter of surprise had I come upon a man in dress clothes, lying on his back in the pathway, with a wet crimson patch spreading over the front of his white shirt. Happily I saw no such thing. Monte Carlo, so far, had failed; failed in that it was not the place I had been led to expect by the writers of fiction.
Next morning, before the sun rose, I stepped out of my bedroom window on to the balcony to take a first look at the amazing city. It was now Christmas Day and still very dark. From the height at which I stood I appeared to be looking into a limitless vault with above a dome of the deepest blue, dotted with stars, and below a floor flooded by a sea whose surface was as ruffled metal.
The only light came from a gap in the east, at the uttermost limit of the vast water. It was a rare and tender light that seemed to be reflected up from the depths. A level band of orange stretched along the sea and over it was a wash of cowslip yellow that, fading into the half-suggested green of an opening leaf, was lost higher still in a flood of blue. Against this ineffable glow stood up, in a black, hard silhouette, the tops of houses.
It was evident that on the slope below me was a town and, at the foot of the town, a harbour. The town was a mere dark mass, so confused that it might have been a jumble of black rocks, save that, here and there, were tiny lights—lights evidently in upper windows. From one hidden casement near by, that must have been open and uncurtained, a gleam fell upon the side of a villa revealing every detail of shutter and balcony as well as a strip of bright ornament painted on the wall. The harbour was made manifest by two black piers with a light at the end of each—one green, one red—by a sheen, like that of quicksilver, on the water in the basin and by a row of lamps upon the three sides of the quay.
Beyond the harbour was a towering dull mass that I knew to be Monaco. It was picked out by a few dots of light which came, no doubt, from scattered rooms and by vague towers scarcely visible before the sullen curtain of the sky.
To the east there stood out, very cleanly cut against the delicate light of the coming day, certain black pinnacles and domes. They looked like the peaks of some fantastic oriental temple but I recognised them as belonging to the Casino and the great hotel.
Clear in the heaven, above these pinnacles and domes, blazed one large, brilliant star. It was, I imagine, the very Star in the East that two thousand years ago shone over the stable at Bethlehem.