In Troubador-Land | Page 9

blue and green like a peacock's neck, the mountains pale yellow, as shown in tapestry, with blue shadows; the silvery-grey olives, the glossy orange trees with their fruit--exactly as in tapestry. Surely the old weavers of those wondrous webs studied this coast and copied it in their looms.
I have said that the sea was like a peacock's neck; but it had a brilliancy above even that. As I have mentioned tapestry I may say that it resembled a sort of tapestry that is very rare and costly, of which I have seen a sample in a private collection at Frankfort, and another in the Palazzo Bardini at Florence. It consists of the threads being drawn over plates of gold and silver. In the piece at Florence the effect of the sun shining through a tree is thus produced by gold leaf under the broidery of tree-leaves. Silver leaf is employed for water, with blue silk drawn in lines over it. So with the sea. There seemed to be silver burnished to its greatest polish below, over which the water was drawn as a blue lacquer.
And Nice. What shall I say of that bright and laughing city--with its shops of flowers, its avenues of trees through which run the streets, its gardens, its pines and cactus and aloe walks? Only one blemish can I pick out in Nice, and that is a hideous modern Gothic church, Notre Dame, filled with detestable garish glass, so utterly faulty in design, so full of blemish of every sort, that the best wish one could make for the good people of Nice is that the next earthquake that visits the Riviera may shake this wretched structure to pieces, so as to give them an opportunity of erecting another in its place which is not a monstrosity.
The Avenue de la Gare is planted with the eucalyptus, that has attained a considerable size. It is not a beautiful tree, its leaves are ever on the droop, as though the tree were unhealthy or unhappy, sulky at being transplanted to Europe, dissatisfied with the climate, displeased with the soil, discontented with its associates. It struck me as very much like a good number of excellent and very useful souls with whom I am acquainted, who never take a cheerful view of life, are always fault-finding, hole-picking, worry-discovering, eminently good in their place as febrifuges, but not calculated to brighten their neighbourhood.
What a delightful walk is that on the cliff of the chateau! The day I was at Nice was the 9th of April. The crags were rich with colour, the cytisus waving its golden hair, the pelargonium blazing scarlet, beds of white stock wafting fragrance, violets scrambling over every soft bank of deep earth exhaling fragrance; roses, not many in flower, but their young leaves in masses of claret-red; wherever a ledge allowed it, there pansies of velvety blue and black and brown had been planted. In a hot sun I climbed the chateau cliff to where the water, conveyed to the summit, dribbled and dropped, or squirted and splashed, nourishing countless fronds of fern and beds of moss, and many a bog plant. The cedars and umbrella pines in the spring sun exhaled their aromatic breath, and the flowering birch rained down its yellow dust over one from its swaying catkins.
I see I have spoken of the cytisus. I may be excused mentioning an anecdote that the sight of this plant provokes in my mind every spring. I had a gardener--a queer, cantankerous creature, who never saw a joke, even when he made one. "Please, sir," he said to me with a solemn face, "I've been rearing a lot o' young citizens for you."
"Have you?" said I, with a sigh. "I fancy I'm rearing a middling lot of them myself."
"Please, sir," said he to me on another occasion, "that there lumbago be terrible trying to know what to do with it."
"Oh!" said I with alacrity, "nothing equals hartshorn and oil applied to the small of the back with a flannel. You have a wife--"
"Yes, sir." He looked at me vacantly. "And yet, it's a beautiful thing."
"Well--yes, when it attacks one's deadly enemy."
"I've cut it down, and trimmed it out, and tied it up," said the gardener. He meant the _Plumbago capense!_
That man never would allow that he was beaten. My eldest boy one day held some pansies over the fumes of ammonia, turned them green, and showed them as a _lusus natur?_ to the gardener. He smiled contemptuously. "Them's the colour of biled cabbage," said he; "I grew them verdigris green--beds of 'em, when I was with Squire Cross."
One day he said to me: "The nurserymen call them plants big onias just to sell them, I call them little onias; you shall just see them I grow,