Most people come here for a night or two, or a month or two, or once in a year or so; and then return to the comparatively dull world from which they emanated--which is fortunate. If they were here a little while this deceptive world of delight would lose all its glamour; but a very few days and you see through the dreary mechanism by which it is produced; the brow-beating of shabby waiters by greedy managers, the extortionate charges and tricks by which money is lured from the pockets of the unwary, the wretched hallrooms and garrets from which some of these butterflies emanate to wing here in seeming delight and then disappear. It was a scorching world, and it displayed vice as an upper and a nether millstone between which youth and beauty is ground or pressed quickly to a worthless mass. I would defy anybody to live in this atmosphere so long as five years and not exhibit strongly the tell-tale marks of decay. When the natural glow of youth has gone comes the powder and paint box for the face, belladonna for the eyes, rouge for the lips, palms, and the nails, and perfumes and ornament and the glister of good clothing; but underneath it all one reads the weariness of the eye, the sickening distaste for bargaining hour by hour and day by day, the cold mechanism of what was once natural, instinctive coquetry. You feel constantly that so many of these demi-mondaines would sell their souls for one last hour of delight and then gladly take poison, as so many of them do, to end it all. Consumption, cocaine and opium maintain their persistent toll. This is a furnace of desire--this Montmartre district--and it burns furiously with a hard, white-hot flame until there is nothing left save black cinders and white ashes. Those who can endure its consuming heat are welcome to its wonders until emotion and feeling and beauty are no more. CHAPTER XXV MONTE CARLO All my life before going abroad I had been filled with a curiosity as to the character of the Riviera and Monte Carlo. I had never quite understood that Nice, Cannes, Mentone, San Remo in Italy and Monte Carlo were all in the same vicinity--a stone’s throw apart, as it were; and that this world is as distinct from the spirit of the north of France as the south of England is from the north of England.