We went out to see the ruined monument to Augustus Cæsar, crumbling on this high mountain and commanding the great blue sweep of the Mediterranean below. There were a number of things in connection with this monument which were exceedingly interesting. It illustrated so well the Roman method of construction: a vast core of rubble and brick, faced with marble. Barfleur informed me that only recently the French government had issued an order preventing the removal of any more of the marble, much of which had already been stolen, carted away or cut up here into other forms. Immense marble drums of pure white stone were still lying about, fallen from their places; and in the surrounding huts of the peasant residents of La Turbie could be seen parts of once noble pillars set into the fabric of their shabby doorways or used as corner-stones to support their pathetic little shelters. I recall seeing several of these immense drums of stone set at queer angles under the paper walls of the huts, the native peasants having built on them as a base, quite as a spider might attach its gossamer net to a substantial bush or stone. I reflected at length on the fate of greatness and how little the treasures of one age may be entrusted to another. Time and chance, dullness and wasteful ignorance, lie in wait for them all. The village of La Turbie, although in France, gave me my first real taste of the Italian village. High up on this mountain above Monte Carlo, in touch really with the quintessence of showy expenditure--clothes, jewels, architecture, food--here it stood, quite as it must have been standing for the last three or four hundred years--its narrow streets clambering up and down between houses of gray stone or brick, covered with gray lichens. I thought of Benvenuto Cellini--how he always turned the corners of the dark, narrow streets of Rome in as wide a circle as possible in order to save himself from any lurking assassin--that he might draw his own knife quickly. Dirt and age and quaintness and romance: it was in these terms that La Turbie spoke to us. Although anxious to proceed to Eze, not so very far away, which they both assured me was so much more picturesque and characteristic, yet we lingered, looking lovingly up and down narrow passages where stairs clambered gracefully, where arches curved picturesquely over streets, and where plants bloomed bravely in spotted, crumbling windows. Age! age! And with it men, women and children of the usual poverty-stricken Italian type--not French, but Italians. Women with bunchy blue or purple skirts, white or colored kerchiefs, black hair, wrinkled, yellow or blackish-brown faces, glittering dark eyes and claw-like hands.