The Promenade is, of course, during the season the focus and center of fashionable life at Nice. Here carriages roll, and amazons ride and flâneurs lounge in the warm sunshine during the livelong afternoon. In front are the baths, bathing being practicable at Nice from the beginning of March; behind are the endless hotels and clubs of this city of strangers. For the English are not alone on the Promenade des Anglais; the American tongue is heard there quite as often as the British dialect, while Germans, Russians, Poles, and Austrians cluster thick upon the shady seats beneath the planes and carob-trees. During the Carnival especially Nice resolves itself into one long orgy of frivolous amusement. Battles of flowers, battles of _confetti_, open-air masquerades, and universal tom-foolery pervade the place. Everybody vies with everybody else in making himself ridiculous; and even the staid Briton, released from the restraints of home or the City, abandons himself contentedly for a week at a time to a sort of prolonged and glorified sunny southern Derby Day. Mr. Bultitude disguises himself as a French clown; Mr. Dombey, in domino, flings roses at his friends on the seats of the tribune. Everywhere is laughter, noise, bustle, and turmoil; everywhere the manifold forms of antique saturnalian freedom, decked out with gay flowers or travestied in quaint clothing, but imported most incongruously for a week in the year into the midst of our modern work-a-day twentieth-century Europe.