High up on the side of a house on the south of the town is a little old window. It has a rounded arch of weathered stone and is probably the oldest window in Eze, for it follows the mode that we in England call “Norman.” It looks across the sea while on the sill is a bunch of scarlet geranium in a broken jar. I like to think that this is the window of Blacas, the troubadour, that he lived in this house on the cliff and that from this casement he poured forth his songs of love and of gallant deeds. A love song—as I have said—would seem strange in Eze in its old ruffian days. It may seem as strange even now. But love is eternal and so long as men and women walk the alleys of this ancient town it will linger within its walls. All the fiercer passions of Eze have died away—the lust for power, the thirst for revenge, the mad fever for the fray—but love, it would seem, still remains as, possibly, its only heritage; for I came upon a document in the _Mairie_ that announced the coming marriage of two young people in Eze. It was not a troubadour’s sonnet, it is true; but it served to show that the old lanes near by may still be paths for lovers, that there are still steep places where he may help her down and still a parapet where the two may lean, gaze over the sea and dream. One walks down the path from the town as one would leave a chamber of death; for Eze is slowly dying, dying like a doddering old man—once the captain of a host—who is breathing his last in a garret, with around him pathetic relics of his virile past and piteous evidences of his present poverty. XVIII THE HARBOUR OF MONACO THE history of Monaco from its early days to the time when it came upon peace is a breathless story full of incident, clamour and surprise. It may not be unfitly compared to an account—from moment to moment—of the flights and rebuffs of a football in a long contested game. Now and again the bewildered ball is lost sight of in a mêlée of panting men. At another moment it rolls quietly into the open to be at once pounced upon by two furious packs. At times it is “out of bounds” and at peace, only to be thrown again into the fight where it is harried and battered and driven now to this quarter and now to that. Monaco was the ball in the fierce game between the Grimaldi, on the one side, and the powers of the Eastern Mediterranean on the other and in the end the Grimaldi won. Until about the end of the twelfth century Monaco was merely a lonely rock, almost inaccessible, uninhabited and waterless. Projecting as it does into the sea it afforded so good a shelter for ships that the little bay in its shadow became famous as a harbour of refuge. Fringing the bay was a pebble beach where a galley could be hauled up or a caravel unloaded.