Automobile travel; France -- Description and travel
in all the vast rooms so hemmed in by a struggling humanity, that I
must wait my turn almost before throwing away good money if such is
my desire. All the nations of the earth come here, and to manage and
keep them in check, hundreds of detectives in plain clothes are always
present. Yonder a man has dropped a pocket-book, which is at once
pounced upon, and he is hustled through some door in the wall which
has escaped your notice. Probably he is a thief, and will not return.
If you end your life at the suicides' table--the last on the right on
your way out--your body will be hustled off in a like manner, and the
crowd without turning to look after you will close in again, leaving
no sign that you have ever been. It is said that there is a carriage
belonging to this establishment especially arranged so that a dead man
may be driven away seated erect as though alive without shocking the
senses of those who are here for pleasure. These people would rather
you did not kill yourself and will give you a ticket home if you will
go, but if you must pass to the great beyond, there will be no high
mass said over your silent face and no further attention paid to your
stiff fingers which have ceased to pour gold on the green tables. This
world has no use for one whose pockets are empty--his day is done and
he might as well be dead.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE CASINO AT MONTE CARLO
By permission of Messrs. Neurdein]
You will not be impressed with the misery of Monte Carlo unless you
walk this terrace after dark and note the dejected figures huddled up
on the benches beneath the rhododendrons. The sea does not seem to
receive many of them, yet it is a better mode of exit than to throw
one's self beneath the wheels of the trains rushing east and west just
beneath here. Yesterday a man was literally swept off the wheels of a
locomotive--there was nothing to pick up.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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