Before the end of the war, the center of the Russian colony was a soup kitchen on a side street, presided over by princesses and served by beautiful million-heiresses of the old régime. Good stuff in those girls, too, who smiled as gayly as of old and talked to me eagerly about becoming governesses or stenographers. And real _noblesse_ in the old men who climbed up the narrow stairs with their pails, coming to fetch their one meal of the day. In one of them I recognized a former ambassador to France. The last time I had seen him he was on horseback between Czar Nicholas and President Loubet crossing the Point Alexandre III on the opening day of the Paris Exposition of 1900.
Enough of shadows! None ever went to Nice in search of them, and comparatively few stay long enough to find them. They are in the picture, and there would be no true picture without them. But they ought to stay in the background. They do stay there. You smell the sewage rarely. The all-pervading sunshine is a tonic. Speculating about why others came here and what they are doing with their lives may hold you through the rainy season. The Carnival puts you in a more material frame of mind. Unless Lent is early, the sun begins to warm the cockles of your heart on Mardi-Gras, and by May it will almost blind you on the water-front. One is not in the mood to let the misfortunes and unhappiness and evil of others cloud his joy. After all, of the quarter million pleasure-seekers who come to Nice each year, the greater part are in as good moral health as yourself, and very few of them have any more reason than you to be "in the dumps."
Unless one becomes engrossed in the study of cosmopolitan human nature to the point of being sunshine-proof, one soon tires of the foreign residential and hotel and shopping quarters of the city. They lack "subjects," as the Artist would put it. But at the eastern end of Nice, the Old Town, home of Garibaldi and many another Red Shirt, takes you far from the psychology of cosmopolitanism and the philosophy of hedonism. This is the direction of Grande Corniche, of villa-studded winding and mounting roads, of the best views (if we except Cimiez) of city and sea.
[Illustration: "The Old Town takes you far from the psychology of cosmopolitanism and the philosophy of hedonism."]