After all, it was but a question of thinking!
Boys coming up from some late errand, played at being soldiers, and
sprang out at each other from behind jutting corners of rock, imitating
the firing of guns, or uttering explosive cries.
Vanno felt a great kindness for all the world, and especially for these
people who--almost all of them--had the blood of Italy in their veins.
He remembered the cure's saying with a smile that even now, if all
Italians were banished from the French coast between Cannes and Mentone,
the Riviera would be emptied of more than half its inhabitants; and it
gave him a warm feeling in his heart to be surrounded by people of his
own blood, at this moment of his great happiness. He would have liked to
give these men something to make them happy also, for he knew that they
were poor, and that those who were most fortunate were those who worked
hardest. Each shadowy figure, as it passed on its way up the mountain,
gave out a faint odour, not disagreeable or dirty, but slightly pungent,
and like the smell of iron filings: what Tolstoi called "the good smell
of peasants."
The fire which had enveloped all Monte Carlo at sunset had burnt out
long ago, but in the west a faint red-brown glow smouldered, as if a
smoky torch had been trailed along the horizon. Monte Carlo and the Rock
of Monaco rose out of the steel-bright sea like one immense jewel-box,
or a huge purple velvet pincushion, stuck full of diamond and topaz
headed pins, with here and there a ruby or an emerald.
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