dort bien.' I saw at once that he had taken 'fitful' to mean full of fits, as 'painful' is full of pain, and had no conception that it simply meant intermittent. Therefore I sent a friend to the British Museum, who brought me back the information that of the one hundred translations of Macbeth in French, about eighty-five had followed Francois Victor Hugo in this misrendering of 'fitful'; and the other had left it out altogether: 'Apres le fievre de la vie il dort bien.'
I sent this to Maeterlinck, thinking he would laugh over the matter, but when I met him again in Nice the next year, he and Georgette came and lunched with us and he broached the subject at once by saying that the translations of Shakespeare were quite impossible. I tried to agree with him by saying that of course it took an equal poet to try to translate from one language into the other adequately.
But he would have it that Shakespeare was quite impossible, and he gave an example from Hamlet where Ophelia says:
Here's rosemary-that's for remembrance;
Here are pansies-that's for thoughts…
'The first sentence can be translated,' he said, 'but the second can't, because in French the word for pansies is almost the same as the word for thoughts; you cannot say, 'Voila des pensees-c'est pour penser.''
'Oh,' I retorted, 'I think it quite possible. Picture the scene to yourself:
Ophelia is speaking before the King and Queen and she knows, with a woman's divination, that the Queen is the real culprit, so she says, 'Voila des pensees,' and then, looking at the Queen, adds, stuttering, 'c'est pour penser.''
Francis Carco, who was also at the lunch, applauded me for the thought, but Maeterlinck pretended not to understand. Really, whenever Frenchmen translate from English, they are apt to come to grief. The other day I saw that one of them had translated 'Love's last shift' into 'La derniere chemise de l'amour.'
I knew Albert, Prince of Monaco, fairly well for more than a quarter of a century. The New York Times gave a column article to him while he was visiting America shortly before his death; it said that 'he belonged to the Grimaldis of Genoa… one of the most ancient houses of Europe'; described him as 'a wise old man of the world, honorably distinguished as a savant; an enlightened ruler… sagacious and experienced,' and God knows what besides. Now, Albert of Monaco was not a Grimaldi at all, but a Matignon of little Breton squire stock, and his 'wisdom and enlightenment' were low cunning.
One incident will give a better picture of this Princelet than pages of word painting. When I first knew him he was always talking of his dislike of 'the gambling house' of Monte Carlo, which gave him his princely revenue and paid besides all the expenses of his three miles long and half a mile wide kingdom. Every one staying in the palace was requested not to visit or even enter 'the gambling house,' and the Prince was continually complaining that his father had given M. Blanc a lease of the place till 1907, or else 'I'd shut it up tomorrow. I hate the corruptions of it. It is really wrong for a father so to bind and fetter a son; I loathe the place,' so he used to preach.
It seemed to me that the Prince protested too much; in any case, surely he need not have accepted 'the wages of sin,' had he had not been so inclined.
But bit by bit his protests affected me; I came to believe in his honesty.
For there was a side to the Prince which pleased me. He was a sportsman. He had a great country house at Marchais on the borders of Lorraine; it had at one time belonged to the Dues de Guise and was set, a great house, in the midst of marshes.
There was most excellent shooting to be had in the swamps of Marchais; wild geese and ducks by the myriad flocked there from the north in cold weather, and wild swans, too, and the woods were well stocked with pheasants and rabbits and hares.
But there were other amenities at Marchais. So long as the Princess Alice ruled there, the food was excellent and there used to be wonderful music in the evenings.
One met at Marchais all the literary geniuses and the leaders of French thought: Bourget and Loti, Saint- Saens and Sarah Bernhardt. In Marchais, more than in any other French house, one touched life at many points.
Naturally, I was delighted to go to Marchais and spend long days with the Prince shooting. I have been awakened at four o'clock in the morning with the news that wild swans had just come in and in ten minutes I was up and dressed. Before we started out I had a cup or two of delicious hot coffee and such eggs and bacon, preserves and bread as one seldom finds. Then down in the cold night to ride six or seven miles to the ground, and when there to crawl for perhaps another mile on one's stomach between straw fences to the huts, out of which one could watch the great swans sailing the water and shoot them, if one wanted to. Then as day dawned we would take this wood for pheasants, and that stubbled plain for red-legged partridge, and so fleet the day in healthy exercise. Then home to a hot bath and a superb dinner with super-excellent French wine and coffee, and a great evening with good music by Tosti or De Lara, or a talk in a quiet room with a member of the Institute or the Academy.
Who could resist the seduction! One evening the Prince assured me that he meant to shut up the 'tripot' or 'den,' as he called it, at Monte Carlo as soon as he had the right, and begged me to preach this in the British press, so as not to surprise people when it took place.
'I want to avoid complaints,' he said, 'and the leaders of English life are powerful in France.'
Naturally, I did my best for his high purpose.
I knew the 'gambling house' at Monte Carlo extremely well: I had spent a good many winters at the Principality, and it was apparent to me that the way to give tone and importance to the whole place was by founding a special Sporting Club which should have all the best visitors as members, especially the best English and French and Americans. One day I outlined this scheme to the Prince of Monaco, saying that if he decided that he had to leave the 'gambling house' as it was, the way to improve it would be by establishing a high class Sporting Club in close connection with it.
He asked me to make out the whole scheme. I told him it would cost some time and labor: and he wanted to know how he should reward me. 'Very simple,' I said, 'you can make me a permanent secretary at a decent salary.'
'Certainly,' he exclaimed enthusiastically. 'You help me: make out the whole constitution and articles of the club, print them and let me have them, and you shall be permanent secretary at a salary, say, of a thousand pounds a year, and of course lodgings in the club.' I said that would suit me excellently;
I made out the whole thing-constitution, articles and all- and submitted it to him. He told me it was exactly what he wanted.
A little later it was rumored that the Prince of Monaco had concluded a treaty with Monsieur Camille Blanc, the chief shareholder in the 'gambling house,' and had given him fresh extension of his lease, on condition of receiving some millions of francs.
One night in London I mentioned the matter to one of the kings of finance; he laughed outright.
'So you're the culprit,' he cried; 'that's a jolly good one on you.'
'Why?' I asked. 'What are you laughing at?'
'I'm laughing,' he said, 'because that wily fox, the Prince of Monaco, got you for nothing to frighten M. Blanc so that he has concluded a new contract for fifty years to come on most favorable terms.'
I knew intuitively that I had been done by the fox. But I had been cheated, I found, more completely than I had even imagined. The Prince of Monaco sold the whole idea of the Sporting Club, as constituted by me, to Camille Blanc, and got another large sum for it, taking care not to encumber the deal with a permanent secretary, and so cheated me.
There were two sides to Prince Albert, as to most men: he really loved science and prosecuted his deep sea fishing in the interests of science; at the same time he married an immensely rich heiress, and he sold the future of Monte Carlo to Camille Blanc, after getting the highest possible from the financier by publishing his resolve to shut the 'tripot' as soon as the lease was out.
Verily, The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of Light!
CHAPTER XI
