Julie Romain by Guy De Maupassant — Read

One spring two years ago I was tramping along the Mediterranean coast. Is there anything pleasanter than striding along a road, lost in dreams? You walk in a world full of light, through the caressing wind, on the slopes of mountains and on the edge of the sea. And you dream! What phantom loves and adventures the vagabond imagination lives through in a two hours' tramp! Born in the warm light air, a thousand dreamy joyous expectations jostle each other in your mind; you breathe them in with the gentle wind, and in the depths of your heart they wake an appetite for happiness that grows with the hunger whetted by much walking. Happy winged thoughts soar and sing like birds.

I was tramping down the long road that runs from St. Raphael to Italy -- less a road than a magnificent shifting scene that seems made to form a background for all the love poems in the world. And I thought that from Cannes, which is full of determined poseurs, to Monaco, which is full of gamblers, hardly a soul comes to this part of the world except to swagger and fling money about and to display, under this glorious sky, in this garden of roses and orange blossom, every form of mean vanity, senseless pretension and vile covetousness and to reveal the soul of man for what it is, abject, ignorant, arrogant and greedy.