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The massacre of these forces drove him home again to engage in attacks on the Catalans and Venetians and struggles with Genoa, till the wealth which his piracy had accumulated enabled him to add Mentone and Roccabruna to his petty dominions.
As to the wicked lady, she was banished to the castle of Roccabruna, where she died miserably, abandoned by all. A legend says she went distracted, and in a fit of insanity flung herself headlong over the rocks into the sea. In 1792 the French Republic destroyed the principality, but it was restored through the interest of Talleyrand in 1815.
But the witch herself holds her high court and never-ending festival of sin in the painted banquet-halls and among the green tables. Let us leave this scene and turn with the country-folk of Roccabruna to S. Michael's Church at Mentone. High above the sea it stands, and from its open doors you look across the mountains with their olive-trees.
A revolution broke out in 1848, which obliged the prince to declare Monaco a free town, and which also deprived His Highness of Mentone and Roccabruna. When the French annexed Nice they also added the two last-mentioned towns to their dominions, but had to pay Prince Florestan four millions of francs for his feudal right.
Away to the left the coast took a magnificent sweep, past the clustering houses of Roccabruna, past the mountains at whose base Mentone nestled unseen, past the Italian frontier, past the bight of Ventimiglia, to where the Capo di Bordighera stood faintly outlined between sea and sky. There was not a solitary sail on the whole expanse of the Mediterranean.
But Polyphemus remained, hungry, sad, gazing on the barren sea, and piping to the mockery of its waves. Filled with these Greek fancies, it is strange to come upon a little sandstone dell furrowed by trickling streams and overgrown with English primroses; or to enter the village of Roccabruna, with its mediæval castle and the motto on its walls, Tempora labuntur tacitisque senescimus annis.
Space, like time, is limited, and much as I should love to conduct my readers all the long way on foot, to show them the monster olive tree at Beaulieu, which is seven yards in circumference, and reputed the largest of its species in the world, to pause a little amidst the Roman ruins of La Tarbia and the Saracenic remains of Eza and Roccabruna, I must hasten on to the capital of the Liliputian dominions of his Serene Highness Prince Florestan II.
Mentone itself steals out again and again from under its huge red cliffs to look up at us; we pass by Roccabruna, half rock, half village, hanging high on the hill-side; we leave the orange groves beneath us studded with golden fruit; even the silvery wayward olives fail us, even the pines grow thin and stunted.
But even the Grimaldis have not managed wholly to escape from the general luck of their fellow-rulers; Mentone and Roccabruna were ceded to France some few years back for a sum of four million francs, and the present lord of Monaco is the ruler of but a few streets and some two thousand subjects.
The streets meander in and out, and up and down, overarched and balconied, but very clean. They swarm with children, healthy, happy, little monkeys, who grow fat on salt fish and yellow polenta, with oil and sun ad libitum. At night from Roccabruna you may see the flaring gas-lamps of the gaming-house at Monaco, that Armida's garden of the nineteenth century.
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