Line 240:  That Englishman in Nice

The sea gulls of 1933 are all dead, of course.  But by inserting a notice in The London Times one might procure the name of their benefactor—unless Shade invented him.  When I visited Nice a quarter of a century later, there was, in lieu of that Englishman, a local character, an old bearded bum, tolerated or abetted as a tourist attraction, who stood like a statue of Verlaine with an unfastidious sea gull perched in profile on his matted hair, or took naps in the public sun, comfortably curled up with his back to the lulling roll of the sea, on a promenade bench, under which he had neatly arranged to dry, or ferment, Multicolored gobbets of undeterminable victuals on a newspaper.  Not many Englishmen walked there, anyway, though I noticed quite a few just east of Mentone, on the quay where in honor of  Queen Victoria a bulky monument, with difficulty embraced by the breeze, had been erected, but not yet unshrouded, to replace the one the Germans had taken away.  Rather pathetically, the eager horn of her pet monoceros protruded through the shroud.