William Le Queux 
Secrets of Potsdam [EPUB ebook] 

Excerpt: "You will recollect our first meeting on that sunny afternoon when, in the stuffy, nauseating atmosphere of perspiration and a hundred Parisian perfumes, we sat next each other at the first roulette table on the right as you enter the rooms at Monte Carlo? Ah! how vivid it is still before my eyes, the jingle of gold and the monotonous cries of the croupiers. Ah! my dear friend! In those pre-war days the Riviera-that sea-lapped Paradise, with its clear, open sky and sapphire Mediterranean, grey-green olives and tall flowering aloes, its gorgeous blossoms, and its merry, dark-eyed populace who lived with no thought of the morrow-was, indeed, the playground of Europe."