Roman & Yankee

Nearly two milleniums ago a man who liked monuments sent his Roman legions into the Alps and in three brisk campaigns made vassals of its 44 tribes. To celebrate that feat the Roman Senate & People raised to their first Emperor, Augustus Caesar, a great monument, on a lonely hill overlooking the Mediterranean and the shore road along which the legions marched toward Spain. Like a great stone wedding cake, the Trophy of the Alps rose 150 ft., topped by a stone Augustus. With the centuries the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals and Huns tore the great pile apart. Later still it was converted into a fort. Louis XIV, who disliked other men's monuments, had it blown up. Seven years ago another man who also liked monuments began to put it together again.

The lonely hill had become La Turbie, near Monte Carlo, where a rich Yankee expatriate spends his winters. Square-shouldered, withered little Edward Tuck, 92, went to Paris 70 years ago as Abraham Lincoln's vice consul and, except for a few early years of shuttling back & forth to the U. S., stayed on in France. He made his fortune as a private banker, built it up by investments in U. S. banks (Chase), railroads (Great Northern, Northern Pacific) and public utilities. He has given France a $5,000,000 art collection, a hospital, Napoleon's Park at Malmaison. Napoleon's famed Marshal's Table, all on the theory that art treasures should stay at home. France has given him the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor and honorary citizenship in Paris. His benefactions have made him Dartmouth College's Grand Old Man. Since 1927 his masons have been rebuilding the western face of the Trophy of the Alps, with an interior stone stairway ending in a great stone block which pivots open to a fine view of the Mediterranean and the road to Monte Carlo. Such relics as his men dug up he installed in a museum on the spot. Last week he stood before Augustus' renovated Trophy and gave the keys ceremoniously to French officials. In his good Yankee accent, he declared: ''The Trophy of the Alps represents . . . the magnificent and generous ideal of an ancient civilization . . . and the Pax Romana, which gave three centuries of world peace and prosperity. May they be spread anew among men."

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