When They Murmured
And Threatened Rebellion, He Threatened In Turn That He Would Rule Them
With A Rod Of Iron, As If Their Actual Conditions Were Not Bad Enough.
Some Of His Oppressions Were Of A Fantasticality Bordering On Comic
Opera:
Travellers had to give up their provisions at the frontier and
eat the official bread of Monaco; ships entering
The port were
confiscated if they had brought more loaves than sufficed them for their
voyage thither; no man might cut his own wood without leave of the
police, or prune his trees, or till his land, or irrigate it; the birth
and death of every animal must be publicly registered, with the payment
of a given tax, and nobody could go out after ten at night without
carrying a taxed lantern. When Nice was annexed to France in 1860 Monaco
passed under French protection again, and now it is subject to
conscription like the rest of France. Ten years after the beginning of
this new order of things the great M. Blanc was expelled from Hombourg,
and the Prince of Monaco rented to him the-gambling privilege of Monte
Carlo.
Then the modern splendor of the place began. The entire population of
the three towns, Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Condamine, is not above
fifteen thousand, and apparently the greater part of the inhabitants
depend upon the gay industry of the Casino for their livelihood. I
should say that the most of the houses in Monte Carlo were hotels, or
pensions, or furnished villas, or furnished apartments, and if one could
be content to live in the atmosphere of the Casino, which is not
meteorologically lurid, I do not know where one could live in greater
comfort.
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