In The Morning We Saw That The Waters Arranged
Themselves In The Rainbow Colors Of Such A Scarf Round The Shores, And
That There Were Only Pleasure-Craft Moored In Them:
The yacht of the
Prince of Monaco and the yacht of some American Prince, whose title I
did not ascertain, but whose flag was unmistakable.
There must have been
other yachts, but I do not remember them, and possibly there were some
workaday craft, of which I do not now recall the impression; but I am
certain of the festive air of disoccupation pervading the port from the
adjacent towns, both Monte Carlo and Monaco, which its wicked suburb has
cleansed in corrupting, and rendered attractive by the example of its
elegant leisure. There remains from both places, and from Condamine in
the plain between them the sense of a perpetual round of holidays. There
seemed to be no more creative business in one place than another, but I
do not say there is none; there is certainly a polite distillery of
perfumes and liqueurs in Condamine, but what one sees is the commerce of
the shops, and the building up of more and more villas and hotels, on
every shelf and ledge, to harden and whiten in the sun, and let their
gardens hang over the verges of the cliffs. On the northeast, the
mountains rise into magnificent steeps whose names would say nothing to
the reader, except that of Turbia, which he will recall as the classic
Tropaea of Augustus, who marked there the bounds between Italy and Gaul.
But we were as yet in no mood to climb this height, even with the help
of a funicular railway, and I made my explorations at such convenient
elevations as I could reach on foot, or by the help of one of those
luxurious landaus peculiar to Monte Carlo.
One such point was undoubtedly the headland of Monaco, where the Greeks
of Marseilles, long enough before Augustus, built a temple to Hercules
Monoecus. The Grimaldi family which gave Genoa many doges, came early
into the sovereignty of Monaco, by the hook or crook those days, but
whether it was they who fostered its piracy in the fourteenth century,
does not distinctly appear, though it seems certain that one of the
Grimaldi princes served against the English under Philip of Valois, and
was wounded at Crecy. In 1524 a successor went over to the empire under
Charles V. Still later the principality returned to the sovereignty of
France, and in 1793 the French republicans frankly annexed it, but it
was given back to the Grimaldi in 1814.
The Grimaldi on the whole were a baddish line of potentates, and only
lacked largeness of scene to have left the memory of world-tragedies.
They murdered one another, at least in two cases; in another, the people
killed their ruler by publicly drowning him in the sea for insulting
their women; the princes were the protectors of piracy, and in the very
late times following their restoration by the Congress of Vienna, the
reigning prince confiscated the property of the churches for his own
behoof, and took into his hands the whole trade of the principality. He
alone bought and ground the grain, and baked the bread, which he sold to
his people at an extortionate price; he bought damaged flour in Genoa
and fed it to his subjects at the same rate as good. 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. It is said that everything is rather dearer than in Nice, for
instance, but such things as I wanted to buy I did not find very dear.
The rates at the most expensive hotels did not seem exhorbitant when
reduced to dollars, and if you went a little way from the Casino the
hotels were very reasonable, so that you could spend a great deal of
money at the tables which in America you would spend in board and
lodging. I fancy that a villa could be got there very reasonably, and as
the morals of all the inhabitants are scrupulously cared for by the
administration of the Casino, and no one living in the principality is
allowed to frequent the gaming-tables, it is probable that domestic
service is good and cheap. If I may speak from our experience at our
very simple little hotel, it is admirable, one waiter sufficing for ten
or twelve guests, with leisure for much friendly conversation in the
office, between the breakfasts served in our rooms and the excellent
dinners at the small tables in the salon.
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