In Vanity Fair: A Tale of Frocks and Femininity

by Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd

The incongruity between drama and setting is one of the most striking things about the place, though familiarity dulls the first swift impression of the contrast. If ever man diverted God-given beauty to the devil's uses, he has done it there upon the Monaco shore, and the serpent was no more out of place in Paradise than is a gambling Casino on that picturesque promontory overlooking the Mediterranean—but the daughters of Eve have smiled upon the Casino as their ancestors smiled upon the serpent, and though their gambling has been for smaller stakes than hers, they have made a somewhat spectacular record of their own. The feminine element at Monte Carlo is one of the most characteristic and dramatic features of the resort. Nowhere else in the world will one see women of all classes gambling openly and heavily; nowhere else are the alpha and omega of feminine folly so sharply and obviously contrasted—and so gaily and recklessly ignored. Around the tables, from opening until closing hour, crowd women derelicts; each train that stops at the station below the wonderful terraces brings more. The veriest ingénue might read the stories of wreck and disaster, yet the warning makes not the faintest impression upon the fair feminine craft steering head on toward the rocks.

How can Fifi of the wonderful frocks and jewels guess that she will lose once too often at the little green tables, that the day of adorers ready and eager to pay her losses will pass, that youth and beauty will make way for such shrivelled and haggard age as that of the painted and bedizened harpies who haunt the gaming rooms, staking their few francs and watching for opportunities of making way with the stakes of other players.

For the average casual visitor to Monte Carlo, these hags of the Casino are among the sharpest and cleanest cut of first impressions. Later one grows used to them, ignores them, allows them to take their places in the shifting human panorama that is in its way as fascinating as the roulette and trente et quarante which brings the crowd together; but at first these hideous old women of the furrowed faces plastered with rouge, of the furtive eyes, of the loose lips, the trembling claw-like hands, the dirty laces, the false jewels, have a hateful fascination, obscure all other impressions.

There are many of the harpies living entirely by fraud, and though croupiers, detectives, and attendants know some of them and suspect others, it seems impossible to keep them out of the Casino. Occasionally the doors are barred to someone, but under the present administration admission rules are more lax than they were in the old days, and the whole character of the Casino crowd, while perhaps not more vicious, is certainly more vulgar than it was under M. Blanc's régime.

The system of the women thieves is a simple one. An excited crowd surrounds a roulette table; many of the players know comparatively little about the game. The stakes are placed, money is lost or won, and raked in or distributed, in less time than is required for the telling of it. While a novice hesitates, wondering whether the money on a certain number is really hers, a yellow hand reaches across her shoulder and snatches the stakes. Even if the victim is sure that she knows the offender, she hesitates to make a scene, to be implicated in a gaming-room scandal, and the thief audaciously counts upon this immunity. Sometimes, however, an attendant sees the transaction and lays a firm hand upon the old woman's arm before she can get away. Or perhaps the croupier of the immobile face and the eyes that see all things notices the hand closing upon money to which it has no right and brings his rake down sharply upon the thin wrist in time to stop the move.

There are other wrinkled and haggard old women in the Casino crowd,—women less contemptible, more pitiable, but unpleasant sights for all that. They come to the gambling rooms to play, not to steal; but the gambling fever has burned out all that was pure womanly in them and nothing is left to them in life save the vice they hug to their hearts. Some of them have been playing there ever since the first years of the Casino, missing never a day from the opening to the closing of the season, and usually staying all day long in the hot, ill-ventilated rooms. They have but little money and they play cautiously, watching the run of the game, making innumerable notes in little note-books, taking no great risks.

One Russian princess is among the number. Old habitués of the Casino say that when she came there first, twenty-five years ago, she was beautiful, superbly gowned, magnificently bejewelled, but gaming is in the Russian blood and the princess was a born gambler. She squandered her fortune, pawned her jewels, sank lower and lower in the gambling mire, gave herself up more and more unreservedly to her absorbing passion. To-day, she lives in a cheap pension at Mentone and belongs to the class known in Monte Carlo as "the bread-winners,"—a class of gamblers making a regular daily visit to the Casino, playing until perhaps ten, fifteen, or fifty francs ahead of the bank, and then leaving. If one is content with making a mere daily pittance out of the tables, the thing can be surely and systematically done; and, every morning the first train brings an army of these bread-winners, together with hundreds of bolder gamblers. There is always a crowd waiting at the Casino doors when they are opened, always a wild scramble for the chairs around the tables; and, once comfortably seated, these early comers are usually good for the day, or at least until dinner-time. They are the most economical and persistent, though not the most profitable, of the Casino's patrons.

Fashionable folk favour shorter gambling hours. If Madame is staying at one of the Monte Carlo hotels,—at the famous Hôtel de Paris, let us say, a hotel beloved of Parisian demi-mondaines and their satellites, but patronized by cosmopolitan great folk as well,—she arises very late and has her breakfast on a terrace with a sunlit sapphire sea stretching out before her and an awning sheltering her from the too ardent sun. The chances are that it is a delectable breakfast, for there is good cooking in Monte Carlo. The prodigal crowd that spends its money there demands high living, and the Café de Paris, with its Indian interior and its famous grill-room, has seen gay dinners and suppers in its time and has appropriated a generous share of the winnings of lucky gamblers, beside helping the Casino to rid the unlucky player of his money.

Ciro's, too, has played its part in nineteenth-century romance and scandal and had its share in the Monte Carlo harvest. The proprietor, an energetic and diplomatic Italian, has made a large fortune and deserves it, for he can produce for his cosmopolitan patrons on demand any dish from buckwheat cakes to the most delicate frittura, and any drink from vodka to Jersey apple-jack. Perhaps that is stating the case too strongly, but he is a remarkable restaurateur, this Ciro.

These are but two restaurants of the many; and if one tires of the town, there is the mountain restaurant at la Turbie, to which one climbs by a funicular and where the air is keen and cool from the snowy mountain peaks. Even the view alone is worth the trip to la Turbie; for, from the restaurant terrace, one looks down upon Monaco with its palace and cathedral, upon Monte Carlo with its snowy villas and Casino amid their groves and gardens, and upon miles of summer sea.