Riviera Towns

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

"How like a gem, beneath, the city
Of little Monaco, basking, glow'd."

The old walled town, on its promontory, must indeed have seemed a gem in an unsurpassed setting in the time of Tennyson. For the little Port of Hercules and the other promontory, Spélugues, were tree- and shrub- and flower-lined. There was nothing to break the spell of old Monaco. Now, alas, the Casino and hotels of Monte Carlo cover Spélugues, and between the promontories La Condamine has sprung up, a town of red-roofed villas, larger than either Monaco or Monte Carlo and forming with them an unbroken mass of buildings. Monaco is simply an end of the city, distinct from the rest of the agglomeration only because it is high up and on a cape jutting out into the sea.

Unless one went up to explore the old town, one would not realize that it was more than the palace with its garden and the post-Tennyson cathedral, too prominent for the good of the medieval spell. La Condamine and Monte Carlo have reached the limit of expansion. In front is the sea, behind the steep wall of the mountain. The principality is all city. But the mountains and sea prevent the exclusion of nature from the picture. Despite the modern growth of Monaco, from the Grande Corniche the words of the poet still hold good. Monaco is no longer a predominantly medieval picture perhaps—but it is still a gem.

The old town is as attractive in walls and buildings as other rock villages of the Riviera. Three main streets, Rue Basse, Rue du Milieu and Rue des Briques, run parallel from the Place du Palais out on the promontory. They are crossed by the narrowest of city alleys, à l'Italienne, and to the right of the Rue des Briques, around the Cathedral, is the rest of the town. Nowhere does the old town extend to the sea.

On the sites of the ancient fortifications the present ruler, Prince Albert, has made gardens and built museums for his collections of prehistoric man and of ocean life. One ought never to dip into museums. If you have lots and lots of time (I mean weeks, not hours), or if you have special interest in a definite field of study, museums may be profitable. But "doing" museums is the last word in tourist folly. Yes, I know that skeletons and the cutest little fish are in those museums. I am not ashamed to confess that I never darkened their doors. Life is short, and while the Artist revels in his subjects, I find more interest in studying the living Monégasques than their—and our—negroid ancestors.

For there is a separate race, with its own patois, in Monaco. You would never spot it in the somewhat Teutonic cosmopolitanism of the Condamine and Monte Carlo tradesmen and hotel servants. It is not apparent in the impassive croupiers of the Casino. But within a few hundred yards, in half a dozen streets and lanes, the physiognomy, the mentality, the language of the people make you realize that regarding Monaco as a separate country is not wholly a polite fiction to relieve the French Government of the responsibility for the Casino. These people are different, children as well as grown-ups. They are neither French nor Italian, Provençal nor Catalan, but as distinct as mountain Basques are from French and Spanish. It is not a racial group distinction, as with the Basques. In blood, the Monégasques are affiliated to their Provençal and Italian neighbors.

What one sees in the old town of Monaco is a confirmation of the assertion of many historians that nationality, in our modern political sense of the word, and patriotism, as a mass instinct shared by millions, are phenomena of the nineteenth century. Steam transportation, obligatory primary education, universal military service, are the factors that have developed national consciousness, and the exigencies and opportunities and advantages of the industrial era have furnished the motive for binding people together in great political organisms. Today if there were no outside interests working against the solidarity of human beings leading a commonwealth existence in the same country, the political organism would soon make the race rather than the race the political organism.

San Remo and Menton and Monaco are Riviera towns all within a few miles of each other. People of the same origin have three political allegiances. In half an hour your automobile will traverse the territories of three nations. Italians and French fight under different flags and were within an ace of being lined against each other in the war. Monégasques do not fight at all. Taxes and tariff boundaries, schools and military obligations, make the differences between the three peoples. Put them all under the same dispensation and where would be your races?

In the old days the raison d'être of the principality was the power to prey upon commerce. From their fortress on the promontory the Grimaldi organized the Monégasques to levy tolls on passing ships. Italy was not a united country. France had not yet extended her frontiers to the Riviera. This little corner of the Mediterranean escaped the Juggernaut of developing political unity that crushed the life out of a dozen other feudal robber states. And when the logical moment for disappearance arrived, Monte Carlo saved Monaco. Another means of preying upon others was happily discovered. The Monégasques abandoned pistols and cutlasses for little rakes. The descendants of those who stood on the poops of ships now sit at the ends of green tables. The gold still pours in, however, and no law reaches those who take it.

There is this difference: you no longer empty your pockets to the Monégasques under compulsion, and the battlements of old Monaco play no part in your losses. The proverb dearest to American hearts says that a sucker is born every minute. It is incomplete, that proverb. It should be rounded out with the axiom that at some minute every person born is a sucker.