Monaco stands on a promontory of rock which falls in bold cliffs into the sea; as one climbs to it from the bay one sees the citadel with its huge bastions frowning on the white buildings of the palace, the long line of grey, ivy-crested walls topping the cliffs, and above them the mass of the little town, broken by a single campanile and a few cypresses. Its situation at once marks the character of the place. It is the one town of the Riviera which, instead of lying screened in the hollow of some bay, as though eager to escape from pirate or Saracen, juts boldly out into the sea as if on the look-out for prey. Its grim walls, the guns still mounted and shot piled on its battlements, mark the pirate town of the past. At its feet, in trim square of hotel and gambling-house, with a smart Parisian look about it as if the whole had been just caught up out of the Boulevards and dropped on this Italian coast, lies the new Monaco, the pirate town of the present.
Even the least among Italian cities yields so much of interest in its past that we turn with disappointment from the history of Monaco. The place has always been a mere pirate haunt, without a break of liberty or civic life; and yet there is a certain fascination in the perfect uniformity of its existence. The town from which Cæsar sailed to Genoa and Rome vanished before the ravages of the Saracens, and the spot remained desert till it passed by Imperial cession to Genoa, and the Genoese Commune erected a fort which became a refuge alternately for its Guelf or Ghibelline exiles, its Spinolas or its Grimaldis. A church of fine twelfth-century work is the only monument which remains of this earlier time; at the opening of the fourteenth century Monaco passed finally to the Grimaldis, and became in their hands a haunt of buccaneers. Only one of their line rises into historic fame, and he is singularly connected with a great event in English history. Charles Grimaldi was one of the foremost leaders in the Italian wars of his day; he passed as a mercenary into the service of France in her combat with Edward III., and his seventy-two galleys set sail from Monaco with the fifteen thousand Genoese bowmen who appear so unexpectedly in the forefront of the battle of Crécy. The massacre of these forces drove him home again to engage in attacks on the Catalans and Venetians and struggles with Genoa, till the wealth which his piracy had accumulated enabled him to add Mentone and Roccabruna to his petty dominions. It is needless to trace the history of his house any further; corsairs, soldiers of fortune, trimming adroitly in the struggles of the sixteenth century between France and Spain, sinking finally into mere vassals of Louis XIV. and hangers-on at the French Court, the family history of the Grimaldis is one of treason and blood—brother murdering brother, nephew murdering uncle, assassination by subjects avenging the honour of daughters outraged by their master's lust.
Of the town itself, as we have said, there is no history at all; it consists indeed only of a few petty streets streaming down the hill from the palace square. The palace, though spoilt by a gaudy modern restoration, is externally a fine specimen of Italian Renascence work, its court painted all over with arabesques of a rough Caravaggio order, while the State-rooms within have a thoroughly French air, as if to embody the double character of their occupants, at once Lords of Monaco and Ducs de Valentinois. The palace is encircled with a charming little garden, a bit of colour and greenery squeezed in, as it were, between cliff and fortress, from which one looks down over precipices of red rock with the prickly pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, or across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the Testa del Cane with gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and orange-gardens fringing its base. A bribe administered to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political existence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna: but it is far more wonderful that, after all the annexations of late years, it should still remain an independent, though the smallest, principality in the world. But even the Grimaldis have not managed wholly to escape from the general luck of their fellow-rulers; Mentone and Roccabruna were ceded to France some few years back for a sum of four million francs, and the present lord of Monaco is the ruler of but a few streets and some two thousand subjects. His army reminds one of the famous war establishment of the older German princelings; one year indeed to the amazement of beholders it rose to the gigantic force of four-and-twenty men; but then, as we were gravely told by an official, "it had been doubled in consequence of the war." Idler and absentee as he is, the Prince is faithful to the traditions of his house; the merchant indeed sails without dread beneath the once dreaded rocks of the pirate haunt; but a new pirate town has risen on the shores of its bay. It is the pillage of a host of gamblers that maintains the heroic army of Monaco, that cleanses its streets, and fills the exchequer of its lord.
There is something exquisitely piquant in the contrast between the gloomy sternness of the older robber-hold and the gaiety and attractiveness of the new. Nothing can be prettier than the gardens, rich in fountains and statues and tropical plants, which surround the neat Parisian square of buildings. The hotel is splendidly decorated and its cuisine claims to be the best in Europe; there is a pleasant café; the doors of the Casino itself stand hospitably open, and strangers may wander without a question from hall to reading-room, or listen in the concert-room to an excellent band which plays twice a-day. The salon itself, the terrible "Hell" which one has pictured with all sorts of Dantesque accompaniments, is a pleasant room, gaily painted, with cosies all round it and a huge mass of gorgeous flowers in the centre. Nothing can be more unlike one's preconceived ideas than the gambling itself, or the aspect of the gamblers around the tables. Of the wild excitement, the frenzy of gain, the outbursts of despair which one has come prepared to witness, there is not a sign. The games strike the bystander as singularly dull and uninteresting; one wearies of the perpetual deal and turn-up of the cards at rouge-et-noir, of the rattle of the ball as it dances into its pigeonhole at roulette, of the monotonous chant of "Make your game, gentlemen," or "The game is made." The croupiers rake in their gains or poke out the winnings with the passive regularity of machines; the gamblers sit round the table with the vacant solemnity of undertakers. The general air of the company is that of a number of well-to-do people bored out of their lives, and varying their boredom with quiet nods to the croupier and assiduous prickings of little cards.
The boredom is apparently greatest at rouge-et-noir, where the circle is more aristocratic and thousands can be lost and won in a night. Everybody looks tired, absent, inattentive; nobody takes much notice of his neighbour or of the spectators looking on; nobody cares to speak; a finger suffices to direct the croupier to push the stake on to the desired spot, a nod or a look to indicate the winner. The game goes on in a dull uniformity; nobody varies his stake; a few napoleons are added to or subtracted from the heaps before each as the minutes go on; sometimes a little sum is done on a paper beside the player; but there is the same impassive countenance, the same bored expression everywhere. Now and then one player gets quietly up and another sits quietly down. But there is nothing startling or dramatic, no frenzies of hope or exclamations of despair, nothing of the gambler of fiction with "his hands clasped to his burning forehead," and the like. To any one who is not fascinated by the mere look of rolls of napoleons pushed from one colour to another, or of gold raked about in little heaps, there is something very difficult to understand in the spell which a gaming-table exercises. Roulette is a little more amusing, as it is more intelligible to the looker-on. The stakes are smaller, the company changes oftener, and is socially more varied. There is not such a dead, heavy earnestness about these riskers of five-franc pieces as about the more desperate gamblers of rouge-et-noir; the outside fringe of lookers-on bend over with their stakes to back "a run of luck," and there is a certain quiet buzz of interest when the game seems going against the bank. There is always someone going and coming, over-dressed girls lean over and drop their stake and disappear, young clerks bring their quarter's salary, the casual visitor "doesn't mind risking a few francs" at roulette.
But even the excitement of roulette is of the gravest and dullest order. The only player who seems to throw any kind of vivacity into his gambling is a gaudy little Jew with heavy watch-chain, who vibrates between one table and another, sees nothing of the game save the dropping his stake at roulette and then rushing off to drop another stake at rouge-et-noir, and finds time in his marches to spare a merry little word to a friend or two. But he is the only person who seems to know anybody. Men who sit by one another year after year never exchange a word. There is not even the air of reckless adventure to excite one. The player who dashes down his all on any part of the table and trusts to fortune is a mere creature of fiction; the gambler of fact is a calculator, a man of business, with a contempt for speculation and a firm belief in long-studied combination. Each has his little card, and ticks off the succession of numbers with the accuracy of a ledger. It is in the careful study of these statistics that each believes he discovers the secret of the game, the arrangement which, however it may be defeated for a time by inscrutable interference of ill-luck, must in the end, if there is any truth in statistics, be successful. One looks in vain for the "reckless gambler" one has read about and talked about, for "reckless" is the very last word by which one would describe the ring of business-like people who come day after day with the hope of making money by an ingenious dodge.
Their talk, if one listens to it over the dinner-table, turns altogether on this business-like aspect of the question. Nobody takes the least interest in its romantic or poetic side, in the wonderful runs of luck or the terrible stories of ruin and despair which form the stock-in-trade of the novelist. The talk might be that of a conference of commercial travellers. Everybody has his infallible nostrum for breaking the bank; but everybody looks upon the prospect of such a fortune in a purely commercial light. The general opinion of the wiser sort goes against heavy stakes, and "wild play" is only talked about with contempt. The qualities held in honour, so far as we can gather from the conversation, are "judgment," which means a careful study of the little cards and a certain knowledge of mathematics, and "constancy"—the playing not from caprice but on a definite plan and principle. Nobody has the least belief in "luck." A winner is congratulated on his "science." The loser explains the causes of his loss. A portly person who announces himself as one of a company of gamblers who have invested an enormous capital on a theory of winning by means of low stakes and a certain combination excites universal interest. Most of the talkers describe themselves frankly as men of business. No doubt at Monaco, as elsewhere, there is the usual aristocratic fringe—the Russian prince who flings away an estate at a sitting, the half-blind countess from the Faubourg St. Germain, the Polish dancer with a score of titles, the English "milord." But the bulk of the players have the look and air of people who have made their money in trade. It is well to look on at such a scene, if only to strip off the romance which has been so profusely showered over it. As a matter of fact nothing is more prosaic, nothing meaner in tone, nothing more utterly devoid of interest, than a gambling-table. But as a question of profit the establishment of M. Blanc throws into the shade the older piracy of Monaco. The Venetian galleons, the carracks of Genoa, the galleys of Marseilles, brought infinitely less gold to its harbour than these two little groups of the fools of half a continent.