Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

The reigning prince has a military staff composed of two aides-de-camp, an ordnance officer, and a chief of staff. He has also a grand and honorary almoner, a chaplain and a chamberlain, several state secretaries, a librarian, and an archivist,—besides another staff devoted to his oceanographical hobby. There are, of course, many other functionaries, like those one reads of in swashbuckler novels, and the list closes with an “Architect-Conservator of the Palaces of His Serene Highness.”

After the prince comes the Principality, and it, too, has a long list of guardians and office-holders. There is a governor-general, who is usually a titled person, a treasurer, and, of course, an auditor, and there is a registrar of the tobacco traffic and a registrar of the match trade, two monopolies by which all well-regulated Latin governments set much store.

Finally there is the municipal governmental organization, with the regulation coterie of little-worked office-holders. They may have their bosses and their games of “graft” here, or they may not, but they are sure to have a never-ending supply of red tape if you want to cut a gateway through your garden wall or sweep your chimney down.

There is also an official newspaper known as Le Journal de Monaco.

The church is better represented here than in most communities of its size. A monseigneur is chaplain to the prince, and Monaco, through the consideration of Leo XIII., in 1887, is the proud possessor of its own cathedral church and its dignitary.

To arrive on the terraces of Monte Carlo at twilight, on a spring-time or autumn evening, is one of the great episodes in one’s life. You are surrounded by an atmosphere which is balsamic and perfumed as one imagines the Garden of Eden might have been. All the artificiality of the place is lost in the softening shadows, and all is as like unto fairy-land as one will be likely to find on this earth. The lovely gardens, the gracious architecture, the myriads of lights just twinkling into existence, the hum of life, the moaning and plashing of the waves on the rocky shores beneath, and, above, a canopy of palms lifting their heads to the sky, all unite to produce this unparalleled charm.

When one considers that fifty years ago the Monte Carlo rock was as bald and bare as Mont Blanc or Pike’s Peak, it speaks wonders for art, or artificiality, or whatever one chooses to call it, that it could have been made to blossom thus.

On a fine morning the effect, too, is equally entrancing,—“Onze heure, c’est l’heure exquise.” The miracle of brilliancy of sea and sky is nowhere excelled in the known world, and, if the raucous sounds of the railway and the electric tram do break the harmony somewhat, there is still left the admirable works of the hand of nature and man, who have here planned together to give an ensemble which, in its appealing loveliness, far outweighs the discord of mundane things.

One is astonished at it all, and, whether he approves or disapproves of the morality of Monte Carlo, he is bound to endorse the opinion that its loveliness and luxury is superlative.

The Principality of Monaco, like those other petty states, Andorra and San Marino, comes very near to being a burlesque of the greater powers that surround it. It is not France; it is not Italy; it is a power all by itself; the most diminutive among the monarchies of the world, but, all things considered, one of the wealthiest and best kept of all the states of Europe. Monaco, the town, has a population of over eight thousand per square kilometre, while its nearest rival among the states of Europe, for density of population, is Belgium, of a population of but two hundred to the same area.