From the heights above Monte Carlo one sees a map of it all spread out before him in relief, the three towns, Monte Carlo, Condamine, and Monaco, with their total of fifteen thousand souls and the most marvellous setting which was ever given man’s habitation outside of Eden.
Overlooking Monaco and Monte Carlo
The capital sits proudly on its sea-jutting promontory, with Condamine, its port, where the neck joins the mainland, and Monte Carlo, the faubourg of pleasure, immediately adjoining on the right. All is white, green, and blue, and of the most brilliant tone throughout.
Monaco was a microcosm in size even when Roquebrune and Menton made a part of its domain, and to-day it is much less in area. It was in the dark days of the French Revolution that the little principality was rent in fragments, and there were left only the rock and its two dependencies for the present Albert de Goyon-Matignon, the descendant of the Maréchal de Matignon, to rule over. It was this Maréchal de Matignon, then Duc de Valentinois, who espoused the heiress of the glorious house of Grimaldi, thus bringing the Grimaldi into alliance with the present power of this kingdom-in-little.
What a kingdom it is, to be sure! What a highly organized monarchy! There is a council of state; a tribunal, with its judges and advocates; a captain of the port; a registry for loans and mortgages; an inspector of public works, etc., etc.; and all the functionaries are as awe-inspiring and terrible as such officers usually are. Even the “Commandant de la Garde,” to give him his real title, is a sort of minister of war, and he is, too, a retired French officer of high rank.
The Frenchman when he crosses the frontier into Monaco literally journeys abroad. The frontier patrol is a gorgeous sort of an individual by himself, a sort of a cross between the gardien de la paix of France and the Italian customs officer who comes into the carriages of the personally conducted tourists to Italy searching for contraband matches and salt,—as if any civilized person would attempt to smuggle these unwholesome things anyway.
As one enters the Principality, by the road coming from Nice, he passes between the rock and the steep hillsides by the Boulevard Charles III., and, turning to the right, enters the town where is the seat of government.
The town has some three thousand odd inhabitants, which is a good many for the “mignonne cité,” of which one makes the round in ten minutes. But what a round! A promenade without a rival in the world! Well-kept houses, villas, and palaces at every turn, with a fringe of rocky escarpment, and here and there a plot of luxuriant soil which gives a foothold to the fig-trees of Barbary, aloes, olive and orange trees, giant geraniums, lauriers-roses and all the flora of a subtropical climate.