The great charm of Monte Carlo consists in the gardens with tropical plants. As to the buildings of Casino and Theatre, they are by Charles Garnier, who was also the architect of the Grand Opera House at Paris,—enough to say that they are vulgar and display no token of genius and sense of beauty. They are appropriate to a gambling hell. That is all that can be said of them.
“The Casino,” says Miss Dempster, the authoress of Vera, “is the thing that all Europe, Asia, and America talk of, that all moralists decry, and that all pleasure-seekers declare to be a paradise. It is the Casino that gives wealth and fashion to this section of the coast. It is the Casino that causes a dozen trains to stop daily at Monte Carlo; that keeps up the palace, the army, the roads, the opera-house, and the Hôtel de Paris. It is the green table that keeps the gardens green and the violins in tune; that has brought 3,000 residents and so many hundred prostitutes to the town; that gives work to 1,000 servants, and causes the annual issue of about 335,000 tickets. When we consider these facts, the fabulous beauty of the site, the mildness of the climate, the good dinners, the better music, the pigeon-shooting, and the many exciting chances, can we wonder that Monte Carlo is in every mouth?”
POST CARDS NOT ADMITTED INTO MONACO
It is just the fact that the site is so exquisitely beautiful that is the pity of it all. Why should the moral cesspool of Europe be precisely there? How much better were it in the Maremma or the Campagna, where the risk to health and life would add zest to the speculation with gold. As long as men people the globe there will be gambling, and it is in vain to think of stopping it. All the lowest types of humanity, the Lazaroni, the North American Indians, the half-caste Peruvians and Mexicans, resort to it with passion, and the unintellectual and those without mental culture throughout Europe will naturally pursue it as a form of excitement. It is therefore just as well that there should be places provided for these individuals of low mental and moral calibre to enjoy themselves in the only way that suits them, but again, the pity is that one of the fairest spots of Europe, this earthly paradise, should be given over to harlots and thieves, and Jew moneylenders, to rogues and fools of every description. The entire principality lives on the tables, the prince, the bishop, the canons, the soldiery, the police, the hotel-keepers, those who have villas, the cabdrivers, the waiters, the boatmen, all are bound together by a common interest—the plunder of such as come to Monte Carlo to lose their money. The institution must be kept going, every scandal must be hushed up. If a case of suicide occur, in ten minutes every trace disappears, and no public notice is given of what has occurred. It is against the interest of every one connected with the place, with Nice also and Mentone, to allow such an event to transpire.
If any trust may be reposed in the assertions of Captain Weihe, a German naval artillery officer who has resided at Monte Carlo for three seasons, the cases are far more numerous than is supposed. According to him, directly a man has shot or hung himself, he is whisked away by the police and the body concealed till it is ascertained that no one is particularly interested in his fate. Then, at the end of the season, the bodies of the suicides are packed in cases that are weighted, and the boatmen sink them far out at sea between Monte Carlo and Corsica.
According to the same authority, the bodies were formerly thrust into the holes and cracks in the limestone on which the Casino and the tributary buildings of Monte Carlo stand, but the condition in consequence became so insanitary that the place had to be cleared of them, and a large body of workmen was imported from Italy and employed on this work, and the corpses removed were disposed of at sea. Captain Weihe asserts as a matter of his own knowledge or observation that from the upper part of the rift of Pont Larousse, in 1898, sixty corpses, from the lower by Villa Eden ten or twelve were removed.
The game of roulette is composed of two distinct divisions, that of numbers and that of cadres. Upon the former it is possible for the player to win thirty-five times the value of his stake; but then, the bank has thirty-six chances against him. Upon the cadres there is not so great a risk; for rouge or noir, pair or impair, passe or manque, there are nearly the same chances for the players as there are for the bank; but then, on the other hand, the player can win no more than the value of his stake.