The Grimaldis of Monaco, page 13
Charles’s idea had been to win back the breakaway towns (which, because of Sardinia’s intervention, were now enjoying greatly reduced taxation and a much improved standard of living) with a nonviolent counterrevolutionary band of followers. Charles got out of the carriage; and as he stood unprotected, other townspeople who had joined the crowd turned on him. A bayonet thrust tore his coat, and he was barely rescued from a second attack by the local armed police. He was then taken by the Carabinieri to the barracks and held there. All that was required was for Charles to be escorted back to Monaco and told to remain within his own boundaries. But the governor of Nice now entered the scene and hurried to Menton to claim his prisoner. He escorted him to a fort in Villefranche, notified Turin and waited for instructions.
Five days later Charles was released after a strong communiqué had been sent from the French foreign minister to Turin. The “Affaire Monégasque” now became an international matter. Rumors even circulated that the Principality was being ceded to the United States. Princesse Caroline had the last word: “It all amounts to this—that Turin should indemnify the Prince de Monaco, fairly and honorably, and remove all occasion for him to open negotiations with any other Power, which would be bound to cause embarrassment to everybody.”
Florestan was much happier once he had returned to Paris where he had the theater to attend and life was less stressful. He became more gregarious, associating with playwrights and artists who appear to have regarded him as amusing and enjoyed having a Prince in their circle. As in the past, he let Caroline handle their business affairs and as before she did this exceptionally well. He died suddenly of a heart attack on June 20, 1856, at the age of seventy-one. His son was acknowledged Charles III, his Principality still an international dilemma. It would remain so for five more years, two more wars and the installation of a new Emperor in France, Napoleon III.
9
WHEN NAPOLEON I CROWNED HIMSELF Emperor in 1804, the Bonapartes became a dynasty. Three of his brothers were given crowns. Joseph was King of Naples and then Spain; Jérôme, King of Westphalia; and Louis, who had married Napoleon’s stepdaughter, Hortense de Beauharnais, of Holland. For thirty years Louis’s son, Louis Napoleon, had stubbornly believed that he was destined to fulfill his uncle’s last dream at St. Helena, the rise of a Second Napoleonic Empire. This aspiration was realized in 1848 with the February Revolution, the abdication of King Louis-Philippe, the failure of the Provisional Government over the next nine months and the election on December 10 of Louis Napoleon as president of the French Republic, an office limited by law to one term.
A son, Albert, was born to Charles and Antoinette in Paris on November 13 of that same year. Like so many Grimaldis before him, Charles had established a home in Paris and spent much of his time there. This was still several years before Charles had managed to eject his parents from Monaco, and Princesse Caroline had taken her young Belgian daughter-in-law under her wing, schooling her in the ways of the Parisian artistocratic society. Antoinette was an adept protégé and soon was a close member of the Court of Eugénie, Louis Napoleon’s wife—a position that required an expensive wardrobe, extensive staff and a handsome carriage among other costly necessities.
Charles had spent Antoinette’s generous dowry in 1854 on the purchase of a magnificent estate in Marchais, whose upkeep was high. Then, after his father’s death just two years later, he also acquired the responsibility of his mother’s care and the Paris mansion.1 Despite the Princesse Caroline’s business acumen, Florestan had managed to squander more than they had. His son’s legacy had been encumbered in debt, and Charles struggled all through 1856 and 1857 merely to keep afloat.
He spent several months a year in Monaco but he had never lost his taste for Paris society and for ladies of the theater. Count Apponyi, an Austrian diplomat in Paris, noted in his diary on March 23, 1852: “Before entering the room [where an after-dinner theater party was being held] I stopped to have a word near the stage with the actors and actresses, especially with Mademoiselles Judith, Fix, Maquet and Rimbolt. The Duc de Valentinois [Charles] was there pinching the arm of one and the leg of another.”
But such divertissements were not enough for Charles. His ambition was to break free of Sardinia and to reestablish the Grimaldis in the French Court, although throughout the reigns of Louis XVIII, Charles X and Louis-Philippe they had been all but ignored. Now, with a Second Empire and a Bonaparte returned to power, his hopes were high that this oversight would soon be reversed.
By 1856, when Charles succeeded as Prince de Monaco, Louis Napoleon had accomplished what Napoleon had failed to do by winning an alliance with England (after France’s help in the Crimean War), reinstituting the imperial dynasty and once again bringing France to the forefront of European nations. The return of a Bonaparte with Beauharnais ancestry was good news to Charles, for, after all, his uncle Honoré V had stood loyally by the Empress Josephine when both Napoleon and France had deserted her. Early in 1857, Louis Napoleon unsuccessfully intervened with Sardinia on Monaco’s behalf in an attempt to obtain the abolition of its protectorate and an award of four million francs as an indemnity. Charles and Monaco were both running out of resources. Money had to be raised to maintain the Grimaldis’ life-style, but from where?
Princesse Caroline, at sixty-eight, with neither her business acumen nor her appetite for money diminished by age, and reconciled with her son (who was now her major means of support) shortly after her husband’s death, came up with the remedy. She had once seen an official memo to Florestan that suggested turning Monaco into a spa since the climate was temperate, the sea views picturesque and, as no sewers emptied into the port, the sands free of impurities. Nice had been prospering for years from the large numbers of wealthy foreigners, mainly English, who wintered there. Villas and hotels had been built in the Croix de Marbre quarter of the town, and the new cult of sea bathing had given rise to a series of other thriving resorts along the Riviera. Cannes, which twenty years earlier had been a small fishing village without a pier or harbor, was now an established watering place with five thousand permanent residents.
Except for two problems, Monaco was perhaps even more suitable for such a development. The first was accessibility. Nice and Cannes, and of course all the towns in between, had good roads connecting them with major cities and ports. But there was only an infrequent boat service to Monaco, and an antiquated horse-drawn, eleven-passenger omnibus was scheduled to make the journey from Nice to Monaco once a day, traversing a narrow road that wove through uninhabited mountainous terrain. Uncertain weather conditions and dislodged boulders presented a constant hazard during a jolting, uncomfortable four-hour ride, at the end of which there were no decent overnight accommodations. Clearly, money was needed to make the improvements necessary if visitors were to be encouraged. The Principality’s lack of funds presented the second stumbling-block.
Recalling a recent visit to Hesse-Homburg, a small sovereign state in central Germany much like Monaco, which owed its prosperity to a gambling casino in its capital, Bad-Homburg, Princesse Caroline dispatched her lawyer and good friend Adolphe Eynaud to visit Bad-Homburg and discuss with the Grand Duke von Hesse-Homburg the conditions he had granted the concessionaires and what his personal recompense was from the venture. Eynaud returned to report that the Grand Duke’s share amounted to 350,000 francs a year. Additional profit came from the two hundred thousand or so annual visitors to the casino who spent money “like water.” Eynaud added that a similar enterprise “would undoubtedly prove a considerable source of revenue and be of the greatest benefit to the general interest as well as to that of Your Highness.” Gambling, “though in reality the main object of the scheme, should appear to be only a sideshow. . . .”
The Princesse conveyed her enthusiasm to Charles, who immediately had plans drawn up for a company to be called the Société des Bains de Mer (The Sea Bathing Society). Eynaud wanted François Blanc, who operated the casino in Bad-Homburg, to take over the gambling concession. Blanc refused, on the grounds that while Monaco was still under the protection of Sardinia, the dangers were too great, such an enterprise being against their laws. “You will be ten times more respected,” Eynaud wrote to Charles, imploring him to get rid of the yoke of Sardinia, “with a few gendarmes at the doors of your palace than with a whole regiment of [Sardinian] guards; they would justly be regarded as your gaolers. You see the results of this protection in the matter of the casino. Nobody dares to come to terms.”
Despite the lawyer’s pessimism, he began negotiations with two Frenchmen, Albert Aubert, a writer, and a Paris businessman, Napoleon Langlois, to establish a gambling casino in Monaco. Within a few months they submitted a plan for a grand casino. “The engine that activates Monsieur Langlois’s brain,” Eynaud wrote to Charles, “is getting up steam. He is at work on this business day and night.”
The two men were not swift in raising the necessary capital. Nonetheless, they were granted an exclusive concession “for the construction of a bathing establishment, a large hotel and a number of villas, and sea and land communications between Monaco and Nice,” along with authorization to provide amusements, “notably balls, concerts, fêtes, games such as whist, écarté, piquet, faro, boston and reversi, as well as roulette with either one or two zeros, and trente-et-quarante with the refait or demi-refait, the whole being subject to the supervision of one or more inspectors or commissioners appointed by His Serene Highness.”
Shortly thereafter, a prospectus was printed in the hopes of procuring the three million francs required to equip the casino, build a hotel and prepare housing sites. “The premises which the company has found are virtually ready. They consist of a large and beautiful villa commanding a magnificent view of the harbor, surrounded by a wonderful garden containing 2500 lemon and 2000 orange trees, as well as a large olive grove. A splendid mansion opposite the palace, belonging to His Highness the Prince de Monaco, has been placed at the disposal of the company [for a hotel]. Finally, it has acquired an extensive tract of land known as les Spélugues [that fanned out from the foot of the Rock and overlooked the harbor], 100,000 square metres in extent. A town of small villas in the English style could be built there, complete with orange, olive and lemon groves. This land can be bought at public auction for about 30 centimes a square metre, while that on the other side of the harbor is already worth more than ten francs the square metre.”
The reality was not quite as glowing as the description. The “beautiful villa” was owned by a Monsieur Arnoux, and was quite modest, although its position, which gave it the name Villa Bellevue, was excellent. The developers would not have bought the property, which Arnoux was pleased to sell for 64,000 francs including all the land, had not Princesse Caroline (who took advantage of her son’s long absences from Monaco to reestablish her power), in a hypocritical spurt of righteousness, insisted to Charles that the casino be sited outside the town of Monaco and that a law be passed that no Monégasque could place bets there. Charles seemed content to have his mother occupied with this project for it allowed him to spend more time in Paris. He appears at this time to have lost faith that a casino would be a profitable venture for he wrote to Eynaud reminding him that Monaco did not have mineral waters to draw visitors as did Bad-Homburg, nor an easily accessible location.
When news of the planned casino reached the French Court, great pressure was brought to bear on Princesse Caroline by her friends to abandon the project. Early in the seventeenth century, Louis XIII had declared that all persons who owned gambling houses were to be excluded from public office, an edict that was made more severe by Louis XVI in the mid-eighteenth century, when he banned all games of hazard and proclaimed all money won in such a manner the fruit of theft and punishable by law.
With the Revolution of 1789 this ban was lifted and the government was powerless to resist, for, as M. Pasquier—a representative to the French Senate and a tough opponent of the planned casino in Monaco—stated in an impassioned speech in the Senate when the plan for the casino in Monaco was debated, “people wished to play, and they played. The madness of gambling reached a climax. . . . When the Reign of Terror arrived, [gambling establishments were] more or less tolerated by the ruling powers who found them useful, as the police often succeeded in finding their victims who sought refuge in these dens of evil.”
From 1795 to 1836, eighteen gambling houses had legally operated (with kickbacks to the government) in the rue de Thionville, the rue Saint-Denis and the rue des Lombards. When these were closed by Louis-Philippe, numerous casinos sprang up and flourished in Europe, the one in Bad-Homburg being the largest. France could do little about these, but a gambling house located as near to French territory as Monaco, Pasquier warned, presented the danger of an influx of low-lifes to France. The Senate, however, did not agree and Caroline pressed forward, with Charles now more actively involved.
The Villa Bellevue opened for business in November 1857. A small house nearby had been converted into a restaurant. The only place to stay was the former French garrison (renamed the Hotel de Russie) opposite the Palace, where a few sparsely furnished rooms were available. In the first few days of business, counterfeit coins and forged banknotes appeared at the tables, where it was also discovered that someone had tampered with the roulette wheel in favor of the house.
Although French opinion was strongly set against Monaco’s new casino, Louis Napoleon (crowned Emperor Napoleon III in 1852, when a new plebiscite overwhelmingly approved the establishment of the Second Empire) placed no pressure on Charles to close it down. Most of the Emperor’s efforts at this time were exerted in maintaining the goodwill of England, whom he desired as an ally. On a recent trip there he had succeeded in winning over Queen Victoria. “From behind the vast solidity of her respectability, her conventionality,” Lytton Strachey wrote of their meeting, “she peered out with a strange delicious pleasure at that unfamiliar darkly-glittering foreign object, moving so meteorically before her. . . . ‘There is something fascinating, melancholy and engaging, which draws you to him, in spite of any prevention you may have against him,’ ” she recorded in her diary. He rode “extremely well.” He danced “with great dignity and spirit.” Above all, he listened. The Empress Eugénie, a woman much aware of her great beauty, dressed in magnificent Parisian crinolines, “which set off to perfection her tall and willowy figure.” Cool and modish, Eugénie “floated in an infinitude of flounces.”
When Queen Victoria and Prince Albert paid a return visit to France in September 1855, Charles and Antoinette attended the great ball in their honor at Versailles. For Antoinette this was the greatest moment of her life; the imperial grandeur of it was to affect her for the rest of her life. From this time she conjured up the dream that her son, Albert, then only a small child, would marry into the British royal family. Meanwhile, there were serious problems to starting Monaco’s new gambling enterprise, and with lessening revenues from the Principality, the future of the Grimaldis looked exceedingly grim. Once the casino opened, they faced even greater economic problems.
By the spring of 1858, Langlois and Aubert, having reached the end of their finances, came to Charles seeking aid to avoid liquidation, which could cause an appalling scandal since they did not have the resources with which to repay their stockholders. Charles was forced to raise what money he could to keep the doors open until a suitable buyer could be found. On November 30, the government commissioner reported: “Though the rooms were opened to play fourteen times during the week, gambling took place only five times [the clients lost 640 francs]. Neglected publicity and lack of communications with Nice are to blame.”
A man by the name of Pierre-Auguste Daval, who was known only as a small-time entrepreneur, now appeared on the scene, claiming he could raise the capital necessary to make the casino “the most dazzling and successful enterprise on the Riviera.” Langlois and Aubert, their financial situation worsening each day, swiftly signed all rights over to him, and Charles granted him permission to proceed. Within a few months it was obvious that Daval was no more competent than his predecessors.
Charles was understandably alarmed. Not only was his financial situation desperate, he had begun to lose his sight and the doctors predicted total blindness in a year, two at the most. To his relief, the wealthy Duc de Valmy, a former investor in the gambling house at Bad-Homburg, decided to buy the concession, and on May 28, 1858, it was transferred from Daval to François Lefebvre, chairman of another gambling enterprise, the Valmy syndicate.
This seeming good fortune was quickly eclipsed by the outbreak of war in the spring of 1859. France had allied itself with Sardinia to expel Austria from northern Italy. Although no Monégasques went to fight, the Principality sided with France and communication between Nice and Monaco was disrupted. The casino closed but Lefebvre, over Princesse Caroline’s loud objections, moved his operation up to the old garrison on The Rock. By the end of the short three-month conflict, Nice and Savoy were ceded to France for its help in defeating the Aus-trians. Travel could be resumed between Nice and Monaco. A new boat, owned by Lefebvre, the Charles III, which could take sixty passengers, made a daily trip to the Rock from Nice. Two small hotels were opened near the port, grandly named the Hôtel d’Angleterre and the Hôtel de Paris. All these improvements notwithstanding, at the end of 1860 the Société des Bains de Mer showed a loss of 80,434 francs.
