The Grimaldis of Monaco, page 18
A combination of her exotic mother and her pragmatic father, even in appearance, Alice spoke many languages—all fluently and all with a melodic American Southern accent, although she had left her native New Orleans when still a small child and had returned only twice to visit her grandparents. She introduced Creole cooking to the Parisian elite and seemed more inclined in style to Spanish than to German influences. She drove in a stately equipage, always followed by a small black page dressed in red satin.
She was close to her family, but fiercely independent. Her brother, George, had gone into the Heine banking business; and her mother, who enjoyed being the grande dame, spent most of her time entertaining lavishly at her daughter’s country estate, the magnificent Château de Haut-Buisson (where she now lived), for Alice preferred to be in Paris. Since childhood, Alice’s daughter, Odile, and her son, Armand, had been admitted to their mother’s sophisticated salon. Gay, witty, wise, iconoclastic, cultured, wealthy and a striking beauty, Alice attracted her share of fortune hunters and a succession of lovers.
She was initially drawn to Albert because of his adventurous spirit. Always ready to learn about subjects previously unknown to her, she found his knowledge of oceanography and his voyages off the coast of Africa interesting. He also had a certain masculine mystique about him, unlike the intellectual, artistic and sometimes effete men who were part of her set. Albert liked the sea, hunting and adventure, yet he was extremely intelligent. He was the heir to a throne, but he was a simple man, of simple tastes. Conscious of her height since childhood (she was about five-feet seven, tall for a woman of that time), she found that his bearlike build made her feel smaller.
When he declared his love for her in 1885, she was twenty-eight and he was thirty-seven. He wanted above all else to make her his wife, but to do so he had to have his father’s permission. Charles withheld it. This was not, presumably, on religious grounds, for Alice had converted from Judaism to Catholicism when she became the Duchesse de Richelieu. She was a widow and they were both free to marry. But the old monarch considered it scandalous that a single woman would conduct a salon and was a friend to writers and artists for whom he had no tolerance. In addition, her Jewish heritage provoked a degree of snobbery in him. Despite his disapproval, Albert and Alice became lovers. On his return from his scientific explorations he would go straight to her house in Paris. At least twice they rendezvoused in Funchal, the capital of Madeira.
Charles III died at seventy-one years of age, after falling ill with pneumonia while on a visit to Marchais, on September 10, 1889, his daughter, Florestine, at his bedside. Although the Palace flag was lowered to half-mast and photographs of him that were on display in public buildings draped in black, his death was unmourned by his subjects. A total recluse for the last decade of his life, when in Monaco he never left the Palace. The end of his reign had cast a pall over the Principality. It had been years since there had been a royal ball or official visits from other royals or heads of state. Festive occasions were centered in Monte Carlo, which now had become a prospering city. Charles III would be remembered as the Prince for whom the city had been named and his reign as the start and rise of the gambling Casino there. But of the Grimaldis, it had been his mother, Princesse Caroline, in conjunction with François Blanc, who had made the greatest impact on his subjects, their lives and economic well-being.
Charles and Albert had never been close and shared little in common. Their relationship had grown more difficult after Princesse Caroline’s death, for Albert was seldom in Monaco and managed to visit Marchais at times when Charles was not there. During the infrequent times they were together Charles was critical of his son’s scientific endeavors (which he considered a waste of effort and money) and his associations. His dictated letters to Albert reflect his dissatisfaction with almost everything his son did. He expected Albert to spend more time with him, to have greater sympathy for his blindness and ill health, and to take over more duties in Monaco. Instead, Albert involved himself more with his scientific expeditions, and when he was not at sea, he was with Alice in Paris.
He was at sea when he was informed of his father’s death and altered his course back to Monaco. On October 23 he accepted the oath of loyalty in the courtyard of the Palace. The ceremony had not been performed there since 1731, when the young Honoré III had returned to succeed his mother, Louise-Hippolyte. For the first time in years there was great celebration in Monaco, but almost immediately after he became Albert I, Prince de Monaco, he departed for Paris; and on October 31, accountable now only to himself, he married Alice in a quiet service in Paris with only her family and a few close friends present. They honeymooned in Madeira, then returned to Paris, where they were the guests of honor at several large balls. On February 9, 1890, the newlyweds (the bride with twenty-seven trunks filled with her new fashionable trousseau) arrived by train in Monaco and were met by an enthusiastic crowd.
Twenty years had elapsed since Albert had brought his first bride to Monaco. In the interval, the Principality had become the cosmopolitan hub of the Riviera, a gathering place for royalty, society, heiresses, fortune hunters and gamblers out to break the bank at Monte Carlo (now called just “Monte” by the cognoscenti). What it was not, despite the Salle Gamier, was an intellectual and cultural citadel.
Once Alice was installed as châtelaine of the Palais de Princier, many members of her intellectual and artistic coterie began to visit. Monaco enjoyed a new recognition with the Princesse de Monaco’s smart soirées. Alice had to contend with Albert’s Aunt Florestine (more testy than ever with her position suddenly usurped), but she did so with amazing finesse. Alice saw to it that Florestine was given a larger suite of rooms, which incorporated Princesse Caroline’s former apartments, and that she was drawn into the extravagant and exciting redecoration being undertaken. The former gloom of the Palace was dispelled by new and brighter upholstery and curtains. Bowls overflowing with brilliant flowers graced the rooms, and the gardens became an attraction few visitors could resist.
The parade of royal guests to the Palace began. The season officially started the week before Easter with the arrival of the Prince of Wales on his yacht Britannia. He much admired Alice and often came to the Palace for tea. His long alliance with the beautiful actress Lillie Langtry was over (although she retained a villa in Monte Carlo and they remained friends), and he was now usually in the company of the worldly and charming Mrs. Keppel, the spirited and attractive wife of a Gordon Highlander. Alice Keppel appeared to have cured his roving eye and would become his constant companion for the remainder of his life.
He arrived in Monaco accompanied by a small personal staff, his physician, two equerries, two menservants and a butler. Although he insisted on being called Baron Renfrew, his small canine pet, who followed him everywhere, wore a jeweled collar with the inscription: I am Caesar. I belong to the Prince of Wales. He went to the Casino almost every night to play baccarat but did not wager large sums that would attract comment.
The Grand Duke Michael, uncle of Czar Alexander III, led the procession of Russian nobility to Monte Carlo. The Russians lived on a far grander scale than the Prince of Wales, who was related to many of them. Russia’s Empress Maria Fëdorovna was his wife’s sister, and his cousin Princess Alix of Hesse was married to another cousin, the Czarevitch Nicholas. The Russians spent fortunes, losing millions of francs in a single night at the Casino, rented whole floors at the Hôtel de Paris and the other hotels, and hired innumerable servants, dressing them in powdered wigs and livery.
King Leopold II of Belgium, whose private life was even more scandalous and dissolute than that of the Russians, also came to Monte Carlo every season, first making his way up the curving road of the Rock to pay his respects to the new Princesse de Monaco. And there were Arabian princes and the Prince of Nepal, whose religion allowed him to gamble only five days a year.
Albert’s scientific sea ventures increased and he was away from Alice for longer and longer periods. Municipal decisions such as zoning and building restrictions and budgetary problems were handled by the S.B.M., with the enriching assistance of Michel Heine in financial matters.
The new Princesse de Monaco enjoyed the prestige of the noble visitors who were attracted to Monaco; but she was disdainful of their reasons for coming, and she was only too aware of the courtesans and expensive whores who flocked to Monte Carlo during the season to the delight of Monte’s many jewelry concerns and fashion houses. What Alice wished was to make Monte Carlo an important cultural center, attractive to the artists and intellectuals who had been part of her salon in Paris. To accomplish this she would need to change the image of the town by constructing and developing diversions other than gambling—the arts, sports and horticulture, starting exotic gardens that would be open to the public. She wanted more charity galas to counteract the Casino’s bad publicity and growing numbers of con men and desperate characters attracted by the free flow of money at the gaming tables. Also, Albert was never easy about the idea that his wealth was based on gambling losses.
“When I first knew this Princelet, he was always talking of his dislike of ‘the gambling house’ of Monte Carlo, which gave him his princely revenue and paid besides all the expenses of his three miles long and half a mile wide kingdom,” author Frank Harris, who lived on the Riviera and was a close friend of Princesse Alice’s, wrote in his autobiography, My Life and Loves. “Everyone staying at the palace was requested not to visit or even enter the gambling house, and the Prince was continually complaining that his father had given M. Blanc a lease of the place till [1913], or else, ‘I’d shut it up tomorrow. I hate the corruptions of it . . . I loathe the place.’
“It seemed to me,” Harris continues, “that the Prince protested too much; in any case, surely he need not have accepted ‘the wages of sin,’ had he not been so inclined.”
Albert had, in fact, given his father-in-law, Michel Heine, the go-ahead to try to renegotiate François Blanc’s original contract on better terms, even if it meant extending the lease, for he needed a great deal of money to construct an oceanographic museum in Monaco, to be the first of its kind and the largest and most complete in the world.
Michel Heine brought Camille Blanc to the negotiating table with threats that Alice might use her influence to close the Casino if changes were not made. Although François Blanc’s original agreement had another twenty-three years to run, Heine secured a new contract with an immediate payment of 10 million francs to the state treasury and a payment of 15 million francs to be made in 1913, the year the Blancs’ concession expired. A further 5 million francs was to be paid by Blanc for harbor improvements, with an equal amount to go to local charities, 2 million francs for the construction of an opera house to adjoin the Casino, and 24,000 francs for each of twenty-four operatic performances a season. The Prince de Monaco would also receive an additional 1,000 shares of stock in the S.B.M., increasing his holdings to 1,400 shares, and 125 million francs plus 3 percent of the first 25 million francs staked on the gaming tables.
Plays and operas had been presented in a concert room at the Casino before the Salle Garnier had been completed, generally by traveling companies whose main function was to provide light entertainment, with short acts and long intervals to allow time for bets to be placed on the gaming tables. Comedy and vaudeville had been the mainstays of these programs. Alice set to work, with Albert’s approval, to bring complete operas with the world’s leading performers to the new Monte Carlo Opera House. With a generous contract and the title of Director of the Monte Carlo Opera, she secured the services of thirty-two-year-old Raoul Gunsbourg, an impresario who had been a member of her Paris salon (and possibly a former lover).
Born in Bucharest, the grandson of a rabbi and the son of an army administrator, Gunsbourg had spent much of his childhood in China, where his father was sent on a tour of duty. A remarkably gifted pianist, he had nonetheless wanted to become a doctor and obtained a baccalaureate at the age of fifteen. His studies in Bucharest were interrupted by the Russo-Turkish War, in which he served with the Russian Army as the chef de musique militaire. After the war he went to Paris to continue his medical studies, but suddenly decided he wanted to work in opera or the theater. To support himself he took a job as the theater critic and then editor of a weekly publication. He met Alice in the early 1880s and she encouraged him to try his hand as a concert manager and then as an impresario. She helped him finance the staging of a theater version of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and operas by Saint-Saëns, Offenbach, Mozart, Meyerbeer, Verdi and Massenet in France and Russia.
Gunsbourg was a bullish, dynamic man with an explosive temper and a hearty laugh. From the moment he stepped off the train in Monte Carlo, he swung into immediate action. During its first season, 1892–1893, the new Monte Carlo Opera presented nine operas (with Nellie Melba as leading diva), six comedies (two starring Bernhardt) and four operettas. With the success of this premier season, Alice grew more ambitious and asked Gunsbourg to include works by new composers the following year.
Enter Isidoro de Lara, formerly Isidore Cohen. Born in London in 1859, he had been a piano prodigy before he turned to voice and, finally, composition, studying at the Milan Conservatory. When he returned to London, he wrote songs and became one of the favorites of the London social set. He sang his own works in a pleasant baritone, accompanying himself on the piano in the city’s finest houses.
His first opera, The Light of Asia was performed in March 1893 at Covent Garden to encouraging reviews. Gunsbourg had received a manuscript of the score of de Lara’s new opera, Amy Robsart, scheduled for spring 1894 at Covent Garden, and contracted to present it the following December. De Lara came down to Monte Carlo to discuss the production. Alice was not greatly taken by him when they first met, although she thought his music displayed an unusual talent. He had a curious appearance. Under five feet tall, he had a hunched back and arms and shoulders that were overdeveloped for his size. But he had a stunningly handsome face, huge burning dark eyes, a strong Roman nose, and robust, swarthy coloring. His success had given him an aura of great self-assurance, and he exuded a seductive charm.
The opera was only moderately well received in Monte Carlo, but Alice was drawn to the strange and romantic de Lara, and insisted that Gunsbourg sign him to a six-year contract that called for two new operas and allowed him to direct two other works of his choice each season. De Lara quickly became an integral part of Monte Carlo’s cultural life, and he and Alice saw each other with growing frequency, meeting—when Albert was on a scientific expedition—as secretly as was possible for the Princesse de Monaco to manage in her own small Principality.
Raoul Gunsbourg appears to have been more distressed by the growing intensity of the relationship between Alice and de Lara than Albert was. Gunsbourg simply did not appreciate being commanded to engage a particular artist. On December 20, 1895, with de Lara’s The Light of Asia scheduled for the following spring, he had two new stipulations added to his own contract, giving him complete authority in the hiring of all personnel and the absolute right to choose his artists and the works to be presented without the approval of either the Prince or the Princesse de Monaco. This still left him with the preexisting contract with de Lara.
With the Monte Carlo Opera and Alice’s glittering sequence of seasonal charity galas, the town spun dizzily into its golden age. Rich American heiresses and needy titled foreigners increasingly used it as a mating ground. To an unwed heiress, a title was worth anywhere from $200,000 to $4 million. American sewing-machine millionaire Isaac Singer paid $2 million for each title for his daughter Winnaretta. She first became a duchess and then, when divorced and remarried a year later, the Princesse de Polignac; and her sister, Isobel, became the Duchesse de Decazes.
This barter in titles seemed no more moral than that of the great courtesans who demanded jewels, clothes and carriages for their favors, and perhaps it had even less to do with the honest emotions of love and sexual attraction. The American ladies, who were the buyers in this case, were quick to adapt to their newly purchased aristocratic station. Tea at the Hôtel de Paris was de rigueur. (A few years earlier a British guidebook had written that the hotel “cannot be recommended as a family hotel, since so many gamblers stay here. If the rooms must be visited, the ladies of the party should be left outside.”) Literary, opera, and poetry societies, sports and garden clubs and numerous charity organizations were formed and were the foundation of the season’s social and cultural activities.
Alice had hoped her friendship with the Prince of Wales might influence his mother to visit Monaco during her usual springtime stay on the Riviera. Queen Victoria was adamant in her refusal to do any such thing. Her son’s gambling losses and those of the Russian aristocrats in Monte Carlo were well known to her, and she would have nothing to do with the place or the Prince and Princesse de Monaco. In 1899, when she was ensconced at the Hôtel Excelsior Regina in Cimiez near Nice, her entourage related stories to her about the local Russian pawnbroker who “lends money to the miserable [Russian] wretches on their way to Monte Carlo and they are generally unable to redeem their pledges, so he acquires splendid jewels for next to nothing and can afford to sell them cheap.”
When the Prince of Wales’s discreet suggestions to his mother that she would enjoy meeting the Princesse de Monaco had no effect, Alice wrote a letter to the Queen, asking if she and Albert could call on her. Such a request could not be overlooked, and Queen Victoria had them to tea at her hotel. Her reception was decidedly cool and the tea hour exceptionally brief. Alice did, however, meet the Princess of Wales with whom she hit it off extremely well, and her daughters, “seedily dressed and Maud [future Queen of Norway] with garish dyed yellow hair.” But she was not unaware of Queen Victoria’s disapproval, or the snub of her avoidance of Monaco. Albert had bought a new and large boat to use for his scientific expeditions, which he named Princesse Alice. He was beginning to distance himself from his wife, his Principality and his son, as he became even more deeply immersed in his research voyages, oceanographic societies and a new interest, paleontology. When not at sea, he would explore the caves near Menton, called Rochers Rouques, and in his diggings, he discovered bone fragments of the Cro-Magnon period. For a number of years, while he planned the building of a museum, they were housed, along with other prehistoric remains of fossilized animals and Roman findings, in the ancient dungeons beneath the Palace.
