‘The Beauty Spot of the Riviera’ is the flattering title which a resident English physician has given to his book upon Monte Carlo. It is getting difficult nowadays to give a new name to a place which has been raved about, reviled, flattered, slandered, discussed, and described ad nauseam. That it is a paradise is a fact as widely advertised as that somebody’s soap is matchless for the complexion, and that somebody else’s mustard is the best. It is a paradise—a fool’s paradise. All that Nature could do to make Monte Carlo beautiful she has done. She has painted the lily and adorned the rose in her endeavour to make the famous mount queen of the Riviera. Monte Carlo is a beautiful poem set to music; but the poem is the one in which the singer tells us that ‘all save the spirit of man is divine.’ When I arrived in Monte Carlo, my first impression was that I had made a mistake, and taken a ticket for Kempton Park; but the scenery was slightly against such a theory. I looked at the sea, and then I thought that in a fit of absence of mind I might have got mixed on the railway and in my dates, and that I had been landed at Brighton during the Sussex fortnight. The sun was hot, the sea was blue, and the bookmakers and the backers that one is accustomed to meet at a race meeting were airing themselves in light costumes and yellow boots along the principal promenades. But palm-trees, and marble staircases, and cacti and eucalypti, and prickly pear-trees, and sunny mountain slopes dotted with white villas are not the characteristic features of London-super-Mare. I gradually awoke to the fact that I was on the Mediterranean, and at Monte Carlo in January; but you can understand my being a little bit mixed at first when I tell you that the only people I met during the first half-hour of my sojourn in the principality were either English bookmakers, English backers, or English racehorse owners.

Let me briefly trace the interesting history of a place which is now world-famous, and is becoming every year more and more a place of English resort. In the old days, when the railway came no further than Nice, someone had permission from the Prince of Monaco to keep a roulette-table in the old town. There were so few customers that the game did not pay, and it was on the point of being given up when Blanc, knowing that the doom of the German gaming-tables was imminent, began to look about for a spot in which he could carry on his business when his German premises were closed. He came to Monaco, and saw the situation. He made an offer for the concession, took it over, and when the German tables were closed he transported his business to the shores of the Mediterranean.

All the world knows how the affair prospered, how Blanc died, how his daughter married Prince Roland Bonaparte, and how the affair was turned into a company. But what all the world does not know is that since Blanc’s death the management has steadily degenerated, until it has become absolutely objectionable.

A special Providence seems to watch over this delightful, romantic, wicked, enchanting little spot. Monte Carlo escaped damage from the earthquake which shattered the neighbouring places, and she is always spared the snow and ice which occasionally remind one of winter in Nice. She seems, indeed, to bear a charmed life, for nothing affects her prosperity, and nothing damages her beauty. I fell an instant victim to her wiles. I had not been in the place half an hour before I wanted to come and live there for ever. Every turn reveals some new beauty, every hour brings some fresh pleasure, and you begin to wonder how it is possible that there can be so many melancholy looking people in such a heavenly spot, unless you remember that the little ball rolls from morning till night, and that the majority of people who come to Monte Carlo come to gamble, and, as a natural consequence, to lose their money.

From noon until eleven o’clock at night, despising the glorious scenery, the tropical vegetation, the balmy air, and the glorious sunshine, the great bulk of the people who come to Monte Carlo crowd round the roulette and trente-et-quarante tables in a series of close, stuffy, and gloomy rooms. The air and the sunshine are rigidly excluded. A dim, religious, artificial light falls upon the tables and the faces of the players. All is forgotten in the greed for gold. Faces are flushed, hands tremble, bosoms heave, and the gold passes slowly and surely into the coffers of the bank. Those who have lost fall out and go their way, with heavy hearts, out into the mocking sunshine and the beauteous Eden in which the ‘establishment’ has concealed its serpent. The winners stay on, and plunge and plunge again, only to come to the inevitable end; it is only a question of time. The unlucky lose at once, the lucky win at first, only to make their ultimate loss the more bitter.

I have the whole place to myself—always excepting the gambling rooms and the post-office. You can mostly find plenty of people losing all their money at the former, and wiring home for more at the latter. I came with the firm intention of climbing the mountain, basking in the sunshine, taking long walks by the blue Mediterranean, and generally enjoying the beauties of the poisoned paradise without paying toll to the Strangers’ Club and Sea Baths Company (Limited). For a whole day I resisted the temptation to play. I drank in the warm air, I feasted my eyes on orange groves and avenues of palms, and gardens gay with the flowers that come to us only in summer. I climbed the mountain, and looked out over the hills dotted with white villas, and I looked down upon the sea that lay like a lake of still blue paint far below. I picked oranges and lemons from the boughs that hung down over the white mountain roadways, and in the lightness of my heart I whistled ‘The Man who broke the Bank at Monte Carlo,’ and shook my fist defiantly at the palatial building which has drawn all men unto the rocky home of the Grimaldis—with the accent on the rocky. I gambolled on the green turf like a lamb, instead of gambling on the green cloth like a donkey—and twenty-four hours afterwards a man with a stern set face and flashing eyes stood opposite that palatial establishment and cursed it in five different languages, specially studied up for that occasion. In spite of all his resolutions, he had gone in ‘just to look on,’ and he had put down five francs ‘just for the fun of the thing,’ and it had ended—ah, you can guess how it had ended—that man had won 5,000 francs, and that man was the man who didn’t mean to play.

Then, like all winners, I went back again and again to the rolling ball that gathers all our moss. I didn’t mind losing—in fact, I only lost the money I had won—but I hated myself for passing sunny mornings and moonlight nights in a heated atmosphere, amid exciting and unhealthy surroundings. It was so lovely out of doors, but Nature, decked in her fairest garb, wooed me in vain. It is so with almost everyone who comes to Monte Carlo. There is no one anywhere else, but the rooms are crowded. The grounds are deserted; there is never a soul upon the beach. Nobody ever goes out in a boat. Even the ocean at Monte Carlo is for ornament, and not for use. And it is an ocean which, anywhere on the English coast, would be a fortune to the proprietors of rowing boats and sailing vessels and bathing-machines.

Still, in spite of my annoyance at my own weakness in yielding to the evil influence of the place, I have managed to amuse myself and take a few notes, other than those handed to me by a croupier on the end of a rake.

One day there was an amusing incident in the rooms. An Englishman arrived early, and, sitting down, crossed his legs, and stuck one foot out in an attitude of ease. Suddenly there was a wild rush of everybody to the tables, and Italian barons, Spanish countesses, and Russian princesses fought with each other to get their gold and silver pieces on to 17. The croupiers stared, the inspectors looked nervous, and when 17 came up the entire staff seemed petrified. What had happened? Had the wheel been got at? Had some clever trick been played? Why had everybody rushed to back 17? The croupiers looked about and saw every eye directed at the Englishman, who, finding himself the object of so much attention, blushed violently, and burst into a profuse perspiration.

Then a roar of laughter went round the room, and the croupiers and the inspectors, and even the solemn attendants in livery, joined in it. The mystery was explained. On the sole of the Englishman’s boot was the number 17 in chalk. He had just come from his hotel, and that was the number of his room, and the number chalked on the soles of his shoes that the boots might recognise them and place them outside the right door. We have heard of a man putting his own shirt on a horse, but it isn’t every day that an entire company of gamblers put somebody else’s boots on a number at roulette.

There have been the usual number of suicide stories flying about Monte Carlo. Last night two young Germans were discovered in the gardens about midnight; one had a pistol in his mouth, and the other had a clasp-knife open, with the point pressed against his heart. When they were seized they declared they were about to commit suicide because they had lost everything at the tables.

But a German gentleman came forward who had heard the lads say to each other a quarter of an hour before they were arrested, ‘Let us do it. Someone will be sure to come along and see us, and we shall get a bit to go away.’ This kind of trick is of the common or Monte Carlo garden order, and has long since ceased to impose on the Casino officials.

In the good old days of M. Blanc, it was the custom (so the story goes), directly a suicide was found, to stuff his pockets full of bank notes. This was done to prove that his losses at play were not the cause of his hurried departure from the shores of time. The last person who received this generous treatment was, I believe, an American. He was found lying in one of the quiet alleys of the beautiful grounds, with an empty bottle, labelled ‘Poison,’ by his side. The secret agents of the bold Blanc instantly stuffed his pockets full of gold and notes, preparatory to giving information to the police. No sooner had they filled him as full of lucre as he could hold, than the suicide leapt to his feet, raised his hat, exclaimed, ‘Thank you very much!’ and went off to enjoy himself with his newly-acquired wealth.

A morning in the little post-office that stands above the sea on the terrace at Monte Carlo, and looks like the Paris Morgue’s understudy, may be passed with profit by the student of men and manners. One day, when the mistral (probably having found out that I had come to Monte Carlo for the benefit of my health) was blowing its worst, I went into the post-office and sat down in a chair and wrote telegrams to the sovereigns of Europe, couched in brotherly language. I am in the habit of doing this sort of thing occasionally when I feel sad. I never send the telegrams, but leave them lying on the desk, saying to myself aloud in the language of the country, ‘Ah, no; after all, I will write.’ It is wonderful the respect with which you are treated in a Continental health resort when it gets about that you have telegraphed to the Czar of Russia, ‘Sorry can’t dine with you Wednesday, old fellow; gout keeps me here;’ or to a Prince of the House of Hohenzollern, ‘Come and take potluck with me Sunday week, if you are passing.’

Once in the old days before the war, when one could put one’s gulden on the board of green cloth at Ems, at Wiesbaden, at Baden-Baden, and at Homburg, I was caught in a storm in the woods above Ems, and, spying a stranger standing under a dripping tree, I offered him half my umbrella. When the storm was over, he thanked me and went his way. That night at the tables we met again; he recognised me, and stopped and spoke to me, and asked me if I had had good luck. It is astonishing how polite they were to me at the tables after that. Although I only played in modest silver the croupiers would do their best to get me a seat, and treated me with the greatest distinction. I had entertained a Czarewitch under my umbrella unawares. The gentleman who had publicly asked me if I was having good luck was the heir to the throne of all the Russias. I have never since had a chance of chatting publicly with royalty, and have had to fall back upon sending it telegraphic messages, or, rather, leaving telegraphic messages addressed to it lying about unfinished on the desks of Continental post-office bureaux.

But in writing about the sovereign I am wandering from the subject. I went into the post-office one day and sat down at a table littered with spoilt telegraph-forms. I picked up some of them and read them. They were most of them little life-dramas in themselves. One ran: ‘Dear Aunt and Cousins,—I have finished my life’s journey. This is the bourne from which one traveller will never return. Farewell.’ Here was a hint at a Monte Carlo tragedy. The next spoilt telegram I picked up was more definite. The tragedy was complete: ‘Alphonse died at seven this morning. Break gently to his mother.’ There was a little comic relief in another one: ‘Send me fifty. HÔtel de Paris, return post. Am dead broke, and living on my watch. I only brought a silver one.’ While I was turning over these telegrams, the writers of which had evidently on second thoughts couched their messages in other words, I heard a female voice exclaim, with a pronounced London accent, ‘Does anybody here speak English?’ I looked up, and beheld a young lady in a black hat and large ostrich feathers, and a silver chain and locket. I at once proffered my services. ‘I want to know if I can send £500 through the post to London.’ I explained that one can send a million if one wishes in a registered letter. ‘Oh, that’s all right, then,’ said the young lady. ‘I’ve won it, and got it changed into English notes, and I want to send it to my mother. I’m not going to let ’em have it back again at the table—not me.’ The young lady then went to the counter, and, with my assistance, registered a letter containing £500 to Mrs. Hopkins, somewhere in the Caledonian Road, and, honouring me with a smile of thanks, went out gaily on a pair of those trodden-down high heels which are peculiar to the feminine toilette of Great Britain.

Her place at the guichet was immediately taken by an English clergyman in a brown straw hat and alpaca umbrella. He didn’t speak a word of French, and he wanted a post-office order for four-and-threepence, payable in the Walworth Road. He asked about three hundred questions of the clerk, who did his best to understand him, and finally tendered for the order two French francs, two Italian lire, and wanted to make up the rest in English penny postage-stamps. When the clerk objected, the clergyman argued, and was especially indignant at the rejection of the Italian coins, maintaining that he had received them in the Principality of Monaco. Finally, after taking up nearly an hour of the clerk’s time, and keeping twelve people waiting, he departed without the order, and with the loudly-expressed intention of writing to the Times on the subject.

There were applicants of every nationality applying for letters at the Poste Restante. Many a one that morning did I see turn away with a white, dazed face when the clerk shook his head and said, ‘Il n’y a rien, monsieur.’ The anxiously expected remittance had not come, and Monte Carlo is a bad place to be in when you have exhausted your funds and forgotten to make your retreat safe by taking a return ticket. Many of those who received registered letters opened them eagerly, and with feverish hands drew forth the bank-notes, thrust them into their pockets, and went off almost at a run along the broad pathway that leads to the gates of—well, ‘the rooms.’ A crowd of anxious faces does he gaze on day after day, this clerk who sits behind the guichet of the Poste Restante at Monte Carlo; and some sad, wild messages must the other clerk read who takes in the telegrams of the gamblers far from home. It isn’t every day that a Miss Hopkins steps jauntily in to send a ‘monkey’ to her mother in the Caledonian Road.

One beautiful sunny afternoon I went over to Mentone. Sitting on the parade in the sunshine, it was difficult to imagine that it was the end of January. It was a day that an Englishman would have been proud of in August. I asked the landlord of the hotel where I lunched if the growing popularity of Monte Carlo had not injured Mentone. ‘Oh no, not at all,’ he replied. ‘On the contrary, we have a great number of English people who come here because it is so close to Monte Carlo. They live here, and go to the rooms every day. No one suspects you of gambling when you are having your letters addressed to Mentone.’ There is no doubt that Monte Carlo is not an address which everybody would care to give who leaves London for the benefit of his or her health.

I missed the train back from Mentone to Monte Carlo, and, not caring to hang about for two hours after the sun had gone down, I took a victoria from the public stand and drove back over the mountains. It was a nice drive in the twilight, but weird and lonely withal. Once in a gloomy gorge, when we came suddenly on an encampment of fierce-looking gipsies, I felt a little uncomfortable, and had visions of being carried off by brigands to a cave; but when we began, after a steep ascent, to go down a precipice at full gallop, I thought of nothing but my neck. The driver cracked his whip, and the horse flew like the wind. We swayed from side to side, and every moment I thought I should go over, and be found mixed up with trunks of trees and bits of rock on the beach below; but the horse was a surefooted little beast, and when I remonstrated with the driver he only laughed, and said he had driven that road for ten years and had never gone over the side of a precipice yet.

The last part of the journey was done by moonlight. I have no doubt it was very beautiful and romantic, but I don’t care about it. There is a bit of roadway near Roquebrune which would try the nerves of a Blondin, and I never walk along it in broad daylight without turning giddy. When we got to that I insisted upon getting out and walking, and I was glad that I did. To avoid a piece of rock which had fallen, my charioteer took the extreme outside edge, and, walking behind, I saw one hind-wheel go actually off the ground and hang in the air. Had the horse stumbled or stopped, I should have had no fare to pay that night. Luckily he made a bound forward as he felt the carriage tilt, and the situation was saved. That steep bank was not the bank that broke the man at Monte Carlo.

I made up my mind that I would never take another moonlight drive over the mountains as long as I lived. For three nights afterwards I dreamt that I was rolling down a precipice, and woke up in such a state of abject terror that I had to get up and draw the curtains, and look out at Monte Carlo bathed in moonlight, lying silent and peaceful as a City of Dreams.

One morning, unable to go to sleep again, I sat at the window and saw the sun rise. I never wished so much for the power of word-painting as then. I would give a good deal to be able to describe that scene. As I looked out upon it, it seemed to me a sin that such a glorious spot should be the hell of Europe—the hotbed of all that is evil in human nature. The flaunting Casino, with its gaudy roof of blue and red and yellow, seemed like a painted harlot leering with a bold and brazen face as the fair earth woke and smiled at the kiss of her bridegroom the sun. But when I looked at it in this way, the last louis I had to lose had been gathered in by the remorseless rake of the croupier. Probably ‘the Successful Gambler’ would have seen that sunrise in a different light.

Everything is done to force the visitor into the bad atmosphere of the hot, unventilated gambling-rooms. No outside attractions are provided or allowed. Everything that may give pleasure to the visitor who does not wish to gamble is taboo. Even the railway is in the official clutches, and the means of escape from the place are made as difficult as possible. The Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean Railway is, in the hands of the Casino people, made to injure the surrounding towns. You can get from Nice to Monte Carlo, for example, easily enough, but you find it very difficult to get back again. The hotel-keepers of Nice complain bitterly of what are called ‘Les trains Blanc,’ which are so arranged that the Nice visitor who goes to Monte Carlo cannot get back to Nice for dinner. There is an afternoon train, but it is ‘facultatif,’ which means that it only runs when the administration chooses.

I met a young fellow the other day at the tables who at one time was betting in thousands, and losing his £5,000 a night at baccarat, and was the most notorious plunger in England. He told me he had been cleared out at trente-et-quarante. ‘That’s what I’ve got to get through the week with now,’ he exclaimed playfully, as he showed me two francs and a bunch of keys. The next day he borrowed a louis and turned it into £50. The day after that he was ‘broke’ again, and the story goes that he went to bed without any dinner. I saw him yet again, and he had borrowed another five francs, and played it up into a thousand francs in the morning, only to be cleared out again before night.

It was this same young fellow who came to me and told me confidentially that he believed everybody was stony-broke. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, my boy,’ he said, ‘I’ve asked about forty fellows to change me a cheque for £50, and there isn’t one of them that has enough to do it.’ I smiled. Poor lad! If he had had more experience of the world he would have understood why all his former friends and associates, and even the wealthy men who had shared the bulk of his once vast fortune among them, had become so suddenly short of cash. Cheques are not changed with impunity at ‘Charley’s Mount.’

There has been a real suicide at Monte Carlo. There is nothing more difficult than to arrive at the facts connected with Monte Carlo scandals. Everything that is unpleasant, or that is likely to increase the prejudice against the pastime of the Principality, is hushed up with the skill which comes of long practice in the art of concealment.

The place at which the suicide was committed was a small house situated in the Condamine at Monaco. In front of it an Italian labourer was at work in the street. With this man I engaged in conversation, and asked him if he had heard of a young couple committing suicide. The reply was, ‘I know nothing.’ Then I told him what I knew, and rattled some loose silver in my pockets. ‘Ah, as the Signor knows so much it cannot matter what I tell him,’ said the man, and then he pointed out to me the window of the room in which the young couple had come to their end. ‘Ah, I saw them often,’ he said, ‘this last few days, while I was at work on the road here. They used to come out arm-in-arm. They were very loving, and I said to myself, “It is a newly-married couple.”’

Having fixed the position of the room well in my eye, I entered the hotel, and found it practically empty. The proprietress came out to receive me. I explained that I was looking for rooms for some friends of mine. Could I see which apartments were vacant? ‘Yes, certainly.’ I was taken into most of the rooms, but none suited until I found myself in the apartment of the romantic suicide. I said nothing to the lady, nor she to me. The room was a small but comfortable one. Two wooden beds stood side by side. These were the beds on which two days previously the lovers had stretched themselves to die. The sun shone in at the open window; the blue Mediterranean glinted below, and as far as the eye could see all was peace and beauty and the joyousness of life. It was from these windows that the young couple had taken their last look upon earth. They had looked out upon the sunny land and the deep blue sea with a fixed purpose of self-destruction in their hearts—with the letter already written which was to tell their friends the story of their last days. It was to this pleasant little room in which I stood that they returned on their last night together, with their last hope gone, with the knowledge in their hearts that when the sun rose again over the palm groves and orange-trees and the white cliffs and smiling seas they would have passed from this world to eternity. What a last walk in the moonlight that must have been!—the man of twenty-nine, the woman of nineteen—lovers, fugitives from their homes—she a married woman, he a married man, and—— But let me tell it you, beginning, middle, and end—this perfect French tragedy, this curious study of morals and manners and Monte Carlo, this romance of the passions, this little life-drama taken ‘palpitating’ from the pages of the modern Boulevard novelist.

A young married man of Lyons fell in love with a young married woman. They met secretly, adored each other, and agreed to fly together—to put the seas between themselves and their families. But there was a slight difficulty in the way. They had very little money for a long journey, and they wanted to be far, far away—in America for choice. Then the idea came to the man that they would take their small capital of a few hundred francs and go to Monte Carlo, and make it into a fortune—a fortune which would enable them to live in peace and plenty on a far-off shore. So it came that one day, with a small box and a portmanteau, the fugitives arrived at Monte Carlo, and put up in this little hotel, where for eight francs a day you can have bed and board.

They had only a few hundred francs with them. In the letter which they have left behind they explained that from the first their arrangements were complete. They foresaw the possibilities of the situation. They would play until they had won enough to go to America, or they would lose all. And if they lost all they would die together, and give their friends no further trouble about them.

They were a few days only in Monte Carlo. They risked their louis only a few at a time, and they spent the remainder of the days and evenings in strolling about the romantic glades and quiet pathways of the beautiful gardens, whispering together of love, and looking into each other’s eyes.

The end came quickly. One evening they went up in the soft moonlight to the fairy land of Monte Carlo. They entered the Casino. They had come to their last few golden coins. One by one the croupier’s remorseless rake swept them away, and then the lovers went out of the hot, crowded rooms, out from the glare of the chandeliers and the swinging lamps, into the tender moonlight again. Down ‘The Staircase of Fortune’ arm-in-arm they went, along the glorious marble terraces that look upon the sea, on to where at the foot of the great rock on which Monaco stands there lies the Condamine. It was their last walk together. The lovers were going home to die.

That night, in some way which I was unable to ascertain, the guilty and ruined man and woman obtained some charcoal and got it into their bedroom. They then closed the windows and doors, and prepared for death. They wrote a letter—a letter which an official assured me was so touching that, as he read it in the room where they lay dead, the tears ran down his cheeks. Then the girl—she was but a girl—dressed herself in snowy white, and placed in her breast a sweet bouquet of violets. Then the charcoal was lighted, and the lovers laid themselves out for death, side by side, and passed dreamily into sleep, from sleep to death—and from death to judgment.

These are the facts of ‘The Romantic Suicide at Monte Carlo.’ It is not a moral story; it is not a new story. I have told it simply as it happened.

One morning I went over to breakfast with a friend of mine at Roquebrune, a picturesque point near Monte Carlo. The proprietor showed me over his villa and his grounds. While we were in the back garden a Frenchman, who rented a villa in the neighbourhood, came in, in a towering rage, to complain of my friend’s cat trespassing on his grounds. After a heated discussion, the Frenchman exclaimed angrily, ‘Very well, sir, I shall lodge my complaint with the mayor. Where is the mayor?’ My friend’s gardener, who was busy digging up new potatoes, suddenly looked up, and, raising his battered hat, exclaimed with dignity, ‘M’sieu, je suis le Maire de Roquebrune.’ Tableau and curtain.