7
THE WORLD Honoré IV awoke to after the Revolution was one of decreasing familiarity. Cut off entirely from Monaco, his family properties in Normandy in desperate straits after their mismanagement under sequestration, his château in Thorigny in disrepair, the Paris town house divested of its former glory and his mother’s great fortune gone with the defeat of the royalists, he was a man teetering on bankruptcy with nowhere to borrow and no talent for making money. He turned to his brother, Joseph, to help him out of his predicament, a decision that created quarrels with his two sons, who were torn between the erratic highs and lows of their divorced mother and the misanthropic attitude of their father.
His chronic ill-health (he had suffered from a severe stomach disorder most of his life) kept him out of the French Army for the first few years following the Revolution. Then, miraculously—or perhaps because of the imposed limitation of diet he had endured during his imprisonment and immediately thereafter—his health improved. With no other satisfactory alternative, he joined the French Army in 1806 and was appointed aide-de-camp to the brilliant and dashing military leader Joachim Murat, who had fought under Napoleon in Egypt in 1798 and married his sister Caroline in 1800. (Murat, by Napoleon’s decree, was to become King of Naples just two years after his army association with Honoré. In 1815, following Napoleon’s fall from power, he was arrested and executed in an attempt to regain the throne of Naples.)
Severely wounded at Friedland during Napoleon’s campaign in Russia, Honoré was awarded the Legion of Honor. Despite the almost total disability of one arm, he fought with Murat in Spain when the French Army marched through it to cross the frontier of Portugal; but because of his ill-health he was sent back to Paris. He never recovered from his war injuries, nor did he receive a just pension from the army.
Napoleon was crowned Emperor by his own hand on December 2, 1804, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Post-Revolution French society consisted of parvenus who had come to power through political or military achievement and had grown rich through speculation. As a model they had only the society they had just destroyed, the extravagant aristocrats of Versailles, which was now silent and deserted. The opulence of the new Court, which moved from Empress Josephine’s luxurious Palace of Malmaison to the Tuileries was no less glittering than the old, but it was outstandingly vulgar.1 To inject a grander tone of manners and etiquette, the new Emperor brought more and more of the old aristocrats into his Court. Some adapted themselves to the new order; others—like Honoré—remained outsiders and were swiftly passed over.
It does not seem that Honoré attended many, if any, of the salons, fêtes or celebrations that filled the Court calendar. Members of the Bonaparte family were given princely titles and the style of Imperial Highness. According to the Duchesse d’Abrantès, one of Josephine’s good friends, “Balls, suppers and other court entertainments were revived. Unfortunately, neither the Emperor nor his courtiers quite knew how to go about it all, so the ceremonies were stiff, and the atmosphere was one of paralysing dullness. Napoleon himself was no help. He was given to walking rapidly up and down the two lines of his courtiers, stopping to tell the women they looked old, or overdressed, or underdressed, or blaming the men for shortcomings and occasionally flying into a rage. . . . In the houses of the nobility, many a snicker could be heard about the lack of manners at the new court. Napoleon knew all about that; and few things annoyed him more.”
Honoré withdrew, unmissed, from this society. His financial situation was increasingly bleak. The great house in Paris had been sold in 1804 by Joseph (who by nature, if not by breeding, fitted well into the parvenu society) to an English speculator for 195,000 francs, which only covered the debts from taxes and repairs owing to it. (The following year it was resold to Talleyrand, who sold it to Napoleon in 1812 for 1,280,000 francs. In the twentieth century it became the official residence of the French president.) Next, Honoré’s estates in Valmont and Thorigny were put up for auction. Placed in the hands of dishonest agents who took a large amount “under the table” for their commissions, the sale did not raise sufficient money to pay off the encumbrances. Honoré, his war wounds now causing grievous discomfort and increasing his immobility, rented a small house at 763 rue d’Enfer. He was supported by his resentful older son, Honoré-Gabriel, who wrote to him in January 1808: “You say your brother is unable to help you, and I must admit that remark surprises me. You can’t be unaware that the sums paid over to you come from my account and not from my uncle’s . . .”
Looking back half a century later on the years of Napoleon’s reign, Victor Hugo placed these words into the mouth of an old revolutionary in his epic novel Les Misérables: “We overturned the old world, we revolutionaries, and it was like the overthrow of a hothouse; from being a forcing-house of misery the world became a vessel of joy . . . You may call it uncertain joy, and now, after the fateful return of the past that is called the Restoration, vanished joy. Our work, alas, was not completed. We destroyed the structure of the ancien régime, but we could not wholly destroy its thought. It is not enough to abolish abuses; custom must also be transformed. The mill was pulled down, but the wind still blows.”
And indeed it did. For the very people of France who had mounted the barricades were now half starved under an equally oppressive government. Each successive year Napoleon’s foreign campaigns, the living conditions of the poor (which had seemed intolerable under King Louis XVI) worsened. By the time of the Emperor’s retreat from Russia in 1812—his Grande Armée, some 500,000 strong, reduced to a fifth of its original strength—many Frenchmen were beginning to feel almost nostalgic for the days of the Bourbon Kings.
In 1813, Great Britain and Sweden joined with Spain and Austria in the War of Liberation against France. Paris fell to the allies on March 31, 1814. Napoleon abdicated, first in favor of his young son (child of his marriage to Marie Louise of Austria), and then unconditionally, and was exiled to the island of Elba off the coast of central Italy. Napoleon’s defeat brought about an affirmation of solidarity among the European monarchies and the same year the return (cheered tumultuously by the people) of a Bourbon King—Louis XVIII, brother of Louis XVI—to the throne of France.
Hugo writes: “Dictatorship was ended . . . the Napoleonic empire dissolved in a darkness resembling the last days of Rome, and chaos loomed as in the time of the barbarians. But the barbarism of 1815, which must be called by its proper name of counter-revolution, was short-winded and soon stooped for lack of breath . . . .”
The last years of Napoleon’s reign had been unduly harsh on the people of Monaco, whose exports were reduced by the allied blockades and who received little help from the Alpes-Maritimes département into which they had been incorporated. But Joseph Grimaldi had never lost contact with former family supporters; and almost immediately upon Louis XVIII’s ascent to the throne in 1814, he petitioned the King in the name of the Grimaldi family to “allow them of his gracious kindness to enter into their rights and possessions again and to deign to take the Principality of Monaco under his powerful protection.” Talleyrand, the King’s foreign minister, negotiated the First Treaty of Paris, which returned France to the borders that had existed in 1792. He now resurrected the Principality of Monaco (including the return of its name) by adding a paragraph to the Treaty which renounced all France’s sovereign rights over territories outside the frontiers fixed for her. The way was cleared for the Grimaldis to return to power in Monaco. But which Grimaldi was the key question
Honoré IV’s physical condition had worsened—he was paralyzed now on one entire side of his body. Joseph came to see him on the rue d’Enfer and persuaded him to renounce the duchy of Valentinois and the peerage in favor of Honoré-Gabriel, while delegating full powers in the Principality to him. To the twenty-eight-year-old Honoré-Gabriel’s rage and shock, his uncle Joseph took over the position that should have been rightfully his—and it was only the hope of finally attaining that position that had enabled him to survive a difficult life.
Born eleven years before the storming of the Bastille, he had known fear when his aunt had died on the guillotine and many other members of his family had been imprisoned. Before that time he had been tossed back and forth between an ineffectual father and a shrewish, wildly emotional mother who hated each other. Seven years older than his brother Florestan, and ten when his parents were divorced, he had always borne the responsibility that being an older son in a fatherless household entailed—but seldom with good grace.
His early years in Paris had been hard. The family was near bankruptcy. He rented a small apartment in 1805 and then, unable to find anything else to do, joined Napoleon’s élite guard, rapidly rising to the rank of captain. Nevertheless, he was bitter that after serving well in Germany and Poland and then with Murat in Spain (where his ailing father was his superior officer) he had not risen higher. He returned to Paris in 1808 and was made an equerry to the Empress Josephine at Malmaison, proudly wearing his scarlet uniform. When Napoleon annulled his marriage to Josephine in 1809, Honoré-Gabriel remained with her. His job was to budget the household, and it was not an easy one.
His own life had become a daily financial struggle to make ends meet. He received 15,000 francs annually in his position, which meant he could afford few luxuries. Whatever outside money he acquired came from his mother’s inheritance, and she never gave a penny without expecting a return. In the case of her sons, this meant that they would be available when she felt the need for their attention and that they would not go against her wishes. Her approval (which he constantly sought) did not come easily. She repeatedly threatened to cut him out of her will if he displeased her, and she had not been happy about the illegitimate son he had fathered in 1814, born in Paris and delivered by the Grimaldis’ discreet friend Doctor Desormeaux. The child was named Oscar, but the mother’s identity was not (and never has been) revealed on the birth records.2
Honoré-Gabriel’s uncle Joseph had lived by his brains for his entire life, managing to escape the ordeals suffered through the Revolution by his father, his brother, and his tragic first wife, Françoise-Thérèse, remarrying a rich widow and cleverly shifting allegiances as rulers came in and out of power. He had squandered his second wife’s inheritance in the eight years since her death. He now looked to Monaco for his income. His first action was to repeal the existing laws to reestablish the status quo prevailing before January 1, 1792, which meant the Palace and all its contents would be turned over to the Grimaldis and, once again, taxes paid directly to them. It also reinstated Italian, which had been banned since the Revolution, as the official language. This caused great chaos for any Monégasques under twenty-five, who had been speaking French all their lives. An uncommonly cold winter greeted Joseph’s arrival in Monaco, further depressing the economic situation and the Monégasques refused to pay their taxes. In January 1815 Joseph hurried back to Paris in the hope of raising funds there. This threw the Monégasques into greater upheaval for, with the French garrison gone and the provisional government dismissed, there was no one to restore order to what was, in effect, a principality without a prince.
By now, however, Honoré-Gabriel had rallied his forces. Through the Due d’Aumont, his mother’s cousin and a confidant of the King, he petitioned Louis XVIII to rescind his uncle’s usurpation of his inherited rights, on the grounds that his father was mentally incapable of knowing what he was signing when he put his name to the document. Within a matter of days, unable to borrow the money he needed to return to Monaco, Joseph capitulated, writing to his brother: “I have consulted with your friends d’Aumont and d’Esclignac [a nephew of Talleyrand] and together we have drawn up the document I am submitting to you; by it, your son will be bound in such a way, and in accord with the family council, that I do not think he will be able to deviate from these agreements. By this means there will be peace in our family again, and you will have sufficient income on which to live comfortably. Say whether you’re agreeable to it; I did nothing without d’Aumont’s consent, and you know of his friendship for you.”
In what Joseph considered a final act of goodwill toward his brother, he agreed to renounce any claim he might have on Monaco with the promise that Honoré-Gabriel would care for his father (he also requested that his own interests would be looked after). A document was thus signed by Honoré IV revoking the first document and assigning all sovereign rights to his elder son. Upon its execution on February 23, 1815, Honoré-Gabriel (now Honoré V) set off for Monaco.
While Honoré V and his entourage traveled by coach through France, Napoleon, with a handful of followers, had escaped from Elba, landing in Cannes on March 1, 1815. On that very afternoon, as Honoré V’s carriage passed through Cannes, he was halted by soldiers. To his dismay, he learned they were Napoleon’s advance guard. To ensure the former Emperor’s safe passage on his way to Paris, all travelers were being stopped and detained until he had moved farther along on his journey. Honoré recognized the leading officer, a general he had served under while a captain in the élite guard during Napoleon’s campaigns of 1806 and 1807 in Germany and Poland. The general thought Napoleon might want to exchange a few words with Honoré in order to hear the news from Paris.
Honoré was led on foot through an olive wood for some little distance. In a small clearing, Napoleon was sitting over a bivouac fire. Napoleon’s valet, Marchand, was later to record, “. . . the Emperor met with the Prince de Monaco, who was embarrassed at first, but ceased to be when he found himself greeted like someone the Emperor knew . . . a big fire was lit, and he and the Emperor went and stood near it. All the while they were speaking together, the Prince kept his hat in his hand. The Emperor wished him a happy journey as they parted. The Prince did not hide from the Emperor how risky such an expedition was. The fairly wide circle we had formed around the two prevented us from hearing what they said yet the Emperor’s good spirits gave cause for thinking he was satisfied with the details he got about Paris and the state of mind in France. The Prince had given him the opinions of the drawing-rooms. . . .”3
To his annoyance, as his rank was now above the ex-emperor’s, Honoré was not permitted to continue on his journey for an hour after Napoleon had gone on his way. He had never been a great admirer of Bonaparte, whom he considered largely responsible for his impecunious past, and he found it difficult to forgive his callous treatment of the Empress Josephine. One still could not dismiss Napoleon’s charisma or his military genius, but Napoleon’s ignorance in many areas was remarkable, and he spoke French very badly, frequently committing the most illiterate mistakes, which brought out Honoré’s snobbishness. The moment he was permitted to continue on his journey he did so, pausing in Nice to inform the Sardinian authorities (who now controlled the city) of Napoleon’s return, an act of spite.4
After this meeting, Napoleon marched triumphantly northward, rallying the people once more behind him. He entered Paris twenty days later. Louis XVIII was quickly transported out of France by the royalists, and Bonaparte began his “ephemeral rule” of the Hundred Days. Then the allies again advanced into states controlled by France. Napoleon was utterly crushed at Waterloo, in central Belgium, his army suffering huge losses. On June 18, 1815, he surrendered to a British warship, the Bellerophon, in the hope of being given asylum in England. Instead, he was sent as a prisoner of war to the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean, twelve hundred miles west of Africa, and Louis XVIII returned to Paris and to his throne.
Honoré V had, meanwhile, established his authority in Monaco. As he had left his Principality at the age of four, the task before him was not easy. An entire generation had grown up with little or no knowledge of the Grimaldi family and had then endured his uncle’s mismanagement (or rather, lack of management). Monaco remained as isolated as it had been before the Revolution. The most direct access by land was still a road too narrow for a carriage to pass, which wound precipitously down from the ancient Roman ruins of La Turbie through pine forests and olive plantations. And so Honoré V approached the Rock on horseback, having left his carriage at La Turbie. Menton, which was joined to the Rock by a carriage road, was more accessible but farther away and either he wished to arrive as soon as possible or he rather liked the image of the returning Prince on a charger.
Honoré’s prime objective was to reclaim the Principality for the Grimaldis and to ensure that whatever monies could be found in the treasury would be transferred directly to him. He belonged to that class of Frenchmen (and he had been born in France and lived his life there until this time) who was not accepted by the true aristocrats, yet who did not himself accept the parvenus. Arrogant above all else, he was also an angry, self-important and embittered man. He possessed a waspish tongue, a quick, cruel wit and an air of condescension. With his dark, lean good looks—piercing eyes beneath well-arched brows, aquiline nose, gracefully bowed mouth, narrow clefted chin—he cut a dashing figure which his penchant for scarlet uniforms and gold braid enhanced.
Upon his arrival the Monégasques had greeted their thirty-six-year-old Prince warmly, and with some hope that he would aid them in their difficulties. They quickly found they were welcoming a despot who, although outwardly a perfect gentleman, had little sympathy for the grievances of his people. Honoré was appalled at the state of his Palace, now little more than a shell, and a dirty shell at that, for it had been used as a poorhouse for a decade. The silver, porcelain, tapestries and paintings were gone, and the treasury of Monaco was almost empty.
The taxes raised on olives, fruit for export and the manufacture of bread brought in a revenue of 45,000 francs, but this was entirely swallowed up in salaries and administrative expenses. Honoré’s initial edict on March 12, 1815 (after decreeing that the official language would return to French, for he spoke very little Italian) was to have all property that had been confiscated by the revolutionary forces, which was now distributed among the former communes, hospitals and churches, made over to him, as well as revenues from all taxes and even from the manure swept up in the streets and sold as fertilizer.
On March 13, only ten days after his arrival, an English troopship was sighted sailing toward Monaco. Honoré ordered the gates of the port closed. The English officer in charge, a Colonel Burke, demanded to see him. Honoré kept him waiting for a reply before he finally agreed to allow him to enter. He greeted the Englishman from his throne in the old Throne Room (“Only a Colonel?” he was heard to comment to one of his attendants.) Burke presented him with a letter from M. d’Azorque, the King of Sardinia’s representative, stating that in consequence of Napoleon’s reappearance, and Honoré’s admission that he had met and spoken with him, English troops had been dispatched to occupy Monaco. Honoré suspected this was a scheme of Sardinia’s King, Victor Emmanuel I, to annex Monaco. But with a guard of only thirty-five or so undisciplined cadets he did not dare attempt to match swords, especially with several ships belonging to the British fleet anchored inside his territorial waters.
After several hours of negotiations the Colonel agreed to sign the following statement:
In the year 1815, on the 13th of March, at two o’clock in the afternoon, M. Burke, colonel in the English service, presented himself at the Palace of Monaco, and handed the prince a letter from M. d’Azorque, commandant at Nice, for the King of Sardinia . . . which states that the English troops have received orders to occupy Monaco. The hereditary prince has declared to Colonel Burke that the principality has been re-established in its entire independence by the Treaty of Paris, and under the protection of France; but having at the moment no garrison in the place, he finds himself debarred from offering opposition to the occupation; that he consents but through constraint, and that he protests against all inference that might be drawn from this momentary occupation against rights of sovereignty which are acknowledged.
Both the men signed the letter and Honoré added in his own hand:
The moment the English troops entered the place Colonel Burke caused it to be garrisoned by the said troops.
Several hundred British troops immediately occupied the Principality. By now, Napoleon was back in power, and Honoré, in a direct about-face, began to petition him through the Emperor’s minister for foreign affairs, the Duc de Vicence, for assistance. A week passed before Vincence finally presented the matter to Napoleon in a letter:
SIRE
From the first moment of your Majesty’s return a commander of English troops, in concert with the governor of the county of Nice, has taken possession of Monaco. After the old Paris treaties [were] renewed, France alone has the right to garrison that place. The period at which this occupation took place indicated sufficiently that the commander of the English troops has acted simply on his own impulse, and that he could not then have received instructions from his government.
France should demand satisfaction for this affair from the courts of London and Turin [capital of Sardinia]; she ought to insist on the evacuation of Monaco, and on her being placed under a French garrison according to the treaties; but your Majesty may perhaps judge this affair as one for explanations only, supposing that the determination of the Sardinian government, and above all, the English commander, has been accidental, and a sudden result of the uneasiness occasioned by extraordinary circumstances.
However, Napoleon had learned of Honoré’s treachery in reporting his arrival in Cannes to the Sardinians, and refused him any assistance. The English troops remained well into the summer when they were eventually relieved by an Anglo-Italian regiment, maintained by England. Thus, the right of protection which for one hundred and seventy-three years had been exercised by France over Monaco ended, and the Principality fell under Sardinia’s domination; the menacing, encircling hand that the Grimaldis had held off for centuries seemed to be closing in on them.
To make matters worse, Honoré had little hope of an indemnity from France for the past revenues of the duchy of Valentinois. At the Restoration a year earlier, France had agreed to a sum of four and a half million francs, but then all French rights and obligations to Monaco had been transferred to the Sardinian government. Bitterly disappointed in his first months in Monaco, bored with life on the Rock and humiliated by the presence of the English, in September Honoré decided to return to France, for “he felt himself to be more French than the French in some ways—as a persecuted Frenchman who was wrenched from his homeland.” But before leaving Monaco, he issued a long list of new edicts, which placed intolerable tax burdens upon his already beleaguered subjects.
The most important produce of the Principality was fruits. The quantity grown far exceeded what could be consumed domestically, and the income derived from its foreign sale supplied the growers with their livelihoods. Honoré’s new ordinances taxed oranges, lemons, grapes, figs, oils and essences so heavily that proprietors were near ruin.
Four oil mills, always privately owned, were decreed henceforth to belong to the State. Honoré also took over all other places of manufacture and proclaimed that their products—linen, gunpowder, pipes, cards and straw articles could not be purchased elsewhere. A monopoly, vermicelli, the principal food of the workers, was sold by Honoré to a Genoese for a substantial price.
A Frenchman named Chappon, formerly purveyor to the French Army, was engaged by Honoré to oversee other acquisitions. Two of the oil mills were converted into flour mills, and a law was passed prohibiting the inhabitants from providing themselves with corn, flour or bread from other sources. The profits were shared by Honoré and Chappon. An ordinance was passed on December 3, 1817, with a five-hundred-franc fine and the grain confiscated if the law was violated.
His income having risen to 320,000 francs annually, 80,000 of which went toward the upkeep of the Palace, and the salaries of civil employees and former soldiers from Genoa whose job it was to enforce his edicts, Honoré returned to France. But before he departed he appointed the Chevalier Charles Trenca, a descendant of the Chevalier de Grimaldi, as leader of the government council. The decision was, perhaps, the wisest he had or would make, for Trenca, though firm, was respected and well-liked by the people; he managed to sweeten the bitterness of their poverty by keeping crime to a minimum and was adept at settling local disputes with a calm and moderating hand.
Monaco had always been poor, but for generations the Grimaldis had contributed considerably to the well-being of the people “from what the harbor and its fleet of galleys brought in, then from the Spanish or French subsidies for the fortress, and finally [through large marriage dowries and] the [Matignon] family possessions in Normandy and the Valentinois.” Louis I had used taxes for his own purposes and left enormous debts; but a sense of enterprise had always existed, and the Monégasques had been able to engage in trade with Nice and other neighbors to subsidize their incomes.
While his subjects were struggling to survive under the crushing economic burden that Honoré had imposed upon them, he set about repurchasing his former properties in Normandy and furnishing an apartment in Paris. Upon his uncle Joseph’s death on June 28, 1816, he halved the monthly allowance of three thousand francs that he had agreed to pay his father, claiming “the people [of Monaco] are badly hit, frost has ruined their harvest and they are unable to pay their taxes that are in arrears.” This was partially true, but with their incomes severely shrunk by his edicts the people were unable to manage when weather conditions damaged their crops. And what Honoré did not admit to his father was that his personal investments and extravagances were mostly responsible for his lack of funds.
His father’s bizarre death on the evening of February 16, 1819, listed officially as an “accidental drowning in the Seine,” remains an enigma. Honoré IV was almost a complete invalid. He could not have reached the Seine in freezing winter and at night without assistance, and it seems improbable that whoever helped him that far would then allow him to fall into the Seine and drown. Murder seems equally remote for he had neither power nor money. Suicide, with someone’s help, is possible. He was gravely disappointed in his elder son. His last years were lonely; he suffered much pain. And when Joseph died his world had disappeared.
Honoré IV had not had much happiness from either of his sons. Seven years younger than Honoré V, Florestan was born when his parents were already on the verge of divorce. He had been briefly imprisoned with his mother during the Revolution, and his youth during those troubled times had been spent under her protective wing. He saw little of his father, and the age gap between his brother and him meant that he remained home in Normandy with his mother while Honoré was fighting with Napoleon’s army. At seventeen, to his mother’s fury and horror, he ran off to Paris and joined an acting company. With a dark, chiseled profile and a grand and imperious manner, he was inclined to think of himself as an Alexandre Dumas, père, hero.5 Dumas himself—perhaps persuaded by the young man’s mother, in whose home he had often been a guest—discouraged him from further seeking a life on the stage.
Threatened with disinheritance by his mother unless he adopted a worthwhile career, at twenty Florestan joined the army. He never rose above the rank of corporal, carrying out his garrison duties on the island of Oessant, at Neort, Bordeaux, and then at Toulon before being sent to fight in Russia.
Florestan was not well-suited to the army, and was even more ill-equipped to fight a war. Orders were difficult for him to take, the unaccustomed coarse food hard to digest, dirty linen and the absence of wine and women drove him into a state of agitated depression. He quickly discovered that an army was sharply divided between officers and enlisted men. His arrogance had falsely convinced him that as an aristocrat he would not remain long in the ranks of the common soldier, and by the time he was sent to Russia he was deeply resentful at his lack of advancement.
Battle horrified him—earth soaked with blood, wounded men, the dead frozen in the Russian winter, the smell of rotting flesh. Frightened, exhausted, hungry and suffering from dysentery, he was taken prisoner on September 7, 1812, during the daylong siege of the small, virtually unknown village of Borodino, where thirty thousand French and forty-three thousand Russian soldiers perished. This was the second time in his life that he had been imprisoned, and the experience must have recalled the terror he had felt as a young boy. Conditions were primitive in the shed in which he was held with other prisoners, but he had at least survived where tens of thousands had not. He was transferred to a hospital and eventually freed after Napoleon’s defeat.
On his return to France he had met Caroline Gilbert and spent the summer of 1815 at her family’s château at Lametz. Caroline was eight years younger than he, a striking Mediterranean beauty with a strong personality. They were married on November 27, 1816. Two years later, on December 8, 1818, they had a son, Charles, who was now heir presumptive to Monaco.
Women’s rights had been greatly increased during Napoleon’s reign. They could control their own inheritances and were active in the world of business and finance. Caroline was a woman of her time. She set immediately to work, using her own income to better her husband’s and her own financial situations—and she was good at it, quickly assuming the reins of the household, and two months after Honoré IV’s mysterious death, Caroline took over the house on the rue d’Enfer. Although Honoré V was to claim his father died heavily in debt, this was only partly true. Honoré IV had left numerous uncollected assets; a legal suit for reparations of his personal losses in Monaco was still pending; an estate claim against the Brignole-Sale family was unsettled. Caroline engaged a lawyer named Adolphe Eynaud on a percentage basis and with his help succeeded in winning a settlement in both cases, appropriating the largest share for her family.
Florestan’s new affluence nettled Honoré, for his position had become difficult. In 1821, the Monégasques faced complete ruin when a severe frost took all their crops and they were unable to pay their taxes. His credit overextended in France, Honoré was forced to ask the French Foreign Ministry for aid (already refused by Sardinia). He cited “the consequences of the enormous debts left by my father and the lawsuits that persist” as the reasons for his inability to help his subjects. “And as for the revenues from the Principality, the frosts in 1820 destroyed my hopes and everything had to be sacrificed for my subjects. I have given up my town apartment, dismissed my servants and am reduced to the position of an obscure person stuck in the depths of the country [his revitalized estates in Normandy]. By making innumerable sacrifices, I have saved between four and five hundred people from destitution and despair. . . .”
His list of personal concessions did not persuade the French Ministry to act on his behalf. Honoré’s claim that by tightening his belt he had saved many of his subjects’ lives is a travesty of the truth. In reality, his despotic edicts had taken from them any means of self-support. No money had been left in the treasury to cover a disaster like that winter’s frost.
Honoré remained unmarried; and as problems in Monaco became more complex, he spent very little time there, leaving Charles Trenca in charge. Conditions did not change much for the Monégasques. They struggled merely to survive. Emigration laws imposed by Honoré made it difficult for them to go elsewhere. Surrounded by the extraordinary beauty of the area, a climate that usually was sunny and mild, possessing a port and waters that held a bounty of marine life, they were denied the rewards of a good life this should have ensured. There was unrest, even riots—quelled by Trenca and a small but well-trained regiment.
Honoré and Florestan’s mother, Louise-Félicité, died in 1826, leaving what remained of her family estate (the d’Aumonts’) to her younger son. The two brothers no longer spoke. Honoré spent little time in Monaco. He had never thought of himself as anything but French and his Principality as a source of income. The Monégasques blamed Honoré for much of their trouble. The name of Grimaldi was losing its luster and it would take a prince with compassion, intelligence and charisma to polish it to a point where it would once again shine.
8
IT WAS CLEARLY IN the Grimaldis’ interest to maintain their sovereignty of Monaco. To lose it would be to lose the tax money that was their only way to regain their pre-Revolutionary lifestyle in France. In heart, allegiance and birth, the Grimaldis were Frenchmen; they saw nothing wrong with stripping Monaco to replenish their fortunes in France, and applied themselves to the task with fervor.
Through the five decades that followed Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and the return of the Grimaldis to the Principality, Honoré V and then Florestan progressively destroyed the goodwill of the Monégasques and were demonstrably unwise in their rule. Despite the constant warning of events in France and the rest of Europe, they repeatedly implemented measures that undermined their reigns. In the end, they made rebels where there had been none.
A distinct and unsavory odor of serfdom and blatant exploitation was apparent in the way they treated the Monégasques, although there are no records of physical force having been applied to collect the dizzying plethora of harsh tax laws and decrees the Grimaldis placed upon their subjects, who were mainly a domesticated, peaceful people, not as ambitious as their French, Sardinian and Italian neighbors. The Mentonians were of a somewhat more volatile character, and it was in this town that resistance appeared at times. By nature, however, they were not fighters, they were survivors—for centuries they had labored to make the rocky earth they tilled feed and support them. All the Grimaldis had ever had to do to maintain their loyalty was to help them in this task. But the Grimaldis of this period felt responsible only to themselves.
The family values were French; their ambitions to ascend to the top of the French aristocracy. After the elderly Louis XVIII’s death in 1824, his younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, became Charles X at age sixty-seven, bringing with him the ultraroyalists who sought a return to the ancien régime. When they saw this was impossible to achieve, they acted instead to ensure their own social and political predominance. The appointment of an uncompromising reactionary, Jules Armand de Polignac, as chief minister led to the July Revolution of 1830 and Charles X’s abdication in favor of his grandson, the Comte de Chambard. However, a descendant of Louis XIII, Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, former Lieutenant General of France, with the support of the popular Marquis de La Fayette, a leader of the moderates, was chosen to become “king of the French” and Chambard never ascended the throne.
Faced with the dramatic changes in France, Honoré, despite his aristocratic pretensions, might well have perceived his own folly at trying to turn back the clock. The world he sought no longer existed. He was a lonely and a bitter man, ignoring his responsibility to Monaco and envious of his brother’s affluence. His sister-in-law, Caroline, had proved to be an astute businesswoman. With the lawyer Eynaud’s help she had wisely invested Florestan’s inheritance from his mother. They purchased for 277,000 francs the Hôtel de Créque in rue Saint-Guillaume, a vast mid-seventeenth century mansion with a handsome wing added in the eighteenth century. Adopting the titles the Comte and Comtesse de Grimaldi, they restored the grand town house to its former elegance and rented the wing, which contained a magnificent ballroom, to the poet and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine.
A daughter, Florestine, was born on October 22, 1833. Charles was now nearly fifteen and was the heir presumptive to the Principality. His uncle and his father still did not speak to each other and neither Charles nor Florestan had ever set foot in Monaco. The Monégasques knew little, if anything, about them. Honoré’s visits to his Principality grew more infrequent with the years. He made two annual trips to go over the financial statements with his administrator and to ensure his monies were paid over to him. During these times he seldom went out among his subjects. He remained a trim, handsome man, vain and arrogant. There seemed to be no woman in his life. By the time he was fifty years old he became extremely popular with hostesses whenever an extra man was required for a dinner party or ball.
In the spring of 1840 Honoré became ill with a throat condition, which made it difficult for him to swallow. He did not allow this to stop him from making his ritual visits to Monaco, and on October 2, 1841, he choked to death while dining alone in the Palace. He was buried in the small parish church with neither his illegitimate son, Oscar, nor Florestan and his family present, nor was there much grieving in his Principality. The end of Honoré’s reign was regretted by few of his subjects.
At this time another claim was placed against the right of the current ruling family of Grimaldis to remain in power in Monaco. The Marquis de Cagnes, a retired general living in Saint-Marcellin in the department of Isère, France, demanded of the Sardinian government, under whose protection Monaco had been since Honoré’s return in 1815, that the Grimaldis’ rights be suspended and his own claims considered. The bid failed. The Marquis Grimaldi della Pietra of Genoa then filed a similar protest in his name and even offered, should his pretensions be recognized, to cede all his rights to the King of Sardinia. This claim also failed and Florestan was assured his title.
Having never set foot in his Principality before, Florestan had no idea of what he would find. Monaco was composed of two quite disparate societies. On one hand there were the people of Menton and Roquebrune who, by the topography of their land alone, were separated from the Rock. Roads now connected the three points of the Principality, but Monaco, that is, the town that occupied the Rock and where the Palace was located, could lock its gates and enjoy total isolation. Then, too, the people who lived in Menton and Roquebrune were the farmers and workers upon whom the bulk of the taxes were levied, while the population of the Rock consisted mainly of Palace, civil and military personnel whose livelihoods were dependent upon their good relationship with the Prince (or the Princesse, as the case would be in Florestan’s reign). Honoré had sequestered himself on the Rock, levying higher and higher taxes on the people of Roquebrune and Menton. What they now hoped for was a Prince who would unite the three townships and work for the benefit of all.
Florestan, Caroline, their son Charles and their daughter Florestine arrived in Menton in a magnificent gilded carriage on February 9, 1842, an entry planned and orchestrated by Caroline. People ran out in the streets and crowded around the vehicle to get a good look at their new royal family. The horses were detached from the carriage, which the crowd dragged with their own hands to the governor’s house. Not knowing what to expect, at first Florestan was afraid, for the crowd looked menacing, but when the carriage door was opened for him and he gingerly stepped out, shouts of “Down with monopolies!” and “Long live Florestan!” assailed him.
The people believed he would bring them better days, but their trust was to prove misguided. Caroline took over the ledgers of the Principality as she had done with the family’s concerns in France. In truth, it was she who governed, writing the ordinances and coercing Florestan into signing edicts to raise taxes to even more crippling extremes. No one seems to have pointed out to the new Prince and Princesse de Monaco that reforms were badly needed. Within a matter of weeks it became clear to the Monégasques that the tough times were not over.
Monégasque historian Françoise Bernardy writes in her book The Princes of Monaco (1961): “Another handicap resulted from the characters and opinions of Florestan and his wife. He, born into a princely family, held democratic ideas; while she, becoming a princess after twenty-five years of married life, believed in divine right, and whenever a slice of power was wrenched from her in one sphere, she tried to win it back in another. Moreover for twenty-five years she had been used to holding the reins and having matters left to her by a husband uninterested in politics and disliking financial affairs; and so she quite sincerely believed she was doing her duty by him in not ceding an inch of power or authority, not even to their son.”
Friction immediately began to set in between Princesse Caroline and her son, now a tall, sharp-featured young man of twenty-four with a trim mustache and goatee. Charles was appalled at his mother’s takeover of the Principality’s affairs. Realizing his father was not going to intervene, he took it into his own hands to write his mother a strong letter criticizing her actions and threatening to go to Turin, the capital and the seat of government of the Kingdom of Sardinia, and have the King force Florestan to abdicate in his own favor. On April 3, 1842, Princesse Caroline replied by letter:
You’ve said what you think quite frankly, and I’ll reply in the same way. To begin with, you talk about my capability, and I’ll tell you this, that only one thing counts for me, the strictness with which I conscientiously carry out the obligations and duties I have taken on, and in my opinion that often serves better than intelligence. My duties, as I understand them, are above the ordinary. I was brought up in a simple and modest position and was then chosen by your father to enter one of the highest placed families . . . from that moment my position changed. In spite of my sex, I became head of a family and had to fulfill the obligations attached and get myself forgiven for this preferment.
Your father gave me a good name and fortune, in return I must take care to see his position is maintained and his fortune looked after properly. I owe it to my children, as a compensation for not having brought material advantages into the family, to guard those belonging to their father; I owe it to my son especially to see that he receives intact the inheritance that Providence has placed in his father’s hands, and I owe him the fruits of my experience and my advice—and I will tell him this, that for six months now he has been in error in several instances, though I admit that the fresh prospects opened before him by the death of his uncle may have confused his mind.
[You appear to believe] that the little aptitude your father has for public affairs meant that you could take charge of them without having received your father’s permission to do so; you then took it upon yourself to write to some of the officials, and although the letters are no doubt innocuous, you did not take into consideration that you are weakening your father’s authority, and thereby giving fresh hopes to Sardinia and increasing the people’s uneasiness.
You can imagine that in a very small place where people have been used to the strong will of one person they must have been greatly astonished to see a prince letting himself be manoeuvred, the wife poking her finger into everything, and a son apparently going his own particular way and often lacking in respect and even consideration where they are due. If only to set an example.
I am serving your father’s interests here, which will one day be your own, and it’s not a game, it concerns a whole family’s position. . . . So it is far better that you should have, later on, a solid, well-established authority than to be putting ideas of division or opposition into minds that have been submissive until now, and which you might find yourself up against one day.
Consider the position you put yourself in if you said at Turin that you’re more capable than your father and that you should take his place. I quite believe you don’t want to reach that point; what you would be saying in effect is—I love and respect my mother enough to leave her some of the authority she seems to like so much, but only on condition that she leaves me the rest. Oh no, my young friend, I shall not agree to a deal like that, because my great idea is always to have your father’s rights respected and keep those of my children intact. Having no rights myself, I’m under the cover of your father, who thus returns the fullness of his authority.
I feel in need of a rest after such a long letter, but I’ve still just enough energy to tell you that ever since you were born you have been most dear to me, and the reason for all my efforts, and that until my dying day you’ll be my well-beloved.
No clearer picture of this family could be painted. Caroline’s ambition streaks across the pages, illuminating Florestan’s weakness and her son’s resentment and fury that she has made his father weak. His self-righteousness is a saber of revenge aimed at this mother whom he loves and hates at the same time. Neither mother nor son seems concerned with the Monégasques, or with enriching the life of Monaco. This is a quintessential power struggle between members of an arrogant and, it would seem, greedy family.
Florestan considered himself much put upon. “I am an unfortunate little sovereign, crushed between two big neighbors [France and Sardinia] who only hesitate as to the sauce with which they shall devour me,” he was later quoted as saying. He claimed that as the new Prince de Monaco he had been “bubbling over with ideas of liberty, progress and reforms!” If this had been the case, then Caroline must have quickly quashed his plans for there is no record of any such improvements being implemented at any time in his reign. Instead, his subjects’ economic conditions grew worse and their freedom diminished as embargoes were legislated that prohibited them from selling or buying goods elsewhere.
Florestan blamed not his own callousness but his subjects’ unreasonable attitude toward him for the state of hostility that existed between them. “All my acts are criticized!” he was quoted as saying. “I go for a walk—it is found I idle my time away. I do not go for a walk—I am afraid of showing myself. I give a ball—I am accused of wild extravagance—I do not give a ball—I am mean and avaricious. I build—wastefulness. I do not build—then what about the working classes? Everything I do is proclaimed detestable, and what I do not do gives even greater offence.”
But the Monégasques had little respect for a Prince who was under his wife’s domination and whose son felt he was incapable of ruling. Caroline’s pleas for Charles to desist from his efforts to replace Florestan as Prince de Monaco did not succeed. Charles made the trip to Turin, but what he found was not what he had sought.
The last years of Honoré V’s reign had proved too much for most Monégasques. Many of them, just to earn a living wage, had joined Sardinia’s armed forces and were beginning to think of Sardinia as their homeland. The Chief Magistrate in Turin (in the name of the Sardinian Kingdom) conveyed in very clear terms its willingness to acquire the sovereignty of the Principality for a fair price. The offer to Charles of a rich marriage alliance with a young woman from a Piedmont family close to the King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia was thrown in to sweeten the package.
Caroline was in Paris when she heard of this proposal, and went straight to the offices of the Sardinian ambassador to France. She was quoted in communiqués as having claimed she would rather Monaco go to war against Sardinia than fall meekly under its heel, and threatened to report “the conduct of his agents to the King.” The ambassador was apparently won over, and the offer presented to Charles was quickly withdrawn.
This meant that Charles had to find his own bride, not too difficult a task, for not only would he one day be Prince de Monaco, he was rich and he was not unattractive. Nonetheless, it was not until four years later, on September 28, 1846 (the bride’s eighteenth birthday), that he married, in Brussels, Antoinette, Comtesse de Mérode, a niece of a wealthy and powerful Belgian, Monseigneur de Mérode. Charles and his goldenhaired, youthful wife returned to Monaco where, despite the many problems in the Principality, they were given a warm welcome.
Florestan’s power had greatly diminished in the four years since Charles had made his appeal to Turin to replace him. In Honoré’s reign the commander of the Sardinian garrison in Monaco took his orders from the Prince or his representative. Now he answered dirctly to the King of Sardinia. Princesse Caroline could well have been right when she told the Sardinian ambassador in Paris, “Your King covets our little State.” Sardinian agitators moved among the people of Menton and Roquebrune, and during the winter of 1847 there was a series of riots and threats to overthrow Florestan. The Grimaldis were much alarmed, for the threat of revolution was growing in France, where dissatisfaction with King Louis-Philippe’s reactionary policy led on February 23, 1848, to street fighting in Paris. Government troops fired on demonstrators and the February Revolution was set off. Within a matter of days Louis-Philippe abdicated, Princesse Caroline’s Paris tenant, Alphonse de Lamartine, was made head of the provisional government and the Second Republic was declared in France. The February Revolution set off insurrections across Europe, and Monaco was not exempt.
The discontent in Roquebrune and Menton accelerated. A rebel group of about fifty men formed. After they made a serious but failed attempt to storm the gates of Monaco (which had been locked), Florestan—fearing a larger force if they should try again—agreed to Charles’s meeting with the agitators at Carnolès. On December 12, almost the entire population of the two towns, including the clergy and magistrates, who headed the procession, assembled there. M. Cariés, the curé of the parish church of Menton, implored Charles to exert his influence to obtain some concessions: reform, he said, was vital, a matter of life and death. Details of the people’s poverty were given. Charles promised the reforms demanded in his father’s name. Days passed, but nothing was done beyond a slight modification in some of the taxes.
Florestan and Caroline remained sequestered on the Rock. Finally, to appease the rebels, Florestan issued a charter which under the appearance of liberal reforms preserved his absolute power. The key paragraph read: “The council of state, established for deliberating on the laws and ordinances for general administration, is to be composed of twelve members who have attained thirty years of age. The half of the members are to be nominated by the prince, and the other half by the electors in the following proportions: two by the electors of Monaco, three by those of Menton, and one by those of Roquebrune. Each member of the council to be chosen by the electors of the commune in which he resides.”
What this meant was that Florestan could not only rely on the votes of his six nominees, but could also be assured of the two for Monaco. That left Menton and Roquebrune with only four votes, making it impossible for them to have any influence in the government. The document was a sham, and the people were further aroused by its insolent disregard for their wishes.
Peace was kept by the Sardinian garrison, but Florestan and Caroline were practically besieged in the Palace. A few days later the King of Sardinia offered to purchase the Principality for six million francs. At that crucial moment Charles arrived from Paris.
He had come well armed with a plan; whether or not he had stopped off in Turin on the way to Monaco, as it was rumored, he had already opened negotiations with Sardinia on his own. He could save the Principality for the Grimaldis only if Florestan appointed him administrator with full powers, and his parents remained acquiescent to him for the remainder of their lives. Caroline was furious, but she also feared for her own and Florestan’s lives. But she did not give in until a financial settlement had been negotiated which assured them a comfortable income. This goal was achieved two days later and on March 10, 1848, they signed an agreement with Charles and accompanied by Sardinian soldiers departed Monaco for Paris.
Charles immediately organized a provisional governing body, headed by Charles Trenca. But he could not convince them to remain loyal to Monaco. On March 21, Menton and Roquebrune proclaimed their independence and two months later voted for inclusion in the Kingdom of Sardinia. This did not come to pass because France insisted that treaties made between France and Monaco should be respected by Turin; the King of Sardinia decreed that the towns would be administered by the prevailing laws until a final decision was made.
A year passed, and after several fits and starts it was decided that the towns would pay an indemnity to the Prince of Monaco to compensate him for their annexation. Negotiations were long and filled with proposals and counterproposals that went from Caroline in Paris to Charles in Monaco to Turin and the French envoy there, who happened to be the Duc de Guiche, a distant relative of the Grimaldis. Finally Charles ill-advisedly took matters into his own hands.
At two in the morning on April 6, 1849, he left Nice, where he had stayed the previous night, traveling to Menton in a six-horse carriage—the Grimaldi arms blazoned on the panels and harness and wearing the full-dress uniform of the Principality, accompanied by his doctor, Chevalet, and his aide-de-camp, Lucien Bellando. At six A.M. they arrived at the Hôtel de Turin, on the Place Napoléon, in the center of Menton, on the pretext of changing horses. Charles was at once surrounded and acclaimed by thirty to forty supporters who had been secretly alerted to his coming. They took the horses out of the traces and dragged the carriage to the town hall, waving flags of Grimaldi colors and shouting, “Long live the Prince! Long live the Grimaldis!”
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.
The one bright spot in the year, especially for Charles, had been the withdrawal of the Sardinian troops from Monaco on July 17, 1860, and the return of the Principality to the protectorate of France. Six months later the question of Menton and Roquebrune was at long last settled. After long negotiations that lasted several months, a treaty between France and Monaco was signed on February 2, 1861, by M. Faugère on the part of France and Count Avigdor on the part of the Prince de Monaco. Under the treaty Charles III ceded all his rights over the two towns and their adjoining territories to France on the payment of 4,100,000 francs by France, which also agreed to construct a carriage road from Nice to Monaco, by way of Villefranche and the coast (completed by 1866), and to have the projected railway between Nice and Genoa pass through Monaco (work began in 1866). Charles now endeavored to claim possession of Cap Martin and the olive wood leading from it up to Roquebrune but was unsuccessful.
Charles had lost 80 percent of his Principality, but he was finally solvent. A condition, not publicly revealed until 1918, provided that the Prince de Monaco and his heirs could not transfer or cede any of their sovereign rights over the Principality unless it was to France, nor could they request or accept a protectorate from any other country.
Four million francs appeared to be a grand sum. However, with the loss of the revenues of Menton and Roquebrune, Monaco had no other income. Within five to ten years the Grimaldis’ personal expenses, the houses in Paris and Marchais, Princesse Caroline’s entourage and the salaries of the Palace and the government staffs would considerably whittle down that amount; in twenty years it could be gone. Earnings were needed, and a casino, bathing facilities and transportation that would attract sufficient visitors to ensure a profit-making venture.
Charles’s burden was made heavier when Antoinette, in the fall of 1862, was diagnosed as having cancer. With the onset of his poor sight, Charles seldom left Monaco and had become dependent upon Antoinette, whom he called his “Angel.” And she must have seemed one, for even though mortally ill, she maintained her even temperament and appeared to be more concerned about her husband and her mother-in-law than herself, writing to Charles in Monaco, when she was in the last stages of the disease and had been moved to Marchais in the belief that the country air might help, that he must not allow his aging mother (Caroline was now seventy years old) to take on too much work on his behalf. And she requested that she be allowed to return to Monaco where she could be near to them both. She traveled to her husband’s Principality by coach with a doctor and two maids, dying three months later, on February 10, 1864.
Charles—now blind—had to rely on others. He turned to Princesse Caroline for advice and assistance, and she did not let him down. She knew Lefebvre lacked the vision to transform Monaco into a thriving tourist attraction. Her thoughts turned back to François Blanc, who Adolphe Eynaud had heard was looking for a new enterprise since the closure of the casino at Bad-Homburg following a series of suicides—the direct and tragic result of large gambling losses at his tables. Eynaud met with Blanc but was unable to persuade him to come to Monaco.
Princesse Caroline then made a direct appeal to Madame Blanc, with whom she had become acquainted during her visit many years earlier to Bad-Homburg. Madame Blanc suffered from arthritis, a condition almost unknown in Monaco, Princesse Caroline assured her, because of the glorious winters when one could enjoy the fresh sea air with no more than a shawl about one’s shoulders. Eynaud traveled to Bad-Homburg laden with boxes of prize citrus fruit. Finally, in March 1863, Blanc capitulated and with his attorney, M. Jagot, arrived by boat from Nice at noon on March 31. They departed two days later, Blanc having agreed to pay the Valmy syndicate 1,700,000 francs in three installments to purchase all their rights. With his mother to guide his hand, Charles signed an agreement granting Blanc the privilege of operating for fifty years the Société des Bains de Mer et du Cercle des Étrangers (the last word emphasized Princesse Caroline’s wish that Monégasques not be allowed into the casino). The Prince de Monaco was to receive 50,000 francs a year, plus 10 percent of the net profits, and an additional private allowance of two thousand francs a week (making his total yearly income 154,000 francs plus the percentage of the net profits).
Within a matter of weeks, Monaco was transformed into one massive construction site. Blanc had raised enough money, with the help of James de Rothschild of the Paris-Lyon-Mediterranean Railroad and the Rothschild banking family, to build a casino, roads, hotels and villas. Soil was brought in to cover the bare rock, and trees, shrubs and exotic flowers were planted. Building sites were offered at very low prices and Blanc himself built a handsome villa, encouraging friends from Bad-Homburg to follow his lead.
While this was going on, the old casino was being used, and Blanc chartered fifty stage coaches and a flotilla of steamboats to bring gamblers to Monaco from Nice and Cannes. Despite the poor condition of the road, the casino in its first year of operation under Blanc had 27,872 recorded visitors, and the profits, although still not commensurate with the immense outlay, were 640,000 francs. With the railway line which would travel through the South of France (and eventually to Genoa) soon to reach Monaco, optimism was high on the business prospects of the Principality.
By the end of 1864, a section of the new Casino was operational and the gaming tables were moved in from their former location. The imposing gambling Casino was finished the following year, its rear terrace overlooking the Mediterranean and its grand façade staring up in all its splendor at new, pastel-toned villas.
The Hôtel de Paris, which was being rebuilt and modeled in its decoration and cuisine after the Grand Hôtel in Paris, was not yet opened, but its restaurant was. A gala had been held there on New Year’s Eve, 1864, a harbinger of the grandeur to come. The table silver alone cost 200,000 francs. When the hotel was completed in July 1865, with its spectacular polychromed glass dome and magnificent wrought-iron, marble and crystal details, one Paris newspaper reported that it had been furnished “with the taste of an intelligent millionaire.” The bathing establishment with its beach cabanas situated in the section of Monaco called the Condamine and managed by Dr. Gillebert d’Herbourt, was opened the following November.
Blanc had recruited the finest designers he could obtain. M. André, who was responsible for the Parc Monceau in Paris, was laying out the Casino gardens. On New Year’s Day, 1865, the exotic Salle Mauresque (the gaming room in the Casino), designed by M. Dortrou, the architect of the Palais de l’industrie, opened. And the Casino, the Hôtel de Paris and the newly constructed Café de Paris (with billiard rooms and a spectacular al fresco dining terrace), which occupied three sides of a handsome square, drew gasps of delight when sighted for the first time by new arrivals.
The former fields and mountainsides were rapidly taking on the look of a town. A name was needed. Charleville and Mont Charles after the Prince were suggested. On June 1, 1866, Monte Carlo (Italian for Mont Charles) was chosen in deference to Princesse Caroline, who preferred the name to be foreign-sounding.
The capital of the Société des Bains de Mer at this time was fifteen million francs and there were 30,000 shares issued, of which Blanc held 22,000 and the Prince de Monaco received 400. The remainder went to various investors, including the Rothschilds, who were negotiating the purchase of land for cutting the railway line through the Principality. (Several of the small landowners demanded such exorbitant sums that the railway company threatened to bypass Monaco and the Monégasques were forced into accepting the price they were being offered.) The Prince de Monaco also received an additional 10 percent of all revenues, which included the profits from the gambling Casino, the Hôtel de Paris, the Café de Paris and the Sporting Club, along with their annual payments agreed to in the original contract.
The first of the buildings in the square to be completed had been the Casino. An English travel writer in 1867 described it: “The building is very handsome though plain; there is a reading-room with the periodicals and journals of almost every country; a magnificent ball-room, where an Austrian band plays daily from two to four, and from eight to ten. Balls are given occasionally as well as concerts and theatricals. The grounds are delightful; the terrace alone is worth going to see. People need not set their foot inside the gambling room. This last spring an order was issued forbidding any of the inhabitants of [Monaco] from entering it,2 much to their indignation, and they endeavored to force their way in; but the gendarmes appeared, and, after a harmless scuffle, they were forced to submit to the imperial decree. They are at liberty, however, to enjoy and share in all the amusements consequent on the existence of a Casino. It [the Casino] may be very immoral, very wrong, and lead to the destruction of many; but it certainly renders the place most attractive. . . .”
He adds that the Monégasques “are neither rich nor poor. Poverty, as we understand it in England, does not exist in this part of the world at all. . . [the people] are well clothed, well shod, and well fed. Hardly anyone exists that does not possess their own little plot of land. . . . Society—there is none; a few retired officers, and those who surround the prince and his family, compose the better class. Little hospitality is dispensed at the palace on account of the affliction [blindness] which Charles III suffers.”
Monte Carlo was fast becoming a chic resort as well as a place to gamble. Rich and titled men from England, Russia and the Continent came with their mistresses or their wives (often both); and so the finest in jewels, gowns and flowers had to be available, the food and wines superlative, the orchestras that played for gala parties and the bands that performed in the square conducted by well-known musicians. New, stylish uniforms were designed for the gendarmerie. The sea-bathing facilities were now on a par with those of Nice and Cannes.
The Principality’s new, sophisticated town had made Monaco—that is, the Rock, appear to be a bit of an oddity. “Monaco, now the capital of itself . . . is a little town with clean and straightly-built streets,” an English travel writer for the London Times explained. “It stands on a projecting rock, 300 feet above the level of the sea, commanding magnificent views. . . . There is little of interest in the town itself beyond a few dark churches and the palace. . . . The court [of the Palais Princier, as the Palace was called] is very fine, and is entirely enclosed. On the left, on entering it, is a magnificent double staircase of white marble, by which a gallery is gained, and from thence one reaches the reception rooms. On the right of the court are some very fine frescoes [which had been restored the previous year] by Caravaggio . . . some of the apartments of the palace are really magnificently decorated, especially the one called La grande salle Grimaldi; the frescoes on the walls, and the ceiling, which is thirty feet in height, are executed by Horace de Ferrari; the chimney piece in this room, which is of an enormous size, is one solid piece of marble. . . . The room in which the Duke of York died is very handsomely furnished in crimson satin and gold; the ceiling is also beautifully painted. The other apartments have nothing remarkable in them.” He also noted that none of the paintings were “of any real worth” but that the climate, “although not as warm as Menton,” was nonetheless “exceptional.”
“I have seen the whole army of Monaco on parade in the Palace courtyard,” a reporter from the London Daily News snidely wrote in 1871. “It consists of a sergeant, a corporal and a half-a-dozen men.”
Travel writers—despite scathing accusations and carping tones—were now writing about the Principality. Articles appeared in England, France and Germany. Monte Carlo had become the scandalous star of the Riviera.
A journalist from the Athenaeum noted “the constant passage through Nice of the very scum of European society on the way to and from the Monte Carlo Casino.” And the Daily Telegraph claimed that “a few Russians—the most reckless gamblers in the world—constitute the élite of Monaco society. To be a Russian count, or better still a countess, is to have the homage of every croupier. Waiters fawn . . . officials salute . . . they have the best seats, the most perfect facilities for ruining themselves luxuriously. . . . Next in importance to the Russians, but separated by a long interval, come the English and Americans, the latter being held in higher esteem [for] they generally play for high stakes and they lose without grumbling. The true melodramatic gambler is either French or Italian [who] comes to Monaco to work out his destiny. He has a dream that he will ruin Blanc, and he has parted with all conscientious scruples. . . . He cannot attempt to rival Russian stolidity, or American recklessness. His whole soul goes for the fortunes of the game.”
Monaco’s winter guests included, along with the fortune hunters, compulsive gamblers and confidence tricksters, Russian princes, French barons, English dukes and American millionaires. The season began on New Year’s Eve; throughout the next few months the cognoscenti dined at the sumptuous table d’hôte of the Hôtel de Paris in a salon with a gold-traced vaulted ceiling and decorated with exquisite frescoes, one of Belle France in tricolor and crown driving a team of four magnificent white horses. The salon also contained marble pillars, goldenwinged serpents over the entrance and chandeliers that each held over a hundred candles. Monte Carlo came vividly to life at night when the lamps of the square and the Casino were lighted, and the gas jets glittered “like a chain of gold girding the grey rock.” The sea gleamed “molten silver” from the rear terrace of the Casino; and on bright, moonlit nights one dark headland after another, stretching for more than twenty miles eastward, could be seen while the breeze carried the sound of the band playing Viennese waltzes in the square.
The romantic scenery, the chic ambience and the warm winter nights added to Monte Carlo’s great attraction. However, the Casino was the flame that drew the society moths. The odds at the tables were six to four in favor of the house, but there were stories of fantastic wins. A Russian countess had confounded the croupiers by amassing immense sums daily for a fortnight. Her prodigious winnings so increased the number of players at the gaming tables, who lost even larger amounts, that there were rumors of the lady being a shill for the Casino.
Such gossip, along with tales of men who had lost their fortunes and jumped to their deaths from the terrace of the Casino, did not deter the growing hordes of visitors, many of whom were now arriving by the railway line that had opened on October 19, 1868. François Blanc had brought great prosperity to Monaco and money back into the hands of the Grimaldis, but this new affluence did not comfort the sightless, widowed Charles, whose condition and loneliness made him a bitter, reclusive man.
Money problems finally solved, Princesse Caroline brought her widowed daughter, Florestine, Duchess of Urach, to care for her brother, Charles. Princesse Caroline had one more driving ambition: to see her tall, attractive and intelligent grandson, Albert, fulfill his mother’s hopes for him and marry a member of Queen Victoria’s family. Two years earlier, she had attempted, through the Empress Eugénie, to introduce Albert’s name to Victoria as a projected husband for her cousin, Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, fifteen years his senior and of a hefty physique. Albert had not been considered a viable suitor and the Queen’s cousin had married the Duke of Teck. This rebuff had not diminished Princesse Caroline’s ambitions to ally the Grimaldis with the English royal family.
Footnotes
1The Empress Josephine (1763–1814) was born Marie Joséphine Rose Tascher de La Pagerie in Martinique. She married Alexandre de Beauharnais (an ancestor of a future Princesse de Monaco, Lady Mary Douglas-Hamilton, wife of Albert I). Two children were born to this union: Eugène (later Viceroy of Italy) and Hortense (later Queen of Holland). Beauharnais was guillotined in 1794. Josephine married Napoleon in 1796. The marriage was annulled in 1809 on the grounds of her infertility and Napoleon married Marie Louise, daughter of the Austrian Emperor Francis I.
2His son was recognized by Honoré and on November 28, 1814, was legalized as Louis-Gabriel-Oscar Grimaldi, Marquis des Beaux (1814–1894). A letter to Charles III (Florestan’s son) dated March 17, 1870, alludes to a legacy of 300,000 francs from the Marquise d’Herecy to the Marquis des Beaux. The Herecys were a Normandy family, and the Marquise was the wife of Honoré’s closest childhood friend.
3Alexandre Dumas, père, published an account of this meeting twenty-five years later which so enraged Honoré V (Honoré-Gabriel) that he demanded a retraction, informing Dumas: “Sir, I have a painful duty to perform . . . but the conversation you give as having taken place between the Emperor and myself is a travesty of the truth. He did not keep saying to me: ‘Good morning, Monaco,’ he never asked me to follow him, and I did not reply that I awaited his orders.” In fact, the day following his meeting with Napoleon, Honoré V had dispatched a letter to the French minister for war, Marshal Soult, giving a detailed report of the encounter.
4Sardinia was the name given to the possessions of the House of Savoy. The Kingdom included Piedmont (northwest Italy), Nice, Liguria and Genoa.
5Florestan’s stage career was later written about in Memoirs of a Paris Doctor, by P. de La Silboutie (Paris, 1911). French singer, writer and composer Sacha Guitry wrote an operetta, Florestan I, Prince de Monaco (music by W. R. Haymann, lyrics by Albert Willemetz) in 1936 which enjoyed a successful season in Paris. Both the book and the operetta portray Florestan as a vain young man. The latter continues his story into his reign in Monaco.
1The last of the land in Normandy, together with the former Matignon home, had gone to Oscar Grimaldi, the natural son of Honoré V upon his father’s death. Charles tried unsuccessfully to buy it back.
2Monaco had a population of approximately 1,200 at the time. Within three years, there were 6,000 residents as tourists from England and the Continent built homes.