Monte Carlo croupiers watching for the arrival of players (from a contemporary drawing).
The famous Casino de Monte-Carlo stands on a hill overlooking the principality’s small harbour, where millionaires’ yachts line the quayside. The building itself is white in colour and in the midday sun it shines out against the blue Mediterranean beyond and the lush green of the surrounding gardens, where orange trees, palms, eucalyptus and jasmine grow. The casino, with its faux bell towers, sweeping balustrades and statuary, is unique in appearance. Influenced by Italian architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it could easily be mistaken for a glittering European palace, an embassy, or some important religious building.
In 1891, summer was the off-season in Monte Carlo. Between May and August the heat was unbearable – especially for the overdressed Victorians. And while the principality already had an enviable reputation as a station balnéaire, or sea-bathing resort, sunbathing was unknown in the 1890s: indeed, the very idea of baring one’s flesh in public would have been unthinkable.
Consequently few people were around just before noon on 28 July 1891, when Charles Deville Wells trotted across the Place du Casino, and up the steps leading to the entrance. Two commissionaires with gleaming brass buttons on their uniforms observed him as he passed. They had seen hundreds of thousands of gamblers before, and prided themselves on being able to ascertain each person’s nationality, social status and approximate wealth with a single glance. At this early hour Charles was probably the first client to enter the building. The fact that he was there at all in July marked him out as a person of indeterminate breeding, an eccentric or an Englishman – or possibly all three. Besides, it was bad form to walk into the casino on the stroke of midday. Respectable people would not dream of visiting during the day, and preferably would only go there in the late evening after dinner and perhaps a visit to the theatre.
These considerations did not trouble Charles Wells in the slightest. He had a strategy, the result of much deliberation on his part, and intended to follow it through. His plan required him to play for the longest possible time without interruption and this, in turn, demanded as early a start as possible.
He entered an interior ‘as gorgeous as money and art can make it’, crossed the gleaming floor of the atrium with its twenty-eight iconic pillars made of marble and stepped into the Salle Mauresque, the Moorish Room, with its eastern flavoured decor and its five gaming tables. It was a room to rival the Palace of Versailles, a ‘dazzling place’, as the author Mark Twain remembered, with walls which seemed to be ‘papered with mirrors’. Five magnificent chandeliers, fitted with the astonishing new electric lamps, hung from the gilded ceiling. The walls of the salon were decorated with pastoral scenes, and with bas-reliefs of the female form, all set among velvet drapes, classical columns and ornate carvings of chocolate-coloured wood.
The thick piled carpet deadens Charles Wells’ footsteps as he crosses to one of the roulette tables, selects a chair, and sinks into the velvet covered cushion.
The roulette tables of the era are about 16ft in length and 6ft wide, with a narrower ‘waist’ in the middle, where the highly polished roulette wheel is mounted (Plate 7). Two croupiers sit on each side of the table in the central position, nearest to the wheel, where they can rake in the losses and pay out the winnings. Another croupier is stationed at each end to keep an eye on the game and prevent cheating. Finally, in charge of the table, the chef de partie, or supervisor, with overall responsibility for the team, sits in a raised position behind the croupiers. The players occupy a row of chairs along either side.
As Wells takes his seat the croupiers eye him with the silent disdain of a waiter who spots a customer using the wrong fork. The game of roulette begins, and the croupier says in an expressionless voice, ‘Faites vos jeux, messieurs [Place your bets, gentlemen]’. (Women may play, but their presence is never acknowledged by the croupier.)
Charles takes several louis – small gold coins worth 20fr. – and places them carefully on the numbered squares marked on the green baize of the roulette table. Chips are not used: all bets must be made in cash – either gold louis or banknotes.1
The croupier reaches for the handle at the centre of the roulette wheel and, with a little flourish, gives it a spin. He takes the small, white ivory ball and expertly throws it in the opposite direction to that of the wheel – or cylindre, as the croupiers always call it. The wheel begins, almost imperceptibly, to slow. In a firm voice the croupier says, ‘Les jeux sont faits [The bets have been placed]’. And, as if responding to his words, the white ball begins its downward spiral. ‘Rien ne va plus [No more bets will be accepted]’. With a faint rattling sound the ball meshes with the wheel, finally settling into one of the numbered pockets. The whole cycle takes about sixty seconds, and will be repeated over and over again by the time the casino closes late that night.
The stake money of £4,000 that Charles had managed to amass fell short of the £6,000 that he had reckoned to be ideal. But circumstances had forced him to compromise. And he proceeded to bet ‘with a recklessness that suggested a mad millionaire endeavouring to get rid of his capital’. Within a short time, the banknotes piled in front of him on the table were evidence that, whatever method he was using, it was working so far.
People seemed to appear from nowhere. The casino – empty a short time earlier – was suddenly teeming with humanity. With a murmur here, a whisper there, finally an outbreak of animated chatter, a crowd formed around Wells’ table to observe this unassuming little man with the bald head and dark moustache and beard. The seats around the table, beside and opposite Wells, were all occupied now. Standing behind them, sometimes on tiptoe, sometimes squeezing forward for a better view, a crowd of onlookers grew steadily. From the back it was hard to see what was going on and even harder to participate in the play: and so the spectators jostled and shoved one another in an undignified mêlée as they tried to get closer.
‘The worst thing was the greed that his success aroused in the other guests,’ said the chef de partie, a man named Bertollini:
They crowded round his table, eight ranks deep, and all wanted to play the same numbers he did … I could do nothing else but limit the number of players at the table. That led to new violent clashes with persons who thought I was afraid they might win too much.
Since all stakes had to be in cash, it could be hard at busy periods for even the most experienced croupier to be sure where each player had placed a bet. But this was no ordinary busy period: it was a near riot. Dozens of people pushed and shoved to put their money on the same squares that Wells had chosen, or called on the bewildered croupier to ‘do the same as this monsieur’. Amid the mayhem it was soon impossible to tell who had won what.
For hour after hour Wells played on despite the hubbub, coolly following the strategy he had worked out over the preceding months. For many of the other patrons, the heat in the salle became oppressive, the air fetid and unbreathable. But where others had to go outside for a breath of fresh air, or to refresh themselves with something to eat or drink, Wells never left his seat.
Camille Blanc sensed that something out of the ordinary was taking place. The distinguished looking 45-year-old had, for the past ten years, been chief director of the company that owned and operated the casino. He could feel any tiny fluctuation in the pulse of the business as surely as a sea captain can discern the slightest alteration in the sound of his ship’s engines. From a small room overlooking the gaming hall, he often watched the play in progress through a peephole concealed among the mirrors and gilded carvings. Unseen by the clients and his staff, he spent hours here watching the ebb and flow of thousands of francs being won and lost. An immense crowd had gathered around just one table. It was hard to see quite what was going on, but at the centre of all the activity was a rather ordinary looking man, who appeared to be the only one in the room who was not in a frenzied state of agitation.
It was nearly thirty years earlier that Camille’s father, François Blanc, had rescued the casino from bankruptcy and turned it into the multi-million franc business it had become. As young men, François Blanc and his twin brother, Louis, had frequented the gambling dens of 1830s Paris, before realising that it was not the players who made the most money, however lucky or skilful they might be: it was the organiser of the games who won in the long run. The twins were resourceful young men. ‘If we cannot earn a good living as gamblers we shall start our own casino,’ they agreed.
Their first difficulty was a lack of capital, and they overcame this hurdle in an inventive way that Charles Wells would have been proud of. They discovered that news of fluctuations in the price of shares on the Paris stock market could take as long as twenty-four hours to reach a city on the other side of the country, such as Bordeaux, 310 miles to the south-west. This was, of course, long before the introduction of telegrams and telephones.
Suppose a stock increased in value by 10 per cent in Paris. If the brothers could immediately buy shares at the old price in Bordeaux, they had only to wait a few hours to resell them at a significant profit. But how could this be achieved?
They soon realised that the French government had a system for communicating information very quickly. Messages of national importance could be sent all over the country by means of visual semaphore signals relayed from one hilltop station to another. The only difficulty as far as the Blanc brothers were concerned was that this network was strictly reserved for official business only. So they bribed government employees to transmit their coded messages for them. The escapade succeeded and in a short time they had increased their small capital to 100,000fr. (£400,000).
It was only when one of their accomplices fell gravely ill and made a deathbed confession that the scheme fell apart. The Blanc brothers were eventually both found guilty of corrupting government employees, but when the court gave its verdict it must have seemed as if the telegraph employees were not the only ones to have been bribed. Instead of receiving a stiff sentence the brothers were merely ordered to pay the court costs and were then set free.
Gambling had been outlawed in almost every European country. But with the capital he had earned from the share swindle, François Blanc set up a casino in Bad Homburg, a small, self-governing enclave in what is now Germany. Blanc split the profits with Count Ludwig, the head of state, and a mutually profitable business partnership was born. Well-heeled visitors flocked to the tiny domain in the hope of gaining dizzying sums of money. But the only real winners, most of the time, were François Blanc and the count.
Although the laws of chance dictated that the casino would always be the overall winner, there were some visitors who enjoyed spectacular gains. Prince Charles Lucien Bonaparte – the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte – made the journey to Bad Homburg in 1852 and was so successful at the tables that he nearly bankrupted the casino. He sensibly left with the cash he had won, instead of being tempted to play on and possibly lose it all again. In 1860 a Spaniard named Tomás Garcia was a consistent winner, and profited to the tune of 800,000fr. (about £3 million). Although these impressive wins temporarily dented Blanc’s profits, he came to the realisation that the publicity attracted many more gamblers to his casino and, on balance, this more than compensated for the bank’s short-term loss.
At the start of each day every gaming table was provided with a cash reserve or ‘bank’. From time to time a gambler might have such a large win that this money was insufficient to pay out all of the winnings, and when this happened extra cash had to be sent for from the casino’s vaults. This is what is known as ‘breaking the bank’.
Blanc invented a ceremony which was enacted by casino staff when the bank was broken. The table in question was temporarily closed down and, with all the pomp of a state funeral, a black crêpe cloth was spread over it. Play was suspended while more cash was brought in from the reserves. During this ritual, the patrons would generally drift away to play at other tables. And then, after a decent interval, the table would reopen.
François Blanc prospered, and so did the ruler of Bad Homburg. Indeed, the whole principality received a welcome boost from its share of the casino profits. This cosy arrangement lasted until 1866, when the enclave was about to be absorbed into the Prussian Empire. As gambling was illegal in the rest of Germany, the days of the Homburg Casino were numbered. But as luck would have it – and Blanc had always been a very lucky man – an opportunity in the tiny principality of Monaco presented itself at just that moment. A casino had opened there as early as 1856, but it had failed to take off because Monaco was not yet served by the railways, and was simply too out of the way for most tourists. Between 15 and 20 March 1857, ‘only one visitor entered the casino, where he won two francs! On the 21st two more arrived, and lost two hundred and five francs.’ Business was so slack that the croupiers would stand around outside the building, taking it in turns to peer through a telescope and try to spot any visitor who might be coming down the road.
After a long struggle the original promoters became insolvent. The prince – who also teetered on the edge of bankruptcy – searched for someone who could turn the failing enterprise around. He contacted François Blanc and they signed a binding agreement in April 1863, giving Blanc the exclusive right to run the casino for fifty years. In return, Blanc was to pay an annual sum of 250,000fr. (£1 million) to the royal household. The casino would also meet all of the public expenses of the principality, maintaining its small army, its roads, schools, hospitals and police. Thus the prince would henceforth enjoy a rich lifestyle, and the people of Monaco would never again have to pay any taxes.
In order to downplay the gambling aspect, which many people regarded with disdain, François Blanc set up a holding company to run the casino, and euphemistically named it the Société des Bains de Mer (Sea-Bathing Company). Blanc and his family owned nearly all of the shares in this body.
Under Blanc’s management the business went from near collapse to unprecedented success. In fact, his wealth reached such huge proportions that on one occasion he bailed out the French government when it was short of funds. The project in question was Charles Garnier’s opera house in Paris. Work had begun in 1862, but it had ground to a halt during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and the partly completed building was temporarily used as a warehouse, a hospital and then a barracks. Instead of the elegant theatre of Garnier’s dreams, the unfinished structure became a blot on the landscape for several years. Garnier feared that his association with the ill-fated venture might end his career.
François Blanc was the kind of man who knows that money can buy anything – including respectability. He also recognised the cachet to be gained by being associated with such a prestigious cultural project. Blanc offered to lend the government some 5 million francs to finish the opera house. In return, the state was to repay the loan with interest – at an exceptionally high rate of 6 per cent. A further condition imposed by Blanc was that a railway was to be constructed to connect Monaco with the French transport network.
Paris got its opera; Blanc finally got a rail link which enabled far more clients to visit his casino than ever before; and Garnier was so grateful that he publicly declared his indebtedness to François Blanc. So when Blanc asked Garnier to design a new concert hall to be built next to the casino, the architect could hardly refuse.2 The theatre opened in 1879, and the greatest French actress of the era, Sarah Bernhardt, recited a specially written monologue as part of the inaugural ceremony.
With one foot now firmly planted on the ladder of French society, Blanc consolidated his position by arranging for his elder daughter, Louise, to marry into a distinguished but cash-strapped family. She became the wife of Prince Constantin Radziwill, whose family were Polish exiles.
His second daughter, Marie, married Prince Roland Bonaparte – a great-nephew of the former Emperor Napoleon. She died in childbirth the year after, but the child lived. Thus François Blanc’s grandson was born a royal. But Blanc did not live to see it. He had died three years earlier. He left a fortune of 88 million francs (about £300 million), and on his deathbed he bemoaned the fact that he had not been able to leave more money to his family. His widow took over the casino for a few years until her death in 1881, and then his two sons, Camille and Edmond, inherited the business. The company was now restructured so that its capital was 30 million francs, and the Blanc family owned no less than 87 per cent of the shares.
At the time of Charles Wells’ 1891 visit to Monte Carlo, the casino there was the only place in Europe where gambling was still permitted. The contract between the Blanc family and the Prince of Monaco was as good as a licence to print money. But, as Camille Blanc was well aware, the casino had many enemies, and its survival could never be taken for granted.
Nineteenth-century society, with its strict morals, considered betting to be a vice, on a par with sexual impropriety and drunkenness. It was believed that temptations such as these, if left unchecked, would lead the working classes into a life of sin and erode the moral fibre of the nation. Newspapers such as The Times frequently referred to the Monte Carlo Casino as a ‘blot on civilisation’, a ‘plague spot’ and a ‘gambling hell’. The Vatican and the Church of England organised petitions demanding the closure of the gaming salons, and at various times the British, French and United States governments had expressed their disapproval in the strongest terms (though it has to be said that none of these protests had so far had any effect in practice). Still, the casino remained a popular destination for some well-known pillars of society, including Baron Rothschild, Lord Randolph Churchill (father of Winston), Sir Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) and W.H. Smith (bookseller, MP and philanthropist).
These opposing viewpoints are perhaps best illustrated by the example of the royal family. Queen Victoria herself thought that the casino was an abomination. When she visited the principality in 1882 she wrote in her journal, ‘The harm this attractive gambling establishment does, cannot be overestimated. The old Prince of Monaco, derives his income from it & therefore does not wish to stop it, though efforts are being made to do so.’ But the efforts were always in vain. And, although the queen disapproved of gambling, her eldest son, Bertie (later King Edward VII), frequently travelled to Monte Carlo, where he was a popular guest at the casino. However, only a few weeks before Wells attained Monte Carlo fame, Bertie had received scathing criticism in the press for gambling with a group of aristocrats in London.
The British newspapers constantly reported on gamblers who, having lost all of their money, finished up in the bankruptcy courts. Or those who, seeing no hope, had committed suicide. The Times claimed:
Another victim of Monte Carlo is now lying at the hospital of the Principality. A young man … lost all his money at the tables, and as he went through the hall attempted to blow his brains out with a revolver, but the bullet passed through his cheek and lodged in his palate. He is in a critical condition.
When Sarah Bernhardt appeared again some years after her Monte Carlo debut, she gambled away most of her fortune, until one evening she was down to her last 100,000fr. In a final attempt to recoup her losses she staked this money, too, only to lose every centime within three hours. She took an overdose of a sleeping powder in her room at the Hôtel de Paris, where she would have died if she had not been saved by a friend, a wealthy duke. He subsequently lent her enough to clear her 300,000fr. debt.
To keep scandals like these out of the press, the casino allotted a minimum of £10,000 (£1 million) each year for what it coyly termed ‘publicity’. This was, in fact, the hush money paid to newspaper editors to turn a blind eye to the more unsavoury aspects of the casino’s affairs, a practice which had been going on for years.
But lately a shadow had fallen over the very existence of the casino, and this new threat seemed alarmingly real. Two years previously, in 1889, Prince Charles III of Monaco, the ruler who had first made a pact with François Blanc, had died, and was succeeded by his son, Albert. Camille Blanc expressed his condolences by sending wreaths to be placed upon the late prince’s coffin. But Albert returned the flowers with neither comment nor explanation. As far as Camille Blanc was concerned, it was hardly an auspicious start to the new prince’s reign. Albert despised the casino, and resented the influence its money-grabbing owners had exerted over his late father and the state in general. And the fact that most of his own personal income was derived from other people’s losses at the tables troubled his conscience. He allegedly said, ‘I’d shut it up tomorrow. I hate the corruptions of it … I loathe the place.’3
Within weeks of becoming the ruler of Monaco, Albert had married American-born Alice Heine, a woman possessed of an immense fortune and considerable business acumen. With her wealth at his disposal, Albert was no longer dependent on the money being paid to him by Blanc. Would the prince break the contract their fathers had signed over a quarter of a century earlier, and have the casino shut down? It was a question that undoubtedly gave Camille Blanc sleepless nights.
Camille looked down through the spyhole on to the gaming tables in the room below. The ordinary-looking man was still winning. But Blanc was not at all concerned. As Blanc’s father used to say, ‘He who breaks the bank today will most surely return tomorrow and let the bank break him.’
By eleven o’clock in the evening – closing time at the casino – Charles Wells had broken the bank. In one day he had transformed the £4,000 he had brought with him into £10,000 (£1 million). He left with his winnings, felt the cool breeze on his face and breathed in the evening air, laden with the scent of oleanders, tangerine trees and other fragrant plants in the casino gardens – a welcome change from the stuffy, ill-ventilated gaming halls.
In the morning Wells went to Smith’s Bank – a British-owned establishment at the Galerie Charles III, overlooking the casino gardens – to transfer the previous night’s proceeds to his own bank in London. He went to the casino again at opening time, and sat at the tables until late at night, never taking a break, never pausing for food or drink. And this was his routine for the next few days. By the end of his five-day stay he claimed to have won no less than £40,000 (£4 million).
As he was packing his bags before leaving, a report was on its way, via Reuter’s News Agency, to newspapers around the world. It claimed that the casino would be finally closing its doors the next year. Prince Albert had decided to renounce his annual ‘salary’ of £50,000 (£5 million). And Blanc would be forced to make other arrangements:
The owners of the gaming tables have offered Prince Jean, of Liechtenstein … the sum of ten million francs for permission to establish gaming tables at Vaduz, the capital of the principality … The Princess has induced her husband to convert the [casino] building into a Free Consumptive Hospital.
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1 At the time, tokens – or ‘chips’ – had been tried experimentally, but it was found that they were too easy to counterfeit. By the time of Wells’ visit, the casino had gone back to using cash only. Today, each gambler is issued with chips of a different colour or pattern to help the croupier to distinguish where each player has placed his or her stake.
2 Garnier was also responsible for some subsequent alterations and additions to the gaming rooms in the casino itself.
3 Ironically it was Albert who, as a 10-year-old boy, had laid the foundation stone of the original casino in May 1858. (Smith, A., p.302.)