NOT having as yet been in the Cirque privé at Monte Carlo, I was perhaps unduly impressed by the splendor of the rooms devoted to gambling in this amazingly large casino. There were eight hundred or a thousand people all in evening clothes, who had paid a heavy price for the mere privilege of entering, and were now gathered about handsome green-covered mahogany tables under glittering and ornate electroliers, playing a variety of carefully devised gambling games with a fervor that at times makes martyrs in other causes. To a humble-minded American person like myself, unused to the high world of fashion, this spectacle was, to say the least, an interesting one. Here were a dozen nationalities represented by men and women whose hands were manicured to perfection, whose toilets were all that a high social occasion might require, their faces showing in every instance a keen understanding of their world and how it works. Here in Nice, if you walk away from these centers of social perfection, where health and beauty and sophistication and money abound, the vast run of citizens are as poverty-stricken as any; but this collection of nobility and gentry, of millionaires, adventurers, intellectual prostitutes and savage beauties is recruited from all over the world. I hold that is something to see.
The tables were fairly swarming with a fascinating throng all very much alike in their attitude and their love of the game, but still individual and interesting. I venture to say that any one of the people I saw in this room, if you saw him in a crowd on the street, would take your attention. A native force and self-sufficiency went with each one. I wondered constantly where they all came from. It takes money to come to the Riviera; it takes money to buy your way into any gambling-room. It takes money to gamble; and what is more it takes a certain amount of self-assurance and individual selection to come here at all. By your mere presence you are putting yourself in contact and contrast with a notable standard of social achievement. Your intellectuality, your ability to take care of yourself, your breeding and your subtlety are at once challenged—not consciously, but unconsciously. Do you really belong here? the eyes of the attendants ask you as you pass. And the glitter and color and life and beauty of the room is a constant challenge.
It did not surprise me in the least that all these men and women in their health and attractiveness carried themselves with cynical, almost sneering hauteur. They might well do so—as the world judges these material things—for they are certainly far removed from the rank and file of the streets; and to see them extracting from their purses and their pockets handfuls of gold, unfolding layers of crisp notes that represented a thousand francs each, and with an almost indifferent air laying them on their favorite numbers or combinations was to my unaccustomed eye a gripping experience. Yet I was not interested in gambling—only in the people who played.
I know that to the denizens of this world who are fascinated by chance and find their amusement in such playing, this atmosphere is commonplace. It was not so to me. I watched the women—particularly the beautiful women—who strolled about the chambers with their escorts solely to show off their fine clothes. You see a certain type of youth here who seems to be experienced in this gay world that drifts from one resort to another, for you hear such phrases as “Oh, yes, I saw her at Aix-les-Bains,” or, “She was at Karlsbad last summer.” “Is that the same fellow she was with last year? I thought she was living with —” (this of a second individual). “My heaven, how well she keeps up!” or, “This must be her first season here—I have never seen her before.” Two or three of these young bloods would follow a woman all around the rooms, watching her, admiring her beauty quite as a horseman might examine the fine points of a horse. And all the while you could see that she was keenly aware of the critical fire of these eyes.
“My heaven, how well she keeps up!”
At the tables was another type of woman whom I had first casually noticed at Monte Carlo, a not too good looking, rather practical, and perhaps disillusioned type of woman—usually inclined to stoutness, as is so often the case with women of indolent habits and no temperament—although, now that I think of it, I have the feeling that neither illusion nor disillusion have ever played much part in the lives of such as these. They looked to me like women who, from their youth up, had taken life with a grain of salt and who had never been carried away by anything much—neither love, nor fashion, nor children, nor ambition. Perhaps their keenest interest had always been money—the having and holding of it. And here they sat—not good-looking, not apparently magnetic—interested in chance, and very likely winning and losing by turns, their principal purpose being, I fancy, to avoid the dullness and monotony of an existence which they are not anxious to endure. I heard one or two derogatory comments on women of this type while I was abroad; but I cannot say that they did more than appeal to my sympathies. Supposing, to look at it from another point of view, you were a woman of forty-five or fifty. You have no family—nothing to hold you, perhaps, but a collection of dreary relatives, or the ennui of a conventional neighborhood with prejudices that are wearisome to your sense of liberty and freedom. If by any chance you have money, here on the Riviera is your resource. You can live in a wonderful climate of sun and blue water; you can see nature clad in her daintiest raiment the year round; you can see fashion and cosmopolitan types and exchange the gossip of all the world; you can go to really excellent restaurants—the best that Europe provides; and for leisure, from ten o’clock in the morning until four or five o’clock the next morning, you can gamble if you choose, gamble silently, indifferently, without hindrance as long as your means endure.
If you are of a mathematical or calculating turn of mind you can amuse yourself infinitely by attempting to solve the strange puzzle of chance—how numbers fall and why. It leads off at last, I know, into the abstrusities of chemistry and physics. The esoteric realms of the mystical are not more subtle than the strange abnormalities of psychology that are here indulged in. Certain people are supposed to have a chemical and physical attraction for numbers or cards. Dreams are of great importance. It is bad to sit by a losing person, good to sit by a winning one. Every conceivable eccentricity of thought in relation to personality is here indulged in; and when all is said and done, in spite of the wonders of their cobwebby calculations, it comes to about the same old thing—they win and lose, win and lose, win and lose.
Now and then some interesting personality—stranger, youth, celebrity, or other—wins heavily or loses heavily; in which case, if he plunges fiercely on, his table will be surrounded by a curious throng, their heads craning over each other’s shoulders, while he piles his gold on his combinations. Such a man or woman for the time being becomes an intensely dramatic figure. He is aware of the audacity of the thing he is doing, and he moves with conscious gestures—the manner of a grand seigneur. I saw one such later—in the Cirque privé at Monte Carlo—a red-bearded man of fifty—tall, intense, graceful. It was rumored that he was a prince out of Russia—almost any one can be a prince out of Russia at Monte Carlo! He had stacks of gold and he distributed it with a lavish hand. He piled it in little golden towers over a score of numbers; and when his numbers fell wrong his towers fell with them, and the croupier raked great masses of metal into his basket. There was not the slightest indication on his pale impassive face that the loss or the gain was of the slightest interest to him. He handed crisp bills to the clerk in charge of the bank and received more gold to play his numbers. When he wearied, after a dozen failures—a breathing throng watching him with moist lips and damp, eager eyes—he rose and strolled forth to another chamber, rolling a cigarette as he went. He had lost thousands and thousands.
The next morning it was lovely and sunshiny again. Sitting out on my balcony high over the surrounding land, commanding as it did all of Monte Carlo, the bay of Mentone and Cap Martin, I made many solemn resolutions. This gay life here was meretricious and artificial, I decided. Gambling was a vice, in spite of Sir Scorp’s lofty predilection for it; it drew to and around it the allied viciousness of the world, gormandizing, harlotry, wastefulness, vain-glory. I resolved here in the cool morning that I would reform. I would see something of the surrounding country and then leave for Italy where I would forget all this.
I started out with Barfleur about ten to see the Oceanographical Museum and to lunch at the Princess, but the day did not work out exactly as we planned. We visited the Oceanographical Museum; but I found it amazingly dull—the sort of a thing a prince making his money out of gambling would endow. It may have vast scientific ramifications, but I doubt it. A meager collection of insects and dried specimens quickly gave me a headache. The only case that really interested me was the one containing a half-dozen octopi of large size. I stood transfixed before their bulbous centers and dull, muddy, bronze-green arms, studded with suckers. I can imagine nothing so horrible as to be seized upon by one of these things, and I fairly shivered as I stood in front of the case. Barfleur contemplated solemnly the possibility of his being attacked by one of them, monocle and all. He foresaw a swift end to his career.
We came out into the sunlight and viewed with relief, by contrast with the dull museum, the very new and commonplace cathedral—oh, exceedingly poorly executed—and the castle or palace or residence of His Highness, the Prince of Monaco. I cannot imagine why Europe tolerates this man with his fine gambling privileges unless it is that the different governments look with opposition on the thought of any other government having so fine a source of wealth. France should have it by rights; and it would be suitable that the French temperament should conduct such an institution. The palace of the Prince of Monaco was as dull as his church and his museum; and the Monacoan Army drawn up in front of his residence for their morning exercise looked like a company of third-rate French policemen.
However I secured as fine an impression of the beauty of Monaco and the whole coast from this height, as I received at any time during my stay; for it is like the jewel of a ring projecting out of the sea. You climb up to the Oceanographical Museum and the palace by a series of stairways and walks that from time to time bring you out to the sheer edge of the cliff overlooking the blue waters below. There is expensive gardening done here, everywhere; for you find vines and flowers and benches underneath the shade of palms and umbrella trees where you can sit and look out over the sea. Lovely panoramas confront you in every direction; and below, perhaps as far down as three and four hundred feet, you can see and hear the waves breaking and the foam eddying about the rocks. The visitor to Monte Carlo, I fancy, is not greatly disturbed about scenery, however. Such walks as these are empty and still while the Casino is packed to the doors. The gaming-tables are the great center; and to these we ourselves invariably returned.