MONACO***


This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler.

                 [Picture: Monaco Town, from Monte Carlo]





                                 THE FALL
                                    OF
                       PRINCE FLORESTAN OF MONACO.


                                * * * * *

                               BY HIMSELF.

                                * * * * *

                                 London:
                            MACMILLAN AND CO.
                                  1874.

        [_The Right of Translation and Reproduction is reserved_.]

                   [Picture: Map of the Town of Monaco]




THE FALL OF PRINCE FLORESTAN OF MONACO.


I am Prince Florestan of Wurtemberg, born in 1850, and consequently now
of the mature age of twenty-four. I might call myself “FLORESTAN II.” but
I think it better taste for a dethroned prince, especially when he
happens to be a republican, to resume the name that is in reality his
own.

Although the events which I am about to relate occurred this winter, so
little is known in England of the affairs of the Ex-principality of
Monaco, now forming the French commune of that name, that I feel that the
details of my story, indeed all but the bare facts on which it is
grounded, will be news to English readers.  The English Post Office
believes that Monaco forms part of Italy, and the general election
extinguished the telegrams that arrived from France in February last.

All who follow continental politics are aware that the Prince Charles
Honoré, known as Charles III. of Monaco, and also called on account of
his infirmity “the blind prince,” was the ruling potentate of Monaco
during the last gambling season; that there lived with him his mother,
the dowager princess; that he was a widower with one son, Prince Albert,
Duc de Valentinois, heir apparent to the throne; that the latter had by
his marriage with the Princess Marie of Hamilton, sister to the Duke of
Hamilton, one son who in 1873 was six years old; that all the family
lived on M. Blanc the lessee of the gambling tables.  But Monaco is shut
off from the rest of the world except in the winter months, and few have
heard of the calamities which since the end of January have rained upon
the ruling family.  My cousin, Prince Albert, the “Sailor Prince,” a good
fellow of my own age, with no fault but his rash love of uselessly
braving the perils of the ocean, had often been warned of the fate that
would one day befall him.  Once when a boy he had put to sea in his boat
when a fearful storm was raging, had been upset just off the point at
Monaco, and had been saved only by the gallantry of a sailor of the port
who had risked his own life in keeping his sovereign’s son afloat.  In
October 1873 my unfortunate cousin bought at Plymouth an English sailing
yacht of 450 tons.  He had a sailor’s contempt for steam, which he told
me was only fit for lubbers, when he came up and stayed with me at
Cambridge in November to see the “fours.”  He explained to me then that
he had got a bargain, that he had bought his yacht for one-third her
value, and that he was picking up a capital crew of thirty men.  He had
no need to buy yachts for a third their value, for he was rich enough and
to spare, having enjoyed the large fortune of his mother from the time he
came of age.  She was a Mérode, and vast forests in Belgium—part of
Soignies for instance—belonged to him.  His wife had her own fortune of
four and a half million francs, bringing her in about seven thousand
pounds a year, so he was able to spend all his money on himself.  He did
not spend it on his dress, for when he came to Cambridge and was
introduced to Dr. Thompson, he neither had a dress suit to dine in at the
lodge, nor a black morning coat to put on for hall, where his rough
pea-jacket scandalised the “scouts.”  He sailed from Plymouth in
November, and reached Monaco at the end of that month.  In December he
made several excursions, in none of which did his father go to sea with
him, but on the 26th of January, as ill luck would have it, he tempted my
poor uncle to go with him for a three days’ cruise.  It came on to blow
hard that night, and nothing was ever heard of them again.  Great was the
excitement at Monaco on the 27th and 28th, but on the 29th the worst was
known, as a telegram from Genoa informed the unfortunate old princess—who
has all her faculties at the age of eighty-six—that her son and grandson
were both numbered with the dead, for one of the boats of the rotten
yacht had been fallen in with by a fishing vessel floating empty in mid
sea.

The Conseil d’Etat was at once called together by the Governor General,
and the little boy of the Princess Marie proclaimed by their order at the
market-place.  A proclamation was posted in the town the moment the
sitting ended, declaring the joint regency of the dowager princess and of
Baron Imberty.  A telegram was sent to Princess Marie, who was staying
with her child at Nice, informing her of her husband’s death and of the
accession of her son, and begging that she would the next day confide the
little Duc de Valentinois to the deputation of the councillors of state
and of the officers of guards, who would reach Nice by train at noon.
She was in the same despatch assured that on the death of the old dowager
princess she should succeed her in the regency, but for family reasons on
which I need not enlarge, she was requested not on this occasion to
accompany her son.

All this I learnt by a telegram from the baron; I, as the son of the
sister of the late prince, having now become most unexpectedly next heir
to the throne of Monaco.  I had no idea of the possibility of my ever
being called upon to succeed a healthy boy of six, and gave the matter no
thought but one of regret at the death of my gallant cousin Albert, who
in the Prussian war had proved his courage in the French navy, while I,
had I been older, should have had to have fought upon the other side, my
father having been a prince of Wurtemberg.

I was thoroughly English in my ways.  My father, a man of wide and
liberal views, disliking “professors” as much as Mr. Disraeli does, and
especially distrusting Prussian pedagogues, had sent me to Eton and to
Trinity. At Eton I had lived rather with the King’s scholars than with my
more natural allies, and had imbibed some views at which my poor father
would have groaned.  When I went up to Cambridge my friendships were in
King’s rather than in Third Trinity, and my opinions were those now
popular among spectacled undergraduates, namely, universal negation.  I
even joined First Trinity Boat Club, instead of Third, because the
gentlemen of the latter were too exclusive for my princely tastes.

During my four years at Cambridge I had rowed in First Trinity Second.  I
had heard at the Union Mr. Seeley defend the Commune, and oppose a motion
declaring it innocent because it did not go on to express the “love and
affection” with which that body was regarded by the University.  I had
supported a young fellow of Trinity when he showed that the surplus funds
of the Union Society should be applied to the erection of statues of
Mazzini in all the small villages of the West of England—a motion which I
believe was carried, but neutralized by the fact that the Union Society
possessed no surplus funds.  I had also had the inestimable advantage of
attending the lectures of Professor Fawcett on the English poor laws.  I
had, by the way, almost forgotten the most amusing of all the Union
episodes of my time, which was the rising of Mr. Dilke of Trinity Hall,
Sir Charles Dilke’s brother—but a man of more real talent than his
brother, although, if possible, a still more lugubrious speaker—to move
that his brother’s portrait, together with that of Lord Edmond
Fitzmaurice, the communist brother of a Marquis and a congenial spirit,
should be suspended in the committee room to watch over the deliberations
of that body, because, forsooth, they had happened to be president and
vice-president of the Society at a moment when the new buildings were
begun out of the subscriptions of such very different politicians as the
Prince of Wales, the Duke of Devonshire, and Lord Powis.  Mr. Dilke and
his radicals were sometimes in a majority and sometimes in a minority at
the Union, and the portraits of the republican lord and baronet went up
on the wall or down under the table accordingly, Mr. Willimott, the
valued custodian of the rooms, carrying out the orders of both sides with
absolute impartiality.

Fired with the enthusiasm of my party and of my age, I had subscribed to
the Woman’s Suffrage Association, to Mr. Bradlaugh’s election expenses,
to the Anti-Game-Law Association, and to the Education League.  My
reading was less one-sided than my politics, and my republicanism was
tempered by an unwavering worship of “Lothair.”  Mr. Disraeli was my
admiration as a public man—a Bismarck without his physique and his
opportunities—but then in politics one always personally prefers one’s
opponents to one’s friends.  As a republican, I had a cordial aversion
for Sir Charles Dilke, a clever writer, but an awfully dull speaker, who
imagines that his forte is public speaking, and who, having been brought
up in a set of strong prejudices, positively makes a merit to himself of
never having got over them.  This he calls “never changing his opinions.”
For Mr. Gladstone I had the ordinary undergraduate detestation.  There
are no liberals at Cambridge.  We were all rank republicans or champions
of right divine.

The 31st of January was a strange day in my history.  On entering my
rooms in my flannels, hot from the boats, and hurrying for hall, I saw a
telegram upon the table.  I tore it open.

                      “_The Governor-General_, _Monaco_;
                                     _to_
                   _His Serene Highness Prince Florestan_,

                                                        _Trinity College_,
                                                             _Cambridge_.”

“His Serene Highness!”  Surely a mistake!  I read on.

    “This morning at noon his Serene Highness the reigning prince was
    committed by the princess his mother to the care of M. Henri de
    Payan, at Nice.  The princess being nervous about railway accidents,
    the departure for Monaco took place by road.  The carriage conveying
    his Serene Highness and M. de Payan was drawn by four horses.  Turbie
    was reached without mishap, but half-way between Turbie and
    Roquebrune, at a sharp turn in the road, the horses took fright, and
    the coachman, in avoiding the precipice, threw the carriage upon the
    rocks on the mountain side of the road.  His Serene Highness was
    thrown on his head and killed on the spot.  Your Serene Highness is
    now reigning prince of Monaco, and will be proclaimed to-night after
    the meeting of the Council of State by the style of Florestan II.
    Lieutenant Gasignol, of the guard, will proceed at once to England
    and meet your Serene Highness at any spot which your Highness may
    please to indicate.  M. de Payan escaped without a scratch.”

Prince of Monaco!  Prince of Monaco.  And I had seen Lafont in _Rabagas_!
I was not a “milk-and-water Rabagas,” as Mr. Cole called Mr. Lowe, when
all the papers reported him to have said “milk-and-water Rabelais,” and
the _Spectator_ mildly wondered at the strangeness of the comparison.
No, but I was somewhat of a milk-and-water Prince of Monaco after Lafont.
What distinction!  What carriage!  If the princes of the earth were only
like the princes of the stage, there would be no republicans.  But then,
fortunately, they are not.  “Fortunately!” and I one of them.  What am I
saying?

Poor little fellow!  How sad for his young mother too.  A reigning prince
for nineteen hours, and that outside of his own dominions and at the age
of six.  A strange world! and a strange world, for me too.  A
half-Protestant, half-free-thinking, republican, German, Cambridge
undergraduate, suddenly called to rule despotically over a Catholic and
Italian people.  My succession, at least, would be undisputed.  No one
had ever vowed that I “should never ascend the throne—without a protest.”
One of the Grimaldis had a claim which was no doubt a just one, my
respected great uncle having been probably a usurper; but Marshal
MacMahon and the Duc de Broglie would, I well knew, support me,
preferring even a German prince at Monaco to an Italian.  My succession,
I repeat, was undisputed; but if anybody had taken the trouble to dispute
it, I can answer for it that they would have been cheated out of their
amusement, for I should willingly have resigned to their charge so
burdensome a toy.  I was that which the republican mayor of Birmingham,
Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, in his jocular speech proposing the Prince of
Wales’ health at the mayor’s banquet, said that one of his friends had
been trying by argument to make the Prince—with, “as yet,” only “partial
success”—a republican King.  I would have gone only to Monaco to proclaim
the republic had I not known that the strange despotism—presided over not
as a despotism should be by one clever despot, but by two stupid despots,
the Dukes of Magenta and Broglie—which is called the French republic,
would not permit the creation of a small model for herself in the middle
of her commune of Roquebrune.

I was not sorry to leave Cambridge.  My rooms in the new court overlooked
Caius, where they had typhoid fever; and between the fear of infection
and the noise of the freshmen’s wines in Trinity Hall, I was beginning to
have enough of Cambridge.  My bedmaker and tutor were the only people to
whom I bid goodbye.  The men were all in hall and out at wines, and I
left notes for my friends instead of looking them up in their rooms.  I
caught my tutor as he was going into hall.  I told him of the news, and I
could see the idea of an invitation for next winter to the castle at
Monaco pass through his mind as he assured me that my rule would be a
blessing to my country, and that nothing could better fit me for a
sceptre than the training of an English gentleman.  He added, with a
return of the grim humour of a don, that he supposed that as a sovereign
prince I need scarcely “take an _exeat_.”  My poor old bed-maker, who had
read the telegram in my absence from my room, called me “your imperial
majesty” three times while she packed my shirts, but in half-an-hour I
was off to London; and on the evening of the 3rd of February I met M. de
Payan and Lieutenant Gasignol by appointment at the Grand Hotel at Paris.

From M. de Payan I obtained my first accurate ideas as to the State of
Monaco.  I found that I was not more independent under the supremacy of
France than is the Emperor William independent under the domination of
Prince von Bismarck.  I had not only the Code Napoléon, and a Council of
State dressed in exact copies of their Versailles namesakes, but French
custom-house officers levying French custom-house duties in my dominions.
At the beginning of our conversation I had said to M. de Payan, “Between
ourselves, and fearing though I do that like Charles I. of England I may
be committing high treason against myself, I feel bound to tell you that
my only ideas of my principality are derived from M. Sardou’s _Rabagas_.”

Why is it that inhabitants of small and isolated communities never can
see a joke?  M. de Payan, slightly drawing himself up and speaking with
as much stiffness as he could assume towards his prince, gravely answered
me, “Your Serene Highness is not aware, I presume, that _Rabagas_ was a
satire directed against France in her decline, and not against your
Highness’s principality.”

M. Sardou wasting his hours on satirising Monaco.  I will never joke
again, I said to myself, unless I should suffer the modern fate of kings
and be deposed.

“M. de Payan,” I replied, “I am aware of what you say, and I was joking.”

“We have no Gambettas at Monaco, your Highness; that is all I meant.”

“Perhaps, Sir, the country would be happier if you had.  Rabagas was not
Gambetta, but Emile Olivier—not the man who never despaired of France,
but the man who sacrificed his opinions to his advancement.  I admire M.
Gambetta, who is at this moment the first man in France, in my
estimation, and the second political man in Europe.  His figure will
stand out in history, daubed as even it is with the mud that French
politicians are ceaselessly flinging at each other.”

“M. Gambetta is, as your Serene Highness says, a man of extraordinary
powers; but his father was a tradesman at Cahors, and is retired and
lives at Nice, near your Serene Highness’s dominions.”

What more could I say?  There was nothing to be made of M. de Payan.

On the 5th of February I reached Nice by the express, and after reading
the telegram