THE SKETCHER.

Otago Witness, Issue 2728, 27 June 1906, Page 77

THE SKETCHER.

THE HUMOROUS SIDE OF MONTE CARLO.

(By Ward Mtjir, in Chambers's Journal.)

Monte Carlo is undoubtedly the funniest thing in Europe. Like many European funny things, it moves the alien spectator as nearly to tears as to laughter. It possesses a sort of ironical pathos underlying its patent absurdity. Its atmosphere is so intensely civilised, and cloaks such appalling barbarism ! Beneath its eternal smile — its courtly, high-class, demi-monde smile — it is so smoothly cruel. The unfeeling observer cannot but perceive that Monte Carlo, as a phenomenon of latter-day "civilisation," is the most ludicrous of spectacles. He who f eels— well, he who feels had better disregard Monte Carlo altogether, or he will suffer. The humours of Monte Carlo are not far to seek. Monaco seems to have prided itself on being a jest amongst the nations — a grim jest — ever since it had a history. Its founder, the first of the Grimaldis, bought it from the sea-povrsr of Genoa, and then calmly levied toll on every passing vessel which came within range of his swift galleys. When it is realised that the majority of his victims were Genoese ships, the excellence of his joke will immediately be apparent. Grimaldi's stronghold — a nice, comfortable, little, sheltered pla au upon a promontory which had an even nicer and more comfortably sheltered little harbour for his f [alleys at its foot — earned the nickname, ocally, of "Spelugues." This was in the fourteenth century. The spot is still the Spelugues. Spelugues means "The Plain of the Robbers," and the site of Grimaldi's pirate-retreat is at this moment the site of the Monte Carlo Casino. Passing ships have no interest for Grimaldi's successor, the Prince of Monaco; but passing tourists present him, free, gratis, and for nothing, with a comfortable salary of £70,000 per annum, an impost which his ancestor would have thought unreasonable and excessive.

Grimaldi, like most of the pirates of his age, was exceedingly religious. The very name of his territory, Monaco, derives from the Latin word "monachus," a monk ; and, following up the idea, we find he emblazoned two monks upon his coat of arms, where they still blandly pose. Observe, now, the consistency of the Grimaldian- tendency to jokes. Ninetenths oi the wealth of the present Prince is extracted -from a ■ monkish invention — the roulette-wheel. Pascal devised the gambling cylinder exactly as it is now used in the Salles de Jeu during a six months' "retreat" for meditation and prayer in a monastery. The roulettewheel has built for Monaco the finest cathedral on the Riviera, has paid for innumerable lesser churches, has founded several orphanages and nunneries, and pays the salaries of a bishop and innumerable priests; but before gambling was introduced into Monaco that benighted State could afford only one small church. Within the Prince's palace, it- may be added, a naive inscription in a prominent position on one of the walls is proudly pointed out by the cicerone of every tourist. It runs : "The man who pretends to know God and does not keep His commandments is a liar." Precisely what this may be apropos of is not explained. Plenty of charming things are not explained — at Monte Carlo. One of the many charming things which are not explained at Monte Carlo is the annual balance-sheet of the Casino Company ; or why the said company, which exists solely for and by gambling should call itself the Societe Anonyme dcs Bains de Mer et Cercle dcs Etrangers (the Sea-Bathing and Strangers' Club Company). The one thing which nobody ever does during the winter season — the profitable season — at Monte Carlo is to bathe in the sea. Nevertheless, this Sea-Bathing Company which provides no sea-bathing, mysteriously announces that its profits for the year 19045 amounted to one million four hundred and forty thousand eight hundred pounds. It omits •to mention why visitors who have never dipped so much as a toe in the Tideless Gulf should be willing to pay so heavily for the privilege of not doing so ; and it also omits, perhaps discreetly, to give more than the very sketchiest details of the items of the balance sheet. The shareholders are incurious ; perhaps they realise that silence, like their dividend, is golden.

The founder of the Sea-bathing Company was a humourist of the first water. Having been invited to leave Homburg, he placidly wandered into Monaco one morning in the year 1860, and cast a critical eye upon the puny Casino which was then rising out of rubbish-heaps on the edge of the promontory. Seemingly, this M. Blanc — whose snowy surname subsequently gave rise to the proverb, "Rouge perd, noire perd ; blanc gagne tonjours" — owned that priceless virtue of the business instinct, Imagination. He saw Money in the rubbish-heaps, and Possibilities in the ugly skeleton of the Casino. He paid a TE>rief call upon the owners of the concession, and, by one of those strokes of luck which occur only to individuals able to appreciate their significance, found these gentry in financial difficulties. He offered them £68,000 down for their concession. "I am going to lunch," he said, "and when I have lunched, shall receive your decision." He lunched (a rite omitted by no great financier), and received the decision. That very day, the 31st of March, 1860, he became sole owner of the Monte Carlo Casino and 30 years' gaming concession from the Prince. Seventeen years later he died -worth £2,400,000. Three times since 1860 the Casino has been enlarged; and there is no reason to doubt that it will require enlarging again, seeing that this year's net profits exceed those of last year by no less than £80,000; and a fresh lease of 50 years' duration has onlx recently been £ranted»

•with the most agreeably stimulating effect on the Sea-bathmg Company's share quotations. Francois Blanc, it would seem, is still very much alive, and his joke is still active. A million-pounds-a-year joke is difficult to kill. The gist of M. Blanc's joke was that he should propose to turn a rubbish-heap into a gold mine by "chance." Roulette, it will be observed, is a game of chance. It is a pure chance if the players lose a million pounds a year, a pure chance that the bank has 37 odds in its favour to its opponents' 36, a pure chance that the Casino Company can provide their patrons with the finest orchestra, the finest gardens, the finest roads and bridges, and police- force and fetes and pigeon-shooting, in Europe for nothing. Chance — blindfolded Chance, but surely ■with the bandage slightly hitched off from the eye which beams in the Blanc direction ! What a pleasant thing it must be to live in a realm ruled over by the high-priests of Chance ! Land in Monaco was, at the time of the Blanc invasion, worth half a franc per square yard ; the value of the same trifling i'oothold is now quoted at a figure which soars frequently above a hundred francs. Where -there were two modest hostelries there are now 50 sumptuous hotels. What was a barren rock sprinkled with a few meagre olive-trees, and nourishing — with pains—a semi-pauper population of 4000 souls, is 'now confessed by every traveller to be the most cultivated, the healthiest, the best-drained, and the best-governed stretch of coast on the Mediterranean ; and it is the most thickly populated State on earth, supporting no less than 600 persons to the square kilometre — to be exact, 12,600 in all. Monaco is only three miles long by half a mile broad, remember; but it is so wealthy that it can afford to dispense with rates and taxes, although it 'enjoys the luxury of a standing army. By a strange irony of fate, too, it is morally -the most progressive nation in Europe, in one respect at anyrate : it forbids gambling by its inhabitants on any excuse whatsoever. Monaco knows too much about gambling to allow its sors and daughters to indulge in that expensive relaxation. No Monegasque is allowed to put his nose within the Casino doors. The Temple of Chance is reserved for the etrangers who come hither for — sea-bathing. It is said — but perhaps the statement is an envious libel calculated by the less prosperous citizens of surrounding nations — that there are- not merely more rich people to the '.square kilometre in Monaco than elsewhere, but more needy people too. Certain it is that M. Blanc in his day had to deal with an extraordinarily large number of persons -who endeavoured to turn his game of "chance*' into a game, of "certainties" for their. 1 own benefit. They did not worry M. Blanc. If they had anything to teach -him, he was' willing to pay for his new wisdom. Usually, he learnt" nothing that he did not already know, and paid nothing; but now and then Bom? fresh genius discovered a weak point in bis armour, and M. Blanc had to defray the cost of strengthening it. The firm of swell-mobsmen, for instance, who playfully inserted a bomb in the cellar where the Casino gas-meters were fixed taught him that electric light was a surer illuminant for his tables; and the gentleman who succeeded in switching off the electric light, and during the confusion which followed grabbing some thousands of francs, preached to him a salutary sermon on the merits of oil. Oillamps of enormous dimensions, as a matter of fact, now hanc over each green cloth; and electricity— brought, it is said, from two quite separate generating stations — adds to the pitiless glare of the Salles de Jeu.

Another lesson which M. Blanc paid dearly for was that hard cash is a more satisfactory, if more blatant, -"medium of play than counters: When the present Casino was first organised, the players were compelled to ptirchase counters, priced at two francs apiece, from the administration, and stake with these as tallies alone. At the close of the days play the counters could be redeemed at the guichet at their face-value. But m practice they were not always redeemed, and by degrees got into circulation in Monaco outside the Casino's doors. So admirable was M. Blanc's credit that his counters were accepted everywhere by shopkeepers and hoteliers in lieu of cash. Two hundred thousand of them in all were issued. This satisfactory state of affairs continued well into the seventies; until one fine day M. Blanc decided to recall his counters, and issued a mandate announcing that they must be immediately redeemed on pain of repudiation. The effect of this announcement must have given him considerable food for thought. His two hundred thousand counters had mysteriously ,grown and multiplied into four hundred thousand. The shock would haye iiritated a smaller mind than M. Blanc's. Hi shrugged his shoulders, and paid out the two francs apiece for each of the counters. But from that day to this the rule of the tables has been: "No credit, and money down." At the same date as the abolishing of the tally system, the minimum stake was raised from two francs at roulette to the five francs at which it now stands; and 20 francs was fixed as the minimum for the game of trrnte-et-quarante. M. Blanc had' no use for the small speculator who played often and lost little, especially when the small speculator was not even playing with genuine counters. The polite Belgian who happened by evil luck to lose a rouleau of "gold coins" which turned out, when its sealed paper (wrapping was removed, to be nothing but a brass tube of the correct diameter, taught M. Blanc that rouleaux must never bs permitted on the tables unopened. This was a cheaply bought piece of wisdom, however, compared with that which was purchased at the price of eighty thousand pounds from Mr Jaggers, the Yorkshire mechaniQ. Jaggers, with an infinitude of patience, and aided by eight assistants, tabulated the roulette results for several moatbs without- £.lajin& aiidj as he had

.anticipated, discovered that one- of the wheels had ' a distinct bias towards a^ certain set of numbers. Staking with a knowledge of this bias, Jaggers and -his men netted one hundred and twenty thousand pounds before the officials guessed the cause of their amazing success. After this the wheels ..were made to be movable from table to table, and were changed nightly. Jaggers, still betting, as lie supposed, on the same wheel, lost forty thousand pounds in a few days.' He * wisely stopped, and quitted Monte Carlo, as Ye bave said, eighty thousand pounds to the good. He was succeeded by an individual -who, contriving to gain &n entrance to the Salles de Jeu during the hours of dark, bent the metal divisions of the roulette, wheel with a pair of pincers, making certain, of' them narrower and certain of them wider than \ they normally ought to have been. .He^ was soon found out ; and nowadays' the wheels are not merely made interchangeable from table to table, but the numberdivisions are interchangeable also ; so that any variation in their siza would instantly ba detected. The mechanism of the wheels » is also examined every 2) '"hoars', and their . horizontality tested with spirit levels* The most carping critic of t the Casino officials'--metliods could not accuse them of any dis-*.' honesty, either in, the. player's favourer, in : their own, as fax as the management of the * roulettes is concerned. - The' game -.of "■ trente'-efc-quararite; iar-i some unknown reason-, seems, to have attracted tho notice of the brainy swindler less than that of roulette. Nevertheless, it was at" a trente-ct-quarante table that the famous drama of Monte Carlo sharping which has ever taken place occurred. The incident is known as the Ardisson case, so called from the name of its hero.

Ardisson was an adventurer of the most distinguished type. For years he had lived by his wits in the spa's and pleasure resorts of Germany and Austria, and finally he cast covetous eyes on the wealth of the Monte Carlo Bank. Having, in a modest disguise, made a careful study of all the aspects of play, ho eventually laid the train for a truly magnificent attack on i-rente-et-quarante, which, being played with cards, probably- appealed to liim more than the lifeless and machine-like pro- - cedure of the roulette.

At the height of the season, then, we behold Monsieur Ardisson, accompanied by a friend and two charmingly attired ladies, enter the Casino and repair idly to oneof the trente-et-quarante tables. A series of games haying just concluded, the croupier is shuffling his six packs of cards preparatory to dealing them out afresh, and - ■we toay suppose that the gamblers- already ' present- are 'taking the opportunity afforded •by bhe momentary lull to compute their losses 'and gains or examine their scoring cards. ' Immediately on arriving-- at the table, t the Ardisson- .quartet arrange themselves two on each side of it; . and ono of the ladies contrives to- enter, into ■ conversation with chef.de p&rfie^ (nm- -. pire or referee of the game), ami aakshim ■ a number of innocent questions, as ,£6, th« methods of play. These he politely answers, and meanwhile, on the opposite side of tho table, the other fair creaturb has begged the second umpire to be so flood as to furnish her with gold change for a banknote.

At the very moment when the croupier has shuffled his cards and is ready to- recommence, the lady who wanted change for her bank note receives it, and, by an unfortunate slip, lets the whole of it fall upon the ground. There is considerable confusion as the gold pieces roll hither and thither, and for a fraction of a second the umpire's attention is distracted from the table. Attendants, however, hurry forward, gather together the coins, and hand them back to their charming owner, who is, of course, covered with confusion at the disturbance she has created in this usually serene and hushed atmosphere. The game begins.

And what a £ame ! The umpires' faces blanch as they behold sequence after sequence turning up in the Ardisson group's favour- Ardisson. and his three companions do not condescend to stake anything lower than masiroums — and the maximum at trente-et-quarante is * twelve ' thousand francs. Pour times twelve thousand francs on the table at each coup, and four times twelve thousand francs winning- at each coup, is enough to turn the hair grey of even the gtoniest croupier. Eight times, did the Ardisson gang stake, and eight times they won. Then they strolled off in a body, taking with them 300,000 odd francs. A swift carriage waiting at the Casino door whirled them away across the French frontier, to be seen no more.

Horrible suspicions entered' the bemused brains of the chefs de partie as they beheld their 300,000 francs ranish, and they oidered the cards to be examined. There were 84 too "many of them in the pack. Georges, tbe croupier, had accepted a princely bribe from Ardisson to substitute a previously arranged pack amongst his cards, and liad contrived to do so at the moment when the eyes of every one — umpires and bystanders included — were diverted by the fallen coins. The. rest was easy. Ardisson and his accomplices bet upon what they knew must be the sequences, and inevitably won. As for Georges, he spent a couple of months in prison, and issued thence to enjoy his share of the Ardisson fortune.

The ' majority of the fitories of fortunes made at Monte Carlo, nevertheless, centre round ordinary straightforward players and not mere rogues such as Ardisson. Few. however, fail to possess the element of jest which seems inseparable from everything Monte Carlian-. One of the most popular amongst the British and American permanent residents is that of an English, peer, who, ha-ving attended divine worship at the Episcopal Church, repaired (let us hope absent -mindedly) direct* thence to the gaming rooms. As he paused for a few minutes beside ono of the roulette tables, a winning number announced by the presiding croupier struck upon his ear as being strangely familiar. It was the number 36 — the number of the last hymn which had been given out as he was quitting the san-pfl edifice. Prompted bj- the curi*

ous inward voice which whispers "An i omen" to., even the most matter-of-fact and [ conservative, he hastily -placed a louis on the 36 square. Thirty-six won again, j though the- balance of chances in favour of the recurrence of a single number is exces- j sively remote ; and our peer wandered forth into. the Sabbath 6tillness of the gardens 700 francs richer than he had been when he dodged the collection plate of the church by escaping from it while the lucky , hymn, was being sung. Of course .the tale leaked out, and/of course the church was crowded on the following Sunday by gambiers eager to repeat the peer's experiment. - t Never before Tiad the local chaplain beheld from his pulpit such a sea of eager faces ; . never before had the pews emptied with | such astonishing rapidity on the. announcement of the collection hymn. The congregation in a tody mr.de a hee line for the Casino, and fought for places at the famous roulette board, whereon to fling piles of •notes and gold, backing the hymn's nam- , ber. The trifling fact that the number in question obstinately -ler-lined to appear did . not dissuade them, and for several^ Sundays the church continued to be crammed with folk intent on hearing the number of the . last hymn, and subsequently backing that number in tbc Casino. The chaplain put a stop to the scandal, and incidentally reduced the size of his flock to its usual somewhat meagre level by a simple expedient. The final hymn was from that time onwards selected from that portion of the hymn ' book wherein numbers ran above 36. As the numbers on the roulette wheel themselves run no higher than 36, it was obvious that the hymn could thenceforward give no clue to the omen -seeking gamster. Another similar adventure which occurred to a well-known English plunser is equally authentic.' Having lost every cent of his ready money, he wired a pathetic appeal for help to a friend in England. Two days later lie received a letter, addressed in the friend's handwriting, which on being opened revealed a five-pound note. Without pausing to read tho letter, our plunger hastened to Cii'o's, the famous restaurant in the Ga'erie Charles 111. and changed his fiver into French money. From Ciro'6 he went straight into the Casino, where, experiencing an extraordinary run oi luck, he not _ merely retrieved all his previous losses, but £'.-«; r.ed a substantial increase into the bargain. Weary of play, he retired with a few , cronies to'Ciro's again to celebrate the occasion with a bottle of champagne. Th-e ! usually jrenial M. Giro met him at the door of his establishment with a flood of . reproaches and upbra'dings. The fivepound note was bad ! He waved it angrily in the plunger's face — ma is oui, it was false, this five-pound note!

The plunger took the guilty fiver and scrutinised it carefully. It was one of the sham bank notes issued by the late Sir Augustus Harris, mid bearing on their face an advertisement of the Drury Lane pantomime. The English, friend, himself as "broke*' as the Monte Carlo plunger, had posted him the flagrantly worthless fiver as a joke — a joke which, had the plunger taken the trouble to examine the fiver or read its covering letter, he would have seen only too clearly for himself. It was fortunate that he did not do so. He merely paid Ciro his five pounds, and, inviting the pacified restaurateur to share in the champagne, pretended that the whole affair was an intentional witticism on his own part.

The conceit of a crnapier. who fondly j imagined that he understood the English language, was instrumental in presenting : another and far less experienced Britisher I with the not-to-be-sn-pered-at sum of lOOOf. , 'This gentleman, handing a thousand-franc ■ billet to the croupier in question, asked , for plaques in exchange for it. Planues j are the large live louis gold pieces peculiar . to Monaco. The croupier, fancying that J the player had said "black," and was re- \ questing him to place the note on the | "blac-k"' compartment of the cloth, did so unobserved. Black duly turned up, and the croupier politely handed 2000f to the surprised Britisher. '

Probably once, and once only, has a player at Monte C.ulo won unwillingly. The incident alluded to came under the notice of the writer, and he can vouch for its truth. An elderly lady who was conducting a party of nephews" and nieces along the Riviera was persuaded by the young people to take them to the Casino. Aunt Maria, as we may conveniently call her, inwardly resolved to give her proteges a lesson in the futility of gambling. Having made a private examination of the odds against the player in the roulette game, she decided, shrewdly and accurately enough, that to place a coin on a single number was to court almost certain less. When, therefore, she took her party into the Sailes de Jeu, she exhorted them to note how x impos6ible it was to make money by play, and, to point he? moral, placed a five-franG piece ■ n the single number 25. By rights, -25 should have lost, the chances being 37 to 1 against it. But "the best-laid plains" — 25 won, to Aunt Maria's discomfiture';, ar.d & delighted nephew gathered up 'ijom the cloth her winnings— l7s francs—oomplimenting her upon her good fortune and judgment. Aunt Maria will not rely again on object-lessons to illustrate her lectures pn the futility of gambling. , Lieutenant-colonel Newnham-Davis, the

well-known journalist of the London Sporting Times, states that an American friend of his once won £20,000 in a single sitting at Monte Carlo," and -was uniquely sensible 'enough to take it home with him intact. But the number of people who are genuinely fortunate at Monte Carlo, and whose luck continues to the day of their departure, is exceedinlgy 6ma11. . "Decave" — which' in slang,- simply means "stonybroke" — is a word whose use is pitifully common at Monte Carlo. The viaticum item on the Casino balance sheet— that is, the money paid for railway fares for the rained players' return to their homes — amounted in the 1896-97 season to no less than £12,000; and it is significant that Monaco is now the only State in Europe where usurious interest is charged by moner-lenders with the sanction of the )aw. * The 'breaking of the bank" stories wliich persistently crop up in the French newspapers during the Monte Carlo season are traceable not so much to a foundation on fact as to a foundation on the "p^ess^ subvention" fond of the Casino Company — a fund which in 1901 amounetd to no less than £2Q#OO, and to which may also fco ascribed the strange silence on the suicide question in the same journals. That peculiar weekly, Rouge et Noir (the Orjrane de Defense dcs Joueurs de Roulette el Trente-et-Quarante — probably the only magsz'tne devoled solely to tho interests of gamblers •ever published), states that the number of suicides per annum at Monte Carlo averages 400, or one per -week per table. This, it may be asserted safely, is .» grosp exaggeration of the truth ; but that, suicides are cadly frequent no one who knows the Riviera would dare to deny. The curious have only to climb the stony and almost pathless hillside behind Monaco to find proof. Here, surrounded by a hisrh wall, is the suicides' cemetery, a melancholy and neglected little enclosure thick with "rank grass, and betraying its nature solely by a few wooden stakes bearing numbers and decorated with be<iragsrled wreaths and torn visiting-cards. The sun beats pitilessly upon its nameless graves, butterflies flit to and fro over its flowering weeds, and the leaves of its wreaths stir lazily in the breeze. Outwardly, at legist, it is perhaps the least picturesque and most uninteresting; cemetery in the length and breadth of Europe ; but to him who knows its secret it is full of meaning. For these uncared-for mounds represent • more than the mere rtoting-phces of madmen or fools who have pitted themselves against the immutable laws of mathematics ; they are in themselves a monument — an everlasting monument —to the crenius of a man who, with th° eye of faith, Deh-eld a gold mine in a rubbish heap ; a monument to the creator of Monte Carle — Francois Blanc. .Some day, when Europe gets the tiue perspective of things, it will be said of Francois Blanc, not that he founded the Monte Carlo Casino, not that he brought stability and wealth to the throne of the Prince of Monaco, not that he built the Monaco Cathedral, but that he made necessary this suicides' graveyard. And when that day comes the grisly jVst of Monte Carlo will 'cease to exist.