The Pillars of Hercules

The turd-mobile is defeated by an unlikely enemy: an older overdressed French woman, a widow, a retiree, a prosperous landlady, someone precisely like Mme. Godefroy. She is the last person you would associate with dogshit, and yet this delicate and dignified woman spends a good part of the day calculating the urgencies of her dog’s bowels. There are thousands of these women and their dogs all over the Riviera. They are forever hurrying their tiny mutts down the sidewalk and looking the other way as the beasts pause to drop a stiff sausage of excrement just where you are about to plant your foot.

At the station, I said to myself: If the next train goes east, I’ll head for Ventimiglia and eat spaghetti in Italy. If it goes west, I’ll eat in Antibes or Juan-les-Pins.

It was an eastbound train to Mention, and once again I was struck by the courtesy of the older French rail passengers, strangers to each other, who chatted about trivial things and seldom departed in silence; nearly always when they left a train compartment they said, “Bye, now” or “Bon voyage” or “Take care.”

There was something else about the train, that Fitzgerald mentions in Tender Is the Night. “Unlike American trains that were absorbed in an intense destiny of their own, and scornful of people on another world less swift and breathless, this train was part of the country through which it passed. Its breath stirred the dust from the palm leaves, the cinders mingled with the dry dung in the gardens. Rosemary was sure she could lean from the window and pull flowers with her hand.”

Beyond the pretty bay at Villefranche-sur-Mer, a little jewel among rocky cliffs, I could see St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where King Leopold of Belgium, sole proprietor of the Congo, had built a regal estate that was so complete, even his mistresses and his private priest, his confessor, lived in a private mansion on the grounds. The idea was that the king could sin all he wanted, for the priest was on call to give him absolution on his deathbed. Somerset Maugham had bought the priest’s house, the Villa Mauresque—named for its Moroccan decor. I had planned to stop here, but the whole kingly place was now a set of condominiums.

Past Beaulieu-sur-Mer, palmy, sedate, piled against the hillside, with mansions on ledges; past Eze-sur-Mer, less grand, with great clusters of banana trees at the station. The bays beyond Eze were beautiful but the beaches were stony, the cliffs perpendicular, a wall-like coast similar to the one I had seen on the Costa Brava. After Cap D’Ail came Monte Carlo—bigger, sleepier, nastier than I had expected, and it was impossible to tell the condos from the grave vaults. I decided to stop there for lunch.

I walked from the station, trying to figure out where I was. There are three regions in the Principality of Monaco—Monacoville, the hill where Prince Rainier’s palace dominates; the valley of the Condamine; and another hill, Mount Charles—Monte Carlo. The whole place owes its existence to Grace Kelly, who provided Rainier with a son, thus maintaining the Grimaldi line. She met Rainier when the prince became involved as a human prop in a photo shoot in Monaco to promote one of her films; then he pursued her, with a priest acting as a go-between. He was well aware of the clause in Monaco’s treaty with France that asserted that Monaco would be absorbed into France if Rainier did not somehow produce an heir. Now it is for the young balding playboy, Albert Grimaldi, to secure the Grimaldi line with an heir of his own.

The Grimaldi family, said to be the oldest monarchical line in Europe, is—like most of those families—royally dysfunctional, filled with stressful and unsatisfying relationships, though Grimaldi self-esteem is not in short supply. They are well aware that their home was a dump until the mid-nineteenth century, when Prince Charles III built a casino. He did it in much the same spirit that the Pequot Mashantucket Indians introduced gambling to Connecticut, because it was forbidden everywhere else (France and Italy had banned it). So Monaco got rich, as the Pequots got rich, on suckers being encouraged to throw their money away.

But the wealthy people who live in Monaco are the opposite of gamblers. They are mainly anal-retentive tax exiles with a death grip on their cash and a horror of spending, never mind gambling. There are thirty thousand residents. Fewer than ten percent of them are natives, which says a great deal. Tax havens are by their very nature boring or else actively offensive; if they were pleasant, everyone would want to live in them. But only by promising tax incentives do the places attract their resident populations. This is not Happy Valley. For one thing, the chief characteristic of wealthy people is that they are constantly whining about how poor they are; the rest of us can take a malicious satisfaction in the fact that these tycoons have only each other at which to cry poormouth.