I had no one to back me in what I did. Major Gasignol and some of the other officers were strongly favourable to the army reform, which gave them service and promotion. Dr. Coulon was half favourable to my views, and a quarter favourable to my ways of working them out in action. L’Abbé Ramin was conciliatory and kind. M. de Payan was grimly neutral. Every other functionary was an active, though veiled, enemy to nine-tenths of my proposals. The people were abjectly passive, and I almost wished that the auberge of the “Crapaud Volant” of Rabagas had had a real existence. At last, however, I conjured up the spirit to found a school with lay teachers, arranging to pay its cost over and above the expected fees out of my own purse. No one came to it, and the Jesuit schools and the schools of the frères de la doctrine continued to be thronged. The Catholic schools were supported by the state. Mine were supported by myself. I went a step further, and I offered Father Pellico the alternatives of stopping the state contributions to all schools, or of continuing them, provided that lay teachers only were employed during the principal hours of the day. He coldly said that an agreement of the nature proposed by me would be contrary to his duty, and that if I chose to stop the state contributions to his schools the effect of my action would be to shake my throne without harming them. He added that if he was to go to prison he was at the service of my officer of the guard. I replied that he was welcome to his opinion.
The next day the edict appeared. It was countersigned by Baron Imberty, who disapproved of it, but not by M. de Payan, who had resigned and left for Nice to consult the Bishop. As I drove through the town in the afternoon, I was coldly received by the people, and the proclamation was torn down on the following night. The weekly parade of the militia was put off for fear of a hostile demonstration; and on the day on which it would have taken place I received, instead of the muster-roll of the national regiment, a vote of thanks from the Executive Committee of the English National Education League, and notice of my unanimous election to membership of the Council of that body.
A strange event occurred in the afternoon, (it was the 11th of March), to distract my thoughts. General Garibaldi, who had been travelling incognito, and with the permission of the French Government, given conditionally on the incognito being strictly preserved, to visit his birthplace – Nice, applied to me to know whether I would receive him if he stopped at Monaco for a day on his return. I replied that I should be glad to see him, the more so as I had met his son Ricciotti at Greenwich in June 1870, at the dinner of the Cobden Club, to which orgy he and I had both been lured by the solicitations of the arch-gastronomist, the jovial Mr. T. B. Potter. I did not add that our acquaintance had been interrupted by the war in which the same clever and conceited officer had cut up my cousin’s (the King of Wurtemberg) troops at Châtillon-sur-Seine.
On the 12th the old General came, and I met him at the station and drove him to the palace. The news that he was with me soon spread through the town, and a mob collected at the palace gates. The General, to whom I had given the “bishop’s rooms,” which had once been occupied by Monseigneur Dupanloup, his arch enemy, imagined that the crowd was composed of his admirers, and, leaning upon his stick, he proceeded to harangue them from the window of the private apartments. Some hundreds of my subjects, I was afterwards informed, had listened to him languidly enough until he began to attack the Jesuits, when arose the uproar which brought me to his room, and all my household into the courtyard. I begged him to remember where he was, but the howling of the mob had excited the old lion, and the more they threatened the more violently he declaimed. When he was pulled into a chair by Major Gasignol the mischief was done, and a maddened crowd was raging on the place crying “à bas Garibaldi,” “à bas les Communistes,” “à bas le Prince.”
Colonel Jacquemet made his way to me and said, “Sir, I can count on twenty of the sergeants and corporals who are in the courtyard, ex-soldiers of your Highness’s ex-garde. They are grand old soldiers, and with the strong walls to help them will hold this canaille in check.”
He might have said, “Sir, I don’t like your ways, and have disapproved of everything that you have done, but after all you are the rightful Prince of Monaco, as well as a good fellow, saving your Highness’s presence, and I am ready to die for you.” He didn’t. He only spoke the words that I have set down.
My answer was an unhesitating one.
“I, Prince Florestan the Reformer, am not going to hold my throne by force if I can’t hold it by love; and, moreover, if I wished to do so it is doubtful whether I could succeed.”
As I spoke the crowd parted asunder, and I saw advancing through it in a wedge the English blue-jackets from my yacht, armed with cutlasses. A few stones were thrown at them, but of these they took not the smallest notice. At their head was the captain of the port, a native Monegascan, the very man who years before had saved my sailor cousin from the waves. They entered the courtyard, and I at once asked them to make their way, with General Garibaldi in the midst, back to the yacht, and steam with him to Mentone, land him, and return. At the same time I sent for Father Pellico. It was lucky the sailors had come, for I soon discovered that the carbineers had made common cause with the mob, and that the sergeants who were ready to die for me would not have escorted Garibaldi.
The mob howled dismally as he left, but he was embarked safely just before Father Pellico reached the palace gate. I told him that the General had left, and asked him whether this concession would satisfy the crowd. He asked whether I was prepared at the same time to give way about the schools. I told him that if I thought that after doing so I could continue to reign with advantage to the country and credit to myself I would willingly give way, but that if he thought that in the event of my abdication the public peace could be maintained until a vote was taken to decide the future of the country, I should prefer to return to my books and to my boat. He said that he hoped that I should stop, but that if, on the other hand, I went he thought that order would be maintained.
I bowed to him and said, “Père Pellico, you may if you please occupy the throne of the Grimaldis. I shall leave in an hour when the yacht returns.”
I went on to the balcony and attempted to address the crowd. If they would have listened to a word I said I might have turned them, but not a syllable could be heard. I could not “address my remarks to the reporters,” because owing to the wise precautions of my predecessor with regard to the press there were none. I retired amid a shower of small stones.
Colonel Jacquemet’s language was fearful to listen to. The air was thick with his curses. I was reminded of the question of a little girl friend of mine, who having been taken out one day to an inspection by the Commander-in-Chief of the garrison of Portsmouth upon Southsea common, asked on her return home if “the Duke of Cambridge wasn’t a very pious man,” explaining that she had heard him “say his prayers” – alluding doubtless to His Royal Highness’s favourite expression of “God bless my body and soul!” If he had ever read history the colonel would have known that the fire-eating d’Artagnan of “Three Musketeers” renown once commanded the fortress of Monaco for Louis the Fourteenth, under my ancestor the Marshal, and he might have been inspired by a desire to emulate his fame, but, as it was, he seemed chiefly moved by a loathing for his tattered fellow-subjects. He wanted to mow them with grape – of which we had none; he wanted to blow them into the air – but to reason with him was useless, and I was unable even to fix his attention enough to bid him farewell.
As I left the palace, surrounded by the tars and preceded and followed by the sergeants of the ex-garde, Abbé Ramin came running up and seized me by the hand.
“Your Serene Highness must not leave us,” he cried; “the people are irritated for a moment against their prince, but happier days will come.”
“I can stop if I please, Abbé Ramin,” I replied, “but only either by firing upon the people, or by blockading them and depriving the women and children of the upper town of their daily bread. I will do neither.”
“History will speak of your Highness as your Highness deserves!”
“My dear friend – for I believe you are my only friend in Monaco – I thank you for coming to bid me farewell, but don’t talk of history, for history will only declare me to have been an obstinate young fool.”
We moved off slowly down the hill amid the hisses of the crowd. The sergeants formed square upon the quay, I embraced Colonel Jacquemet and the Abbé, stepped into the gig, and in a minute was on board. Steam was up, and the next evening I landed at Marseilles.
By a telegram from the Abbé I learnt that an informal vote of the adult male inhabitants of the principality had been taken that day, and that the result was this: —
For Annexation to France
1131 —Oui
1 —Non
The Non was M. Blanc, who, being a Frenchman, ought not to have been allowed to vote at all. I heard afterwards that on learning my departure he had pronounced the following epitaph upon me: —
“Ah le jeune homme est parti. Je m’y attendais. Il aimait la liberté celui là.”
The Casino is removed to Cairo, and M. Blanc’s eldest daughter is to marry the Viceroy’s youngest son.
My tutor at Cambridge received me with a solemn face; but I laughingly exclaimed, “You see, Sir, after all I did want an exeat, even if an absit would not have done.”
The only later news that I have to record is a letter from my friend Gambetta, promising that when he becomes President of France I shall be préfêt of the Department of the Alpes Maritimes, which includes my ex-dominions, on condition that I am very moderate.
END
There is no moral that can be drawn from my fall applicable to the present state of English politics. This may be seen indeed from the comments of the only three English papers of last Friday and Saturday that noticed it. The Morning Advertiser, which, Tory as it is, prefers Radical-Orangeism to Tory-Popery (and beer to both), classed me along with the Tichborne claimant as a victim to the Jesuits, whereas I wasn’t a victim at all; and if I had been, should have been a victim to my own obstinacy, as I certainly could have stopped at Monaco if I had pleased to do so – either by raising a popular clamour against the priests, which would have been immoral, or by accepting Père Pellico’s conditions, which would have been humiliating. The National Reformer, the organ of Mr. Bradlaugh, patted me on the back as an ill-used republican; and the Standard said that my fall showed the absolute necessity of maintaining the 25th clause of the Education Act intact, which is what I could not for the life of me see. On the contrary, so opposite are the conditions of England and of Monaco, that what would have succeeded in one would have failed in the other as a matter of course. In England you have a divided church; an increasing and active though still little numerous Catholic body; a materialistic world of fashion which goes alternately to Mr. Wilkinson and Canon Liddon, Mr. Haweis and Mr. Stopford Brooke, and does not believe a word that any of them says – unless it is Mr. Haweis, but then, doctrinally speaking, he says nothing. You have the old nonconformist bodies, able and powerful still, though less powerful than before 1868; and you have the Wesleyans, pulpy but rich. Outside of them all you have people who believe two-thirds of them in the Bible pure and simple, but with prominence given in their minds to the communistic side of the New Testament, and one-third in nothing unless it is Mr. Charles Watts, Mr. Austin Holyoake, and Mr. Bradlaugh. The most flourishing publications in your country are Zadkiel’s Almanac and Reynolds’ Newspaper, belonging to the opposite poles, but equally at war with all that is most powerful and rich and respectable in your society. What resemblance is there in this state of things, full of life but wholly wanting in unity, to that at Monaco, dead, but single in faith? At Monaco all that believed – and most believed – were earnest Catholics, wielded for political purposes by one man. Had my parliamentary scheme been carried out the cumulative vote would have been inoperative, and Mr. Hare had he been there would have hanged himself from the castle flag-staff, for there was no minority. As in East Prussia the peasants, suddenly presented with universal suffrage by Von Bismarck and asked for whom they would vote, said with one accord, “For the King.” – “You can’t” – “Then for the Crown Prince” – so at Monaco the population would have replied “for Père Pellico.”