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Updated: June 4, 2025
That little episode in history accounted for the Hotel Monte Carlo; and I wondered if it were put up on the site of the Grimaldis' miniature pleasure-palace, which the forest-burning revolutionists tore down just before Les Baux, after all its strange passings from hand to hand, became the property of the nation.
But Vanno was persuaded that he cared nothing for the gold of the dragon. Once before, when he was almost a boy, he had come here with his brother Angelo for a few days. They had gone to see the Prince, whose ancient family, the Grimaldis, was older and more important even than the house of Rienzi.
Far above our heads looked down the old, brown keep of the Grimaldis, once lords of all the azure coast; below us glittered Mentone, pink and blue and golden in the sun; beyond Monte Carlo sat throned, siren-like, upon her rock.
The town from which Cæsar sailed to Genoa and Rome vanished before the ravages of the Saracens, and the spot remained desert till it passed by Imperial cession to Genoa, and the Genoese Commune erected a fort which became a refuge alternately for its Guelf or Ghibelline exiles, its Spinolas or its Grimaldis.
He was victorious, and was rewarded for his bravery and skill by being proclaimed prince of Monaco. In the family of his descendants the little territory still remains. The Grimaldis were powerful rulers, wise and brave, and having secured independence, they maintained it at all cost through centuries of trouble.
He seemed well up in the history of the Grimaldis and that exciting period when Mentone and legend-crusted Roquebrune had been under the rule of tyrannical princes of that name, as well as Hercules's rock, Monaco, still their own. He knew, or pretended to know, the precise date when Napoleon III. filched Nice and Savoy from reluctant Italy as the price of help against the hated Austrians.
A church of fine twelfth-century work is the only monument which remains of this earlier time; at the opening of the fourteenth century Monaco passed finally to the Grimaldis, and became in their hands a haunt of buccaneers. Only one of their line rises into historic fame, and he is singularly connected with a great event in English history.
But even the Grimaldis have not managed wholly to escape from the general luck of their fellow-rulers; Mentone and Roccabruna were ceded to France some few years back for a sum of four million francs, and the present lord of Monaco is the ruler of but a few streets and some two thousand subjects.
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