It is just the fact that the site is so exquisitely beautiful that
is the pity of it all. Why should the moral cesspool of Europe be
precisely there? How much better were it in the Maremma or the
Campagna, where the risk to health and life would add zest to the
speculation with gold. As long as men people the globe there will be
gambling, and it is in vain to think of stopping it. All the lowest
types of humanity, the Lazaroni, the North American Indians, the
half-caste Peruvians and Mexicans, resort to it with passion, and the
unintellectual and those without mental culture throughout Europe will
naturally pursue it as a form of excitement. It is therefore just as
well that there should be places provided for these individuals of low
mental and moral calibre to enjoy themselves in the only way that suits
them, but again, the pity is that one of the fairest spots of Europe,
this earthly paradise, should be given over to harlots and thieves, and
Jew moneylenders, to rogues and fools of every description. The entire
principality lives on the tables, the prince, the bishop, the canons,
the soldiery, the police, the hotel-keepers, those who have villas,
the cabdrivers, the waiters, the boatmen, all are bound together by a
common interest—the plunder of such as come to Monte Carlo to lose
their money. The institution must be kept going, every scandal must
be hushed up. If a case of suicide occur, in ten minutes every trace
disappears, and no public notice is given of what has occurred. It is
against the interest of every one connected with the place, with Nice
also and Mentone, to allow such an event to transpire.
If any trust may be reposed in the assertions of Captain Weihe, a
German naval artillery officer who has resided at Monte Carlo for three
seasons, the cases are far more numerous than is supposed. According
to him, directly a man has shot or hung himself, he is whisked away by
the police and the body concealed till it is ascertained that no one is
particularly interested in his fate. Then, at the end of the season,
the bodies of the suicides are packed in cases that are weighted, and
the boatmen sink them far out at sea between Monte Carlo and Corsica.
According to the same authority, the bodies were formerly thrust
into the holes and cracks in the limestone on which the Casino and
the tributary buildings of Monte Carlo stand, but the condition in
consequence became so insanitary that the place had to be cleared of
them, and a large body of workmen was imported from Italy and employed
on this work, and the corpses removed were disposed of at sea. Captain
Weihe asserts as a matter of his own knowledge or observation that from
the upper part of the rift of Pont Larousse, in 1898, sixty corpses,
from the lower by Villa Eden ten or twelve were removed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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