Just beyond the Oceanographic Museum is a wide, paved platform on the brink of the cliff with parapet and sentry house. Beneath it is the Great Casemate built about 1709 to provide shelter for the people during bombardment and to accommodate a cistern for the storing of water when the outer world was cut off. This great underground “dug-out” is now used as a prison. At the end of the garden is the rugged old fort built by Prince Antoine over 200 years ago. It is looking towards the casino of Monte Carlo, just as a toothless, old brigand might look at a dancing girl. It is a romantic spot with its winding stairs, its great gun embrasures, its mysterious doorways and its deserted sentry walk. It no longer bristles with armed men; it no longer thunders, with flashes of flame, across the sea; it no longer awakens an echo that shakes the astonished hills; for it is now a kind of “Celia’s Arbour,” a place of whispers where lovers meet and ruffle the silence with nothing more unquiet than a sigh. ----- [32] Published in Nice, 1907. [33] “Le Vieux Monaco.” [34] The present Casino at Monte Carlo was built in 1878. [35] Bosio. “Le Vieux Monaco.” XX A FATEFUL CHRISTMAS EVE NOT many years after the building of the citadel or fort in 1215 (page 145) Monaco became involved in the war between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. The Guelphs were represented by the Grimaldi, the Ghibellines by the Spinola. Each party twice besieged the other, when entrenched within the citadel, and each was twice supplanted by its opponents. Indeed such were the changes that a ship returning to Monaco after a voyage of no more than a month or so did well to inquire, before entering the harbour, whether the rock was in the hands of the Grimaldi or the Spinola. In 1306 the Ghibellines, or Genoese, held Monaco and felt sure of their holding, for they had long remained undisturbed. They were represented by the head of the Spinola family who had taken up his residence in the citadel or, as it would by this time be termed, the palace. On Christmas Eve 1306 a small party of men left Nice after sundown and made their way to Monaco by way of certain paths across the hills. It was not a conspicuous party, being formed only of a few armed men and a monk. They would be taken for a body of retainers moving from one castle to another. It might have been observed that they treated the monk with great respect and deference. He himself was not notable, except that he was an agile and powerful man and that he seemed rather more hilarious than is becoming to a priest.