The museum which is ultimately to be the greatest of its kind in
the world, already contains somewhere in its raw inaccessible recesses
the collections made by Prince Albert in his many cruises, and is of a
palatiality worthy of a sovereign with a tenant so generous and prompt
in its rent as the Administration of the Casino of Monte Carlo.
This fact, namely, that the princely grandeur and splendor of Monaco all
came out of the gaming-tables, was something that the driver of my
landau made me observe, when our intimacy had mounted with our road, and
we paused for the magnificent view of the sea from the headland near the
museum. He was otherwise a shrewd and conversible Piedmontese who did
not make me pay much above the tariff, and who had pity on my poor
French after awhile, and consented to speak Italian with me. In the sort
of French glare over the whole local civilization of the principality,
everybody will wish to seem Erench, but after you break through the
surface, the natives will be as comfortably and endearingly Italian as
anybody in the peninsula.
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