Chance

Like a bull walrus on a rock, old Louis II, Prince of Monaco, basked contentedly in the Mediterranean sun. At 75, Europe's No. 1 amateur ichthyologist and ruler of its smallest principality (370 acres, 1,761 Monegasques) might well feel that in history's game of chance, luck had been with him. Of all the Continent's occupied countries, Monaco was perhaps the least scarred.

When France fell, Francophile Prince Louis had proclaimed: Monaco must be "an oasis." Eventually the Germans came to Monaco too--at first in mufti to relax in the Prince's fabelhaft (fabulous) Casino and to goggle earnestly at his fabelhaft aquarium. Before they left, they had stripped the great gambling Casino in Monte Carlo of its copper dome, placed ack-ack batteries in the Tir aux Pigeons (one of Europe's famed shooting grounds), sowed mines in the sun-drenched beach. Even now Prince Louis could hear the lethal crump! crump! as Allied engineers exploded the mines.

Gone Was the Glamor. But the roulette wheels were still spinning. Monaco had remained an oasis of pleasurable chance in Europe's desert of desperate chances. The wheels were spinning now. True, for U.S. soldiers redeploying from the Riviera, Monte Carlo was out of bounds. True, there were no Britons, Germans, Russians, Italians or Latin Americans, no glittering titles, no lavish profligates. Gambling's heroic days were gone: the days when the Princess Suvarov (descendant of Russia's famed general) assaulted the bank at Monte Carlo for a solid month and left it with a daily deficit; the days when German Crown Prince Wilhelm won 2,000,000 francs on the eve of World War I, in which his father and he were about to gamble away an empire; the days when gay Edward VII brought along the prim Prince of Wales (later George V) who said: "It's like a Turkish bath in there. Goodness knows how Father manages to stick it!''; and Alexandra, Tsarina of all the Russias, who brought along a whole corps of the Imperial Ballet to dance while she gambled--chance can be such a bore.

In Polo Shirts. Now the carpets in Prince Louis's Casino were threadbare. Only two gambling rooms were open, for chance's devotees had shrunk to a handful of shabby Frenchmen and Spaniards, a Greek, a Turk. Some of the players--oh, calamity--wore polo shirts. One wrinkled woman, 92, still wagered 50-franc chips as she had done daily for a quarter century. Others jotted down numbers in notebooks. These were the survivors.

Perhaps the change that disturbed the old Prince most was something shiny and plastic in the Casino's foyer: a U.S. and a French slot machine, both geared to take one-franc coins. But, plus c,a change, plus c'est la meee chose. Slot machines or roulette tables--Prince Louis still had his principality. Europe was still willing to take chances.

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