The Girl-Shy Highness

A 19th century French wit once remarked that there were only two monarchs in the world whose thrones he envied. One was Czar Nicholas, absolute autocrat of 120 million Russians; the other was the Prince of Monaco, who knew most of his subjects by name. Russia's Czar is no more, and the 20th century has whittled down the list of Europe's monarchs to an inconspicuous handful, but in the tiny (half-mile square) principality of Monaco, which huddles precariously between the mountains and the sea on France's Riviera, the Genoese Grimaldi dynasty still rules as it has for just short of 700 years.

Baboons & a Beard. Last week the last of the Grimaldis, his strapping and handsome Serene Highness Prince Rainier III, Due de Valentinois, Marquis des Baux, Baron de St. Lo, Compte de Carlades and seigneur of many another feudal fee, returned home from an African vacation to reassume his duties as absolute Prince of Monaco. His 2,245 subjects, who together with some 20,000 foreigners make up the population of Monaco, gave every sign of being glad to have him back. When the royal motor yacht Deo Juvante II glided past the harbor breakwater at the end of a 7,000-mile cruise, the young (31) prince himself was at the helm, sporting a month-old growth of beard and looking every inch a blue-water sailor. Cheering crowds of Monegasques lined the waterfront to greet him and to gaze in wonder at the deck load of souvenirs he had brought back: cages of live chimpanzees, baboons, gibbons, and marmosets, a pelican, an egret, two gazelles and six baby caymans, all destined for a new national zoo.

Modest Prince Rainier was quick to disclaim any credit for the bag, which he said had been ready and waiting for him on a pier in Conakry: he had merely transported them, not captured them. But he had many another adventurous tale to tell--of spearfishing in the shark-infested waters off Dakar, of a near-drowning as he shot underwater pictures during a raging Atlantic storm, of a 1,200-mile trek through French Guinea and of the difficulties involved in helping his Negro valet purchase a wife in a native village (price: 200,000 francs).

Ward Autocrat. During his five-year reign, the people of Monaco have come to expect and to relish such tales of their Prince's Hemingwayward exploits. Like most European princelings of the present century, Rainier is a connoisseur of fast motorcars and dangerous living. Unlike his largely dispossessed royal counterparts, however, Rainier takes his ruling job seriously. He frequently seeks the advice and aid of wise Father Francis Tucker, his American-born court chaplain, and often drops in for lunch at Tucker's modest rectory. If the autocratic approach seems called for, Rainier can summon that up as well, as a group of Communists found out when they recently tried to hire a hall for a meeting in Monaco. Prince Rainier outlawed all party demonstrations whatever.

The conscientious prince is worried by the falling off in revenues from the tourist trade and the gambling casino at Monte Carlo, which have long been Monaco's prime sources of income. His subjects have another worry: their robust, sporting young Prince is girl-shy. Only once has Rainier's name been publicly linked with that of a woman, a French actress named Gisele Pascal. The publicity so frightened him that he has hardly looked at another woman. Since a 1918 treaty with France provides that if a Prince of Monaco dies without issue, the principality becomes a French protectorate, subject to French taxes. His Serene Highness' tax-free subjects are all enthusiastic matchmakers.

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