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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo," William Le Queux crafts a thrilling narrative set against the glamorous and perilous backdrop of early 20th-century Monte Carlo. Through a blend of tantalizing intrigue and romantic tension, the novel immerses readers in the world of high-stakes gambling, espionage, and the secrets that thrive within the opulent casino. Le Queux's literary style is characterized by vivid descriptions and sharp dialogue, capturing the essence of an era marked by both sophistication and danger. The intricate plotting reflects his deep understanding of psychological dynamics, allowing the reader to traverse the labyrinthine relationships and hidden motives of his characters, encapsulating the zeitgeist of a society at the intersection of decadence and moral ambiguity. Le Queux, a prolific author known for his works on crime, espionage, and adventure, draws inspiration from his own experiences as a journalist and traveler. His fascination with international intrigue and the tensions of the pre-World War I period serve as a backdrop for the novel's narrative. Living in a time when the realm of espionage was transforming, Le Queux adeptly fused these elements into an enthralling story that explores the delicate dance between love and deceit. This captivating tale is highly recommended for readers who appreciate a richly woven tapestry of romance and suspense, infused with historical context. "Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo" will not only entertain but also provoke thought about the complexities of human nature and the choices we make under pressure, making it a must-read for aficionados of early 20th-century literature. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo
Table of Contents
Introduction
Where chance masquerades as destiny, reputation, money, and identity are wagered on the same green baize. Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo invites readers into a world where glamour is both a lure and a mask, and where every gesture at the gaming tables reverberates through salons, backrooms, and shadowed promenades. William Le Queux’s story moves with the snap of a card turn, building tension from whispered alliances and sudden reversals. The novel’s fascination lies not merely in the glitter of the Riviera but in how that glitter refracts ambition, secrecy, and desire, promising high stakes and higher risks from the outset.
Written by the British popular novelist William Le Queux, Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo belongs to the mystery–thriller tradition and is set largely in and around the famed casino world of Monaco. First appearing in the early 1920s, it reflects the period’s appetite for cosmopolitan intrigue, swift pacing, and moral puzzles posed against international backdrops. Le Queux, known for tales of espionage and crime, brings to this book the same knack for propulsive suspense that made his earlier work widely read. The result is a period piece whose setting—at once rarefied and perilous—frames a narrative of pursuit, concealment, and the ambiguous uses of power.
At the center stands the enigmatic figure known as the Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo, a woman whose presence draws the ambitious and the desperate to the green tables and beyond. Into her orbit comes an outsider with urgent questions that touch a tainted past and a contested identity. The search for truth quickly becomes a contest of wits conducted in public rooms and private corridors, where polished manners barely contain hidden leverage. Without venturing into revelations, it is enough to say that the story unfolds as a chain of encounters, each turning up fresh complications, and propels the reader from glittering façades to the engines of influence beneath.
Le Queux crafts the experience in a brisk, scene-driven style that privileges momentum and atmosphere. Chapters tighten around crises and evasions, creating the sensation of being swept from carriage to boulevard to salon with little time to breathe. The mood alternates between urbane elegance and sudden menace, capturing the peculiar tension of places where money moves quickly and secrets move faster. Dialogue is sharp, sometimes theatrical, and the descriptive passages sketch the Riviera’s nocturnal glamour without lingering over ornament. Readers encounter a storytelling voice that favors clear stakes, visible clues, and an escalating rhythm that keeps the narrative taut while preserving an air of ambiguity.
Beneath the dazzle, the novel explores appearances versus realities, the moral costs of concealment, and the calculus of risk in a society enthralled by display. Chance and design intersect in ways that force characters to weigh loyalty against self-preservation. The presence of a commanding woman at the narrative’s center complicates expectations about power, reputation, and agency in elite social spaces. Questions of justice—legal, personal, and improvised—thread the plot, asking who gets to define wrongdoing and who pays when truth threatens the comfortable. In a culture of wagers and whispers, the book probes how influence is acquired, traded, and lost, often without a single card officially changing hands.
For contemporary readers, the book’s relevance lies in its portrait of spectacle as currency and of information as leverage—concerns as timely now as in the early twentieth century. The Riviera setting anticipates modern globalized leisure zones where wealth, status, and secrecy collide. It suggests how attraction to glamour can distract from systemic corruption, and how reputations are constructed and undone through networks of rumor and surveillance. The novel also offers a lens on gendered authority, tracing how charisma and control operate within and around established hierarchies. In this way, it raises enduring questions about consent, complicity, and the ethics of ends-versus-means in high-stakes environments.
Approached as a classic popular thriller, Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo promises immersion in atmospheric locales, tight plotting, and a cast whose motives are rarely simple. It rewards readers who enjoy puzzle-like narratives embedded in social worlds where etiquette conceals danger. The period milieu is part of the appeal, offering a snapshot of interwar sensibilities alongside the timeless tug of ambition and fear. While some attitudes reflect its era, the book’s central tensions—about identity, power, and the price of secrets—remain resonant. Enter prepared for swift turns, elegant surfaces, and a steady, mounting unease that invites you to read on, even as the stakes keep rising.
Synopsis
On the glittering Riviera, the figure known as Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo presides over the gaming rooms with poise and mystery. She is famed for her beauty, discretion, and rumored influence, moving among princes, financiers, and adventurers with equal ease. Around her swirls an air of dangerous glamour, where fortunes change in a turn of the wheel and whispered scandals travel faster than telegrams. Observers sense that she knows more than she says, and that her elegant self-possession conceals formidable power. The novel opens within this charged atmosphere, using the casino’s bright lights and silent calculations to frame a story of secrets and pursuit.
In England, a sudden and shocking crime sets the central plot in motion. A respected gentleman is found dead under circumstances that suggest both calculation and betrayal. His son, a young Englishman with more resolve than experience, discovers hints that his father’s private affairs were entangled with people beyond the Channel. Among the items left behind are cryptic references, veiled letters, and a suggestion that the path to truth runs through Monte Carlo. Pressed by suspicion at home and uncertainty abroad, he resolves to follow these traces to the Riviera, believing that the enigmatic Mademoiselle holds the key to his family’s peril.
Arriving at Monte Carlo, the protagonist steps into a world where wealth, rumor, and risk overlap. He observes Mademoiselle from a cautious distance: perfectly composed at the roulette table, politely unreachable in her circle, and shadowed by figures who may be companions or watchers. The more he inquires, the more he attracts attention. A discreet warning suggests he abandon his search, while a second message tempts him onward with the promise of disclosure. Between the salon’s murmurs and the hotel’s corridors, he senses unseen forces measuring his moves. The trail, instead of clarifying, opens into a maze of coded gestures and half-truths.
As he probes further, official scrutiny tightens. Foreign police register his presence; private agents test his nerve. He is followed along the Corniche, diverted by staged accidents, and pressed by questions that reveal how little he understands. A photograph, an engraved trinket, and a name heard twice in different mouths form a fragile chain of evidence. An attempted rendezvous collapses into pursuit, leaving him with one crucial clue and the realization that his father’s death connects to a broader, organized design. The balance shifts from curiosity to survival as he navigates between legal authority, covert networks, and Mademoiselle’s inscrutable orbit.
Parallel glimpses of Mademoiselle’s life deepen the puzzle without resolving it. She is courted by noblemen, respected by sharp-eyed habitués, and feared in whispers by those who frequent shadowy back rooms. Hospitality at her villa is impeccable, yet carefully controlled. She receives messages by routes that avoid the post and speaks in guarded phrases about honor, debt, and retribution. Rumors link her to a masterful figure in the European underworld, a rival whose influence extends across borders. Whether she opposes such forces, collaborates with them, or plays both sides remains unclear. Her every gesture suggests knowledge of past wrongs that now shape present dangers.
The investigation shifts to Paris, where the young man deciphers fragments found among his father’s papers. Hints of a secret transaction, a compromised trust, and a name long thought respectable point to a hidden bargain gone awry. In discreet cafés and offices near the boulevards, he meets allies who may be informants or opportunists. A lawyer offers guidance with conditions; a journalist knows too much about a theft never reported. A cipher yields a location and a date, while a second code, once cracked, reveals a caution rather than a destination. The Paris interlude refines the stakes: this is no isolated crime, but a networked scheme.
Back in London and the English countryside, the plot tightens around reputation and inheritance. Bankers ask polite questions with sharp implications; a private safe reveals an omission that is itself a clue. The authorities’ interest grows, yet their protection is uncertain. A young woman close to the protagonist complicates matters through her own obligations, creating a personal strand interwoven with the larger mystery. A near-fatal incident underscores the cost of missteps. Piece by piece, the protagonist reconstructs a timeline that suggests his father was targeted for reasons that extend beyond money. The path forward points once more to the Riviera and Mademoiselle’s guarded knowledge.
The threads converge on the Mediterranean coast. In a private interview, Mademoiselle speaks in precise, measured terms that confirm some suspicions while withholding final names and motives. She acknowledges a past entanglement that touches the dead man’s fate and alludes to a reckoning already set in motion. As rival parties arrive—officers, emissaries, and those who prefer darkness—alignments shift quickly. A tense exchange in a luminous salon gives way to a decisive encounter beyond the casino’s glare. Without disclosing decisive particulars, the narrative resolves the central questions in a series of revelations and choices that restore order, settle accounts, and clarify Mademoiselle’s formidable, if enigmatic, role.
The conclusion emphasizes consequences more than spectacle. Truth emerges through patience, observation, and the willingness to see beyond appearances. The protagonist secures vindication and a future no longer defined by doubt, while the intricate web of deceit is laid bare to those with the authority to act. Mademoiselle’s final presence reflects the novel’s central tension between glamour and judgment: she remains an emblem of power tempered by private codes. The book’s message aligns with its settings—where chance and calculation constantly interact—suggesting that justice can be achieved when courage meets insight, even in worlds where the stakes are hidden behind elegance and reserve.
Historical Context
Set chiefly in the glittering principality of Monaco and its district Monte Carlo, the novel unfolds in the liminal years between the Belle Époque and the unsettled early 1920s. The Casino de Monte-Carlo, luxury hotels, and cosmopolitan boulevards attract aristocrats, financiers, and adventurers from Paris and London, whose movements are made easy by express trains along the Côte d’Azur. Behind the façade of music, opera, and gaming lies a dense network of private clubs, discreet villas, and vigilant police. The time and place favor secrecy: prewar opulence lingers amid postwar scarcity, while neutral Monaco’s proximity to France and Italy makes it a crossroads for fortune, espionage, and crime.
Monte Carlo’s prominence grew during the Belle Époque (c. 1871–1914), when Charles III promoted gambling to stabilize Monaco’s finances. François Blanc founded the Société des Bains de Mer in 1863, built the casino and the Hôtel de Paris (1864), and lured Europe’s elite via new rail links. The Opéra de Monte-Carlo (1879), designed by Charles Garnier, anchored a cultured image; the Monte Carlo Rally began in 1911, showcasing modernity and spectacle. This milieu of conspicuous wealth and international visitors forms the novel’s stage. It explains the steady flow of titled gamblers, financiers, and adventurers whose mingled fortunes and secrets create the volatile, temptation-rich atmosphere the plot exploits.
The pre–First World War spy scare profoundly shaped European politics and popular culture. Britain’s Secret Service Bureau was established in 1909, dividing into MI5 (headed by Vernon Kell) and the foreign section later known as MI6 (led by Mansfield Cumming). William Le Queux, a journalist-novelist, amplified fears with The Invasion of 1910 (1906) and Spies of the Kaiser (1909), serialized in the Daily Mail. These works encouraged vigilance against foreign agents in peacetime resorts and ports. Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo reflects that climate: dossiers, shadowy networks, and coded encounters at cafés and casinos mirror the era’s conviction that leisure spaces on the Riviera doubled as arenas for clandestine state and criminal activity.
The First World War (1914–1918) upended mobility, wealth, and loyalties across Europe. Monaco remained neutral, yet its economy and residents were intertwined with France; wartime passport controls (Britain added photographs in 1915) and surveillance reshaped travel to the Riviera. Demobilization produced a floating population of veterans, speculators, and displaced persons, while fluctuating currencies and war debts destabilized fortunes. The novel’s world of aliases, forged documents, and nervous border crossings rests on these realities. Characters maneuver through a landscape where information is currency, and where wartime habits of secrecy persist in peacetime, allowing intrigue to thrive in Monte Carlo’s salons even as Europe struggles to return to normalcy.
Monaco’s internal politics also changed. The Monegasque Revolution of 1910–1911 pressed Prince Albert I to grant a constitution (5 March 1911), creating a National Council and formalizing rights. After the war, the Franco-Monegasque Treaty of 17 July 1918 bound Monaco’s foreign policy to France and addressed succession anxieties: Prince Louis lacked a legitimate heir, and without action the throne might pass to the German Duke of Urach. In 1919 Louis adopted his daughter Charlotte; she married Pierre de Polignac in 1920, ensuring a French-aligned succession. The novel’s anxieties about sovereignty, discreet diplomacy, and the leverage of secret knowledge echo these negotiations over autonomy and dynastic legitimacy.
The 1917 Russian Revolution and ensuing civil war (1918–1921) produced a wave of White émigrés who settled along the Côte d’Azur, from Nice to Monte Carlo. Aristocrats and officers liquidated jewels and art to survive; high-end jewelers in Paris and the Riviera handled distressed sales, while cafés and private clubs became hubs of exile society. Their presence altered the social mix, adding stories of lost estates, hidden caches, and political vendettas. The novel taps this context: enigmatic exiles with impeccable manners and uncertain pasts circulate amid gamblers and fixers, and the circulation of diamonds or pearls becomes both a plot device and an index of post-imperial dislocation.
The early twentieth century saw modernization of policing against increasingly internationalized crime. Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometry and later fingerprinting entered French practice (fingerprints accepted in courts by 1912), and Edmond Locard founded a pioneering forensic laboratory in Lyon in 1910. Cross-border collaboration culminated in the International Criminal Police Commission (Interpol) in 1923. Simultaneously, the Riviera experienced sensational jewel thefts and hotel robberies, exploiting fast trains, new automobiles, and porous frontiers. The novel mirrors this environment: detectives consult continental colleagues, rely on dossiers and forensic hints, and pursue thieves or blackmailers who move swiftly between Paris, the Riviera, and Italy, confident that jurisdictional seams can be manipulated.
As social and political critique, the book exposes the moralized veneer of European high society, where gambling revenues, discreet diplomacy, and private vice sustain public splendor. It probes class divides between princely patrons and the labor that serves them, revealing how law favoritism and personal connections shield elites while small offenders are crushed. The independent woman at its center both inhabits and challenges a male economy of surveillance and coercion, echoing contemporary debates over women’s autonomy and respectability. More broadly, it scrutinizes the postwar security state: files, informants, and border controls appear as instruments that can protect the public, yet also enable corruption, blackmail, and political intrigue.
