Poor Monaco, so misunderstood.
Poor royalty, so misunderstood.
When you're prince of an itty-bitty country not much larger than a casino chip - OK, 481 acres, less than a solitary square mile - it's easy for people to think all you do is frolic and romp, and every sunny day is just one long fete.
Mais non, said Prince Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre, Marquis des Baux, here in town to host the awards ceremony of the Princess Grace Foundation last evening.
Actually, he said this in English. He speaks it flawlessly, which is understandable considering he's half-Philadelphian and an Amherst graduate. He
hasn't a soupcon of an accent - well, maybe he rolls his R's a bit - which is too bad, because there's nothing like a French accent, unless it's a Monegasque one.
"Time off? What's time off?" said the prince, who wasn't wearing a crown, a sash, or a single medal. He was dressed like a Swiss banker on holiday, in a double-breasted navy blazer, silk tie, white shirt, gray slacks and black shoes that were wonderfully unscuffed, but then you'd expect royalty to be immaculately shod.
At age 33 (a Pisces), he's 6 feet tall, thin, nice-looking with fine features (all those tabloid photos just don't do him justice), quite shy and terribly serious. And, yes, it is a cliche, but he's charming. What else would a prince be?
The prince, like the rest of us, has a job. "Well, basically what I'm doing is my dad sends me out on missions. No, I can't say missions. It's going to make me sound like a secret agent," said the prince, sitting in his suite at the Hotel Atop the Bellevue. (Which was the QE2 suite, named after the British monarch and the boat, and not a Monegasque royal.) "No, I'm sort of his envoy for different organizations. I sit in on several government meetings, sort of his eyes and ears on various projects, and I work fairly closely with him."
He travels all the time, mostly for business - the royalty business. "I saw James Baker's travel miles the other day," the prince said. "I'm pretty much up there with him. I haven't kept a precise count. I'd say 150,000 miles."
