IT IS around midnight on a sultry May evening in Monte Carlo, and the Sass Cafe, one of the city's top night spots, is abuzz with the multilingual chatter of its privileged clientele.
Millionaires straight from central casting talk to their "daughters" over bottles of Dom Perignon; gaggles of Chanel clad women sit sipping Perrier at the bar, checking their makeup every five minutes and looking hopeful.
Everyone pretends not to notice when a trim, balding middle aged man in a tailor made Italian suit sweeps through the door accompanied by a svelte young woman. With a minimum of fuss, the manager ushers them through the throng to a corner table in the restaurant, where they sit, evidently searching for conversation, sipping champagne.
The new customer looks unremarkable enough: he could be just another medium height, medium build, mildly attractive billionaire accompanied by another stunning younger woman. But the man at the corner table is Prince Albert, crown prince of Monaco, son of Princess Grace and, officially at least, imminent successor to the Grimaldi crown worn for almost 50 years by his father.
Throughout the dinner Prince Albert looks bored, distracted. He can hardly stifle his yawns when talking to his partner; when they embark on an obligatory dance afterwards, he holds her away from him, as if she were an unsavoury great aunt.
It could just be that, after more than 20 years of dating the world's most beautiful women, Prince Albert (39) is getting tired of the bachelor existence. But it could also be that, in the year marking seven centuries of rule on the spectacular rock by his family, the crown prince is aware there is serious trouble ahead.
Monaco, the principality the size of London's Hyde Park which, hosts the world's wealthiest residents, is being plunged into a time of uncertainty that not even its fabled royal family can hide from. At the heart of the uncertainty is the issue that made this pretty but otherwise unremarkable chunk of the Cote d'Azur what it is: money.
After four decades of matchless economic growth, glamour and wealth, the influx of cash, both from private individual and French state subsidies, is starting to dwindle. A combination of the recession still gripping France and Italy, EMU, the virtual eradication of the Italian Mafia, and the royal family's own personal problems are having consequences that can now be seen in the streets around the fabulous belle epoque casino.
The royal family and the long running question of who will succeed Prince Rainier and when play a pivotal role in the perception of the future by the increasingly apprehensive residents. In a state where the monarch has played the role not solely of ruler but also of financial boss and fixer, there is increasing nervousness that neither Prince Albeit nor any of the possible alternative successors will be able to guide them through the troubled waters that lie ahead.
"Monaco's fortune is based on the past brilliance of Prince Rainier and the royal family in generating publicity and investment," says Roger Louis bianchini, a French author who has been charting the principality's financial affairs for the past two decades.
"The uncertainty about the future of the royal family goes hand in hand with the uncertainty about the future of the principality in general."
The constitution stipulates an all male ruling line, and with Prince Albert showing no signs of acquiring either his father's business brain or a wife Prince Rainier has said he will not abdicate until Prince Albert finds one to provide a successor, the alternative being mooted is for him to stand aside to allow his sister, Princess Caroline, and her son, Andrea, to rule in tandem.
But Andrea is only 13 and there are few indicators that he would be a better boss than his uncle, who last year vigorously denied rumours that he was a homosexual.
"Rainier has presided over every development in Monaco like the managing director of a successful corporation," said the source close to the councillors that fond the principality's token elected body. "His dream was to hand over power to Albert while both he and Princess Grace [herself a formidable businesswoman] were there to guide the reins. With Grace's death [in a Car crash in 1982] everything fell apart.
"Albert is much more intelligent than his image as a playboy suggests, but he is truly more interested in sport than either running Monaco or finding a wife. And that is a real headache for the family."
The rock that Prince Rainier inherited from his grandfather, Louis II, in 1949 was a rundown place, its belle epoque appeal long since faded. Understanding that Monaco had no natural resources and no industry, Prince Rainier created what locals affectionately referred to Monaco Inc, a self perpetuating haven of calm made attractive for the superrich by three key elements: its physical status with residents paying no income or inheritance taxes and enduring no inconvenient inquiries about the origins of their bank deposits' its security, with every street corner under video surveillance and white gloved policemen everywhere; and the ultra glamorous international PR generated by the royal family.
While the crime rate is still the world's lowest - a town crammed with cars that cost more than the average Irish house suffered a total of four vehicle break ins in 1996 - the hiatus in the royal family's PR and the accompanying question mark over the succession mean the image problem is having very real financial consequences.
"The investors who made Monaco what it is came in two waves," says Mr Bianchini. "The Americans came after Rainier married Grace Kelly in 1956, and the Italians came after Princess Caroline married Stefano Casiraghi in 1982."
After Grace died in the car crash, Mr Casiraghi, an athletic, tough and handsome multi millionaire who cut as glamorous a figure in his homeland as she had in hers, was killed in a power boat accident in 1990. "The loss of the glamorous figurehead was a blow from which Monaco has yet to recover, and there is no replacement in the offing," Mr Bianchini says.
WHOEVER inherits the reins of power will have to deal with the consequences of a threat by France to cut down on the 1,700 million francs it contributes to the principality's coffers by way of VAT reimbursement every year.
While Prince Rainier's manoeuvring and negotiating skills are legendary, he may be forced to bow to pressure from a French government undergoing austerity measures to meet the criteria for the European single currency.
A greater long term problem will be to rebuild the business machines so carefully crafted by "le businessman prince". Along with Casiraghi's death and the collapse of the lira after Italy left the ERM. businessmen from the rich Italian industrial heartland in Turin and Milan - just two hours away by Ferrari - no longer feel as wealthy in Monaco as they once did.
They have been replaced, to an extent, by their rather more unsavoury countrymen from dawn south; after the Italian state's dramatic success in crushing the Sicilian Mafia in the mid 1990s, podgy figures sucking on cigars were seen sticking large sums of money into Monaco's "no questions asked" banks.
Although Prince Rainier is said to be alarmed by this development and has taken some steps to counteract it, "the problem", says Mr Bianchini, "is that the chapter of Monaco being a fiscal paradise and tax haven is closing and nobody, including Rainier, seems sure about what to do next."
Prince Albert, who has gradually been taking many of his father's duties, and Prince Rainier have been involved in a project to make Monaco a hi tech paradise, but the signs of uncertainty are clear to see: downmarket coach tours abound as the principality, in the words of one local, "tries to make up in quantity what it is losing in quality".
Opposite the legendary Hotel de Paris, a new casino with no entrance fee and a bank of flashing lights more reminiscent of Brighton Pier, caters for the new, "camman" visitors. Wander past the phalanx of Porsches into the casino itself and you will see a development inconceivable just five years ago: a free buffet designed to attract punters to the increasingly deserted tables inside the fabulous Salle des Jeux.
While Monto Carlo is in no danger of turning into a deprived inner city wasteland, the golden era of Monaco, generated almost entirely by the ruthlessness and genius for publicity of one man, Prince Rainier, is over.
And in his lingering reluctance to abdicate it is clear that he has little faith that his successor - whether it be his son, his grandson, his daughter or a combination of all three can ensure the future of his glamorous little kingdom by the sea.