ONCE UPON A PRINCIPALITY

That dwindling species, the nostalgic road-racing enthusiast, has few havens these days from the agents of progress, but for the time being, at least, he can depend on Grace and Rainier to preserve their fairy-tale competition in that improbable fiefdom by the Mediterranean. Next week brings the 28th Monaco Grand Prix: the splendid cars, the narrow streets, the Jackie Stewarts and Mario Andrettis and Jochen Rindts, the sense of wonder that any event so romantically out of sync with the times exists at all. On these pages the French artist Sempé offers up a valentine to the last of the great round-the-houses races, and to all the incurables who choose to attend.

Pit pets, with and without specs, are as essential to the Grand Prix scene as the chandeliered splendors of the Hôtel de Paris, where simultaneously one may sample the past and view the present.

Little old ladies reading Proust tend to be impervious to Grand Prix heroics, but the tableau at left will leave spectators with livelier memories—-of a disabled car, an unseated driver.

FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS