text: During the late 17th century and early 18th century, while Monaco was officially an independent state, it was in reality a province of France. Its rulers spent much of their time at the French court, in this way resembling the absentee landlords so prevalent at the time amongst the French aristocracy. The lure of Versailles was greater than that of their own country.
  Honoré II was succeeded by his grandson, Prince Louis I. The new prince had an urbane personality and spent much time with his wife at the French court, where he enjoyed the unusual distinction of being both a foreign head of state and a peer of France. Impressed by the palaces of the French king, who had employed the architect Jean du Cerceau to carry out alterations to the palace at Fontainebleau, Louis I used Fontainebleau as the inspiration for enhancements to his palace at Monaco. Thus he was responsible for two of the palace's most notable features: the entrance—a huge Baroque arch surmounted by a broken pediment bearing the Grimaldi Arms (Illustration 10)—and more memorable still, a double horseshoe staircase modelled on that at Fontainebleau. The thirty steps which compose the staircase are said to have been sculpted from a single block of Carrara marble. Both the architrave of the new entrance and the horseshoe stairs were designed by Antoine Grigho, an architect from Como.