I’ve just got here, to Paris,
From the sunny southern shore
I to Monte Carlo went,
Just to raise me winter’s rent
Dame Fortune smiled upon me
As she’d never smiled before,
And I’ve now got lots of money, I’m a gent,
Yes, I’ve now got lots of rhino, I’m a gent
As I walk along the Bois de Boulogne
With an independent air
You can hear the girls declare,
‘He must be a millionaire.’
You can hear them sigh and wish to die,
You can see them wink the other eye
At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo
(×2)
I stay indoors till after lunch,
and then me daily walk
To the great Triumphal Arch
Is a grand triumphal march,
Observed by each observer
with the keenness of a hawk,
I’m a mass of money, linen, silk and starch
I’m a mass of money, linen, silk and starch
As I walk along the Bois de Boulogne
With an independent air
You can hear the girls declare,
‘He must be a millionaire.’
You can hear them sigh and wish to die,
You can see them wink the other eye
At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo
(×2)
I patronised the tables at the Monte Carlo hell
Till they hadn’t got a sou
for a Christian or a Jew;
So I quickly went to Paris
for the charms of mademoiselle,
Who's the darling of me heart
What can I do?
When with twenty tongues she swears
that she’ll be true?
As I walk along the Bois de Boulogne
With an independent air
You can hear the girls declare,
‘He must be a millionaire.’
You can hear them sigh and wish to die,
You can see them wink the other eye
At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo
(×2)
Wells' family was English, but moved to France when he was a young boy. As an adult he originally had a respectable job as an engineer at a shipyard in Marseille. He was obviously clever: in 1868 he invented a device which would regulate the speed of a ship propeller and sold its patent for a tidy sum. Somewhere along the line though, it all went wrong... a decade later Wells was in Paris persuading people to invest in a fraudulent railway scheme. He absconded with all the money and crossed the Channel to England; he was convicted in absentia by a French court. In Britain, Wells continued his fraudulent ways, bilking unwary investors in a series of shady schemes then disappearing with the funds. In the summer of 1891 Wells turned up in Monte Carlo with some of his ill-gotten gains; he broke the bank for the first time then, winning over a million French francs at roulette. He returned in November of the same year and broke the bank again.
Some people speculate that, considering Wells' penchant for crime, he found some way to cheat at roulette. Most believe however that he used a variation of the Martingale strategy. Essentially, when playing a game with roughly 50/50 odds- like the roulette ball landing on red or black- a player doubles their bet after every loss, gambling that the ball will land to the right colour often enough for their increased wagers to cover their previous losses and add to their profit. Wells appears to have at least partially used this method, and been very lucky.
Charles Wells used some of his winnings to purchase a ship which he had transformed into a luxury yacht which included a ballroom large enough for 50 dancers. The following year however, his luck ran out. He attempted another win at Monte Carlo, but lost about 100,000 francs instead. Then, while docked in Le Havre, he was arrested aboard his yacht and extradited to Britain where he was tried and found guilty of 23 counts of fraud; in 1893 he was sentenced to 8 years in prison. He served 6 years before being paroled; apparently before he left, he played The Man That Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo on the organ in the prison's chapel.
Unfortunately, Wells had not learned his lesson: he moved to Ireland, set up a fake fishing company which he used to swindle investors, and ended up in jail once again. In 1910 he was back in Paris living under an assumed name (Lucien Rivier, one of at least 12 aliases he used over the years) where he set up a private bank, promising investors incredible- one might say, unbelievable- interest returns. It was a textbook Ponzi scheme, run ten years before Charles Ponzi ever got around to starting one. When suspicious French authorities started asking questions about this "bank" Wells once again fled to England, taking his investors' money with him. It took a couple of years but the French police eventually figured out that Rivier was actually Wells. It probably didn't help that he had used the stolen money to buy another luxury yacht. He was arrested while docked at Falmouth in 1912 and extradited to Paris for his trial where he was sentenced to 5 years in prison for this latest fraud. He was 70 years old at this point.
Here's Charles Coborn singing the song: