LIFE slowed in Monaco yesterday as the tiny nation saluted Prince Rainier, whose death at dawn at the age of 81 marked its first change of ruler since 1949.

Far from the emotion of the Pope’s death, Monaco’s mourning was typically discreet, after the widely expected news that the Prince, who had been in intensive care for two weeks, had succumbed to the heart, lung and kidney conditions that had dogged him for the past decade.

Prince Albert, the 47-year-old son of Rainier and Grace Kelly, the former film star, inherits the 600-year-old throne to Europe’s second-smallest state — after the Vatican. The unmarried Prince, who has emerged over the past year from under his father’s shadow, had been appointed regent a week ago.

He remained out of sight, but Princess Caroline, his older sister, was ushered into the palace from her hillside home. The Prince’s death means Queen Elizabeth becomes Europe’s longest-reigning monarch.

The body of Rainier, who ruled the rockside enclave with an iron hand, turning it from seedy resort into a high-tech tax haven, was taken from the waterside clinic to the Grimaldi family’s clifftop palace.

The principality’s 7,600 pampered citizens and 23,000 other residents will be able to attend a lying in state before his interment in the crypt of the Monaco Cathedral, beside the grave of Princess Grace, who was killed in a car accident in 1982.

A state funeral will be held tomorrow week. Until then, the Casino, the principality’s prime attraction until Rainier’s modernisation, will remain closed.

In contrast to the mass mourning in Rome, the baroque cathedral was quiet with only a few residents in prayer. A television monitor beside the nave played a diaporama of photographs from Rainier’s life, showing him laughing with the Princesses Caroline and Stephanie, his two daughters, now 48 and 40. Alongside stood a portrait of Pope John Paul II, for whom Monaco’s red and white flags were already at half-mast.

Shop windows were decorated with black crepe in honour of the popular monarch.

“Everyone here feels orphaned,” Patrick Leclercq, the Monaco Minister of State, said.

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