Chief Justice Maynard did not disclose the meetings in Monte Carlo, and he did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

Image The photos are included in a motion asking the judge to step aside in the appeal of a $50 million award against Massey.

Ten of the photographs attached to the motion were filed under seal. They showed, the motion said, “two females apparently traveling with them as companions.” The men are single.

The case itself was brought by mining companies that said they had been driven out of business by fraud committed by Massey. “Make no mistake,” Justice Larry V. Starcher wrote in his dissent in November. “A West Virginia jury heard from all the witnesses for both sides, and decided that Mr. Don Blankenship directed an illegal scheme to break” the companies.

Mr. Blankenship and his companies have attracted attention for labor disputes, workplace injuries and what environmentalists call a highly destructive form of mining called mountaintop removal that involves using explosives to blow off the tops of mountains to reach coal seams.

Hugh M. Caperton, the owner and president of Harman Development Corporation, a mining company that Massey was said to have driven out of business, said he was angry when he learned about the photographs, and doubly so when he saw the dates time-stamped on them.

“That’s when all the miners take their families to Myrtle Beach and Pigeon Forge, if they can, if they can afford to,” Mr. Caperton said, referring to vacation spots in South Carolina and Tennessee. “They go camping at the river while the chief justice and Don Blankenship are smiling and frolicking on the French Riviera.”

Stephen Gillers, who teaches legal ethics at New York University School of Law, said Chief Justice Maynard should not have socialized with Mr. Blankenship and should now disqualify himself from the case. Federal judges in Manhattan, Professor Gillers said, will not even have lunch with old friends while they have cases pending in their court.