Dirty Bertie Page 17

  It might have been simpler to say, ‘Honest, he’s only going there for the sex.’ Though to be fair to Bertie, that wouldn’t have been entirely true. At Disraeli’s insistence, he paid a visit to the new President of France, Patrice de Mac Mahon, a marshal who had seen action in the Crimea, where he was credited with winning the siege of Sebastopol. He had also fought alongside Napoléon III at the Battle of Sedan, where he had been wounded and taken prisoner, before being released by the Prussians so that he could lead the ‘Versaillais’ army that massacred the Communards. The new President was a staunch royalist, even more anti-republican than Adolphe Thiers.

  Mac Mahon’s family, who claimed descendance from Irish kings, owned a superb château in Burgundy, and he took Bertie shooting, a bonding exercise during which their royalist sympathies no doubt gelled. According to Bertie’s biographer André Maurois, when the two men sat down at dinner, the centrepiece on the table was a vase of ferns, which Bertie interpreted as a sign of French rebirth. He may not have been sympathetic to wild animals, but where plants were concerned he was obviously quite the poet.

  Bertie also took up the invitation of the former Ambassador to London, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia, to stay at the glorious Château d’Esclimont, some seventy kilometres southwest of Paris. It is the epitome of a Renaissance château with its conical peaked towers, moat and wooded hunting grounds – the perfect place to forget that the Commune ever happened. Here, the Duc had assembled a veritable mob of monarchists to greet Bertie and make his return to the French good life a memorable one.

  Most memorable of all was Hélène Standish, the glamorous 27-year-old wife of Henry Standish, who was a French aristocrat despite his name – his father was an Englishman who had moved to France and married into blue French blood. Hélène Standish was of noble birth herself, and was by all accounts both classy and sexy – exactly the kind of woman who attracted Bertie to France. Like others who sensed that he occasionally needed some subliminal excuse for his adulterous adventures, Hélène often dressed like Alexandra, in a high collar and tight bodice, and even possessed a startlingly similar face. Bertie had met her in London the previous year and now made sure that he wouldn’t waste his golden opportunity to pursue their acquaintance.

  Back in Paris, Bertie was seen entering Hélène’s house (or rather, her husband’s house) on the chic avenue d’Iéna, near the Arc de Triomphe, where he apparently spent ‘many hours’. We know this because he was being followed by the Parisian police who, unlike many of their royalist politicians, were anxious to protect their new republic, and didn’t want the English Prince plotting to bring it down.

  The police were right to have their suspicions, because a coup d’état was a real possibility. Bertie’s royalist friends in Paris had started organizing banquets in their hôtels particuliers in the old medieval neighbourhoods, away from the flashy boulevards, as if to demonstrate to the city that theirs was a longer-lasting aristocracy than the fake one created by the nouveau-riche Napoléon III.

  Bertie attended some of these parties before travelling north of Paris to Chantilly, to see more evidence of the growing royalist resurgency. He paid a visit chez his old friend Henri d’Orléans, Duc d’Aumale, the third surviving son of former King Louis-Philippe. Bertie had met Henri while he was living in Twickenham following his father’s abdication, and been instantly impressed. Bertie told a friend that he loved talking to Henri because he represented ‘the flower of exquisite French politeness. Every time I speak to him I feel as though I am receiving a lesson in French history. His knowledge is so vast and his memories are so precise.’ Henri had returned to France as soon as the Commune was over, and was now a general with a whole army under his command. The preparations for a new royalist page in France’s history book couldn’t have been clearer.

  Henri’s country seat, the Château de Chantilly, had escaped being requisitioned by both Napoléon III and the new French republic because it was a complete ruin. Now Henri was back on his home turf and having the château completely rebuilt, transforming it into the veritable palace that it is today. The intention was clear – this was to be a home fit for a king.

  In Henri’s vast personal forest, Bertie rode to hounds, ostensibly to hunt stags, but he was probably more interested in pursuing one of the other riders, the scandalous Anne-Alexandrine-Jeanne-Marguerite Seillière de Sagan, famous for ball gowns that, according to one witness, ‘left the company in no possibility of doubting the symmetry of her limbs and general shapeliness of her person’. She was the flirt who had confided to Bertie at their first meeting in 1867 that she was unhappily married5 – and at the Chantilly hunt, he took the hint. They became lovers, and their affair was even formalized by inspiring an obscene French pun. It was said of them that ‘Sagan est son gant’ – ‘Sagan is his glove’.

  Bertie followed Madame de Sagan as far as her own home at Mello, just north of Chantilly, where she too had had the builders in. Work had recently finished on a new Renaissance-style château, replacing a castle dating back to Louis XV that Madame had considered too plain. The interior was renowned to be one of the most lavishly furnished and decorated in the country. Anne-Alexandrine-Jeanne-Marguerite was a financier’s daughter who knew how to spend money.

  Perhaps inspired by the château’s name, Bertie was obviously feeling mellow, because while there he excused himself from the other guests and retired with his hostess into her boudoir for some privacy. But he was too complacent and left his clothes where they could be seen by Madame de Sagan’s son. The jealous teenager picked them up and threw them into a fountain. When his mother found out, she was so furious that she sent him away to a religious boarding school. In her house, children should neither be seen nor heard, especially when she was with one of her lovers.

  In this sophisticated set, jealousy was confined to youngsters, and also present at that Mello house party was Hélène Standish, Bertie’s other notable conquest on this trip. So he was sleeping with the mistress of the house in the presence of a second mistress.

  Apparently only one woman refused Bertie’s attentions on this trip, but in a playful, almost Alexandra-like way that must have made him chuckle. After spending an evening practising his French subjunctives into the ear of a certain Marquise d’Harcourt, the lady finally acquiesced to his advances and told him that she would put a rose outside her bedroom door so that he would be sure to find her. But when Bertie let himself in later that night, he found the bed occupied by the ugliest kitchen maid in the house. The Marquise’s little joke. The question is: Was Bertie bothered? As the French proverb goes, ‘In the dark, all cats are grey.’ And in the autumn of 1874 he was a man on a mission: with Napoléon III out of the game, he had to prove to himself that he could don his mentor’s mantle and become Paris’s alpha male.

  The omens were excellent. Bertie had overcome typhoid, just as Paris had survived the violence that had destroyed the Tuileries. He had come to France despite the opposition of his Teuton mother, just as Paris had shrugged off the memory of its Prussian occupiers. Now his charms were working again, and Frenchwomen were as desirable and available as ever. Paris was his oyster – no, his oyster buffet, to be consumed at will.

  So what if one marquise wasn’t interested? Bof, the kitchen maid was warm, willing and no doubt in complete awe of her royal visitor . . .

  It was official – Bertie, and Paris, were back.

  * * *

  1 See Chapter 5.

  2 Interestingly, Londesborough Lodge was repeatedly put on the market between 2009 and 2013 by its owners, Scarborough Borough Council, and failed to find a buyer despite being hyped as a house in which Edward VII had stayed.

  3 For a more detailed account of the demise of Napoléon III, see 1,000 Years of Annoying the French. By the way, no doubt in a spirit of political fairness, the British also put paid to King Louis-Philippe.

  4 Prime Minister Gladstone is said to have taken Skittles’s measurements with his hands. Learning that he was fon
d of visiting prostitutes and trying to ‘convert’ them, she invited him to her house, where he complimented her on her figure and gripped her waist to stress his point. She thought the visit was hilarious, and told Bertie all about it.

  5 See Chapter 4.

  9

  THE FRENCH TRY TO BE ENGLISH

  ‘The cut of his coat, the shape of his hat, even the colour of his gloves, were like laws.’

  James de Chambrier, French writer, on Bertie’s clothes

  I

  EVEN IN HIS new format – rounder and balder – Bertie was still a popular sight around Paris. The locals were, overall, glad to see him return. As one of his French biographers, Philippe Jullian, expresses it, his attitude during the difficult period they had just lived through ‘proved the Prince’s loyalty to France’. Though Jullian was lucid about the reason for this fidelity: ‘To people of a superficial nature, the strongest ties are those of pleasure. And he showed that he was not ungrateful to us for having amused him.’

  Bertie was a very recognizable sight, even in the days before the omnipresence of photographs. Having little to occupy him other than his personal habits, he was maniacal about his clothes. Wherever he went, he was always careful to dress exactly comme il faut. Parisians kept an eye out for him not only to see what mischief he might be getting up to, and with whom, but also for hints as to how they themselves should be dressing. It seems incredible, but at that time Paris looked to a plump Londoner for fashion tips.

  But Bertie was more than a simple fashion victim. He had enough money to make his every sartorial whim a reality, as well as the self-assurance to wear what he liked. In short, as a style icon he was a sort of male, nineteenth-century Princess Diana – the ironic thing about this being that he had originally learnt his fashion sense from the very people who now admired him for it.

  Bertie had first witnessed the French in all their finery when he came to Paris with his parents in 1855. However, the real importance of being sharply dressed would only have dawned on the Prince when he began visiting Napoléon and Eugénie as a young man, and realized how high the fashion bar was set.

  The imperial couple were strict taskmasters, demanding precisely the right dress for each occasion. It was a fashion dictatorship. At each of their six annual balls, the invitation specified that men should be ‘en uniforme’, so that all the officers turned out in their regimental colours, sporting the kind of braided jackets that the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix would adopt a century later as their own psychedelic uniform. Meanwhile, at every official function, the foreign dignitaries would be smothered in sashes and medals, and usually dressed up in some kind of national army uniform, even if they had never drawn a sabre in anger. Civilian men had to follow a strict dress code that was subtly different for each type of occasion, consisting of a variation on black tails, tight white waistcoat and high collar, black knickerbockers and knee-length stockings – all of which spawned a highly profitable costume rental industry in Paris. Bertie was a guest of honour at almost every Parisian reception he attended, and would therefore have received a detailed briefing before each event so that he would be perfectly attired. For men at the imperial court, there was no room for improvisation.

  Standards of dress were just as demanding for the women guests, though they were freer to personalize their costume, because the principal role of a female at Napoléon’s court was to look stunning (though not quite as stunning as Eugénie, of course). A single ball gown could make or break a woman’s reputation. In his memoirs of life during the Second Empire, the Comte de Maugny describes a countess who shone at court because of ‘the perfection of her features, the academic purity of her curves . . . and her brilliant choice of lovers’. This lady once arrived at a fancy-dress ball at 2 a.m. (after the imperial couple had left, so as not to eclipse the Empress) dressed as a Roman goddess. Her skimpy dress was slit down one side from top to bottom, revealing erotic expanses of outer thigh and what de Maugny calls ‘a foot of unreal perfection’ left half-naked by an open sandal. Yes, a woman was showing her toes in public. It is hard to imagine anything similar happening at one of Victoria’s sober gatherings.

  When the young Bertie first ventured outside the imperial palace, he would have seen that well-off Parisians about town were also stylishly dressed. Daytime wear for chic men at that time was a long, buttoned-up jacket, a stiff high collar, a very tall top hat, accompanied by gloves worn thin and tight to prove that you didn’t need to use them for anything practical. The outward style was similar to that of rich young men in London, but in Paris this playboy set reigned as uncontested masters over whole sections of the city, strutting along every boulevard as if they were in the grounds of their châteaux. And as we have seen, many of these wealthy Parisians did possess châteaux – the hôtels particuliers – in the city.

  As soon as Bertie had got the measure of these Parisian high standards, he took them back to London and adapted them to his life there, getting his tailor, Henry Poole of Savile Row, to add what the French now like to call ‘le British touch’ and creating his own personal style – which he then re-imported into Paris. The French loved it, and the adjective most frequently used about Bertie was ‘impeccable’. Here is Xavier Paoli, the French police commissaire who would later be his official bodyguard, catching sight of him for the first time in the 1870s:

  Beneath the impeccable cut of a navy-blue tweed suit, his gait was fluid and remarkably relaxed. From the expertly tied knot of his tie to the fine silk handkerchief peeping from his breast pocket; from the gold-handled bamboo cane tucked under his arm to the perfumed Havana between his lips; from the light-grey felt hat that he wore tipped slightly to the left to the yellow suede gloves with black trimming, everything suggested sober elegance and subtle refinement.

  The French policeman, a representative of the Republic, was instantly under the suave Prince’s spell.

  Bertie is credited with several sartorial inventions. If we are to believe some sources, he was the first man in the world to have turn-ups on his trousers, after going for a walk in the country and shortening his trouser legs so they wouldn’t get wet. He is also said to have started the fashion for leaving one’s lowest waistcoat button undone when he began loosening his clothes to accommodate his burgeoning waistline. This plumpness then led to him leaving his jacket completely unbuttoned, a fashion that Parisian men of all girths adopted. And proving that he was always open to new ideas, Bertie also began a craze for uncreased trousers after a valet accidentally ironed along the seams instead of putting a sharp crease in the front and back of the leg.

  His greatest invention, though, was the dinner jacket. Legend has it that it was Bertie who first requested a short jacket for evening wear from Henry Poole. This may not sound as ground-breaking as the discovery of penicillin or the invention of the steam engine, but it is surely no bad thing that a British royal once conceived an idea more universal than marrying six wives or invading France.

  As the story goes, the long frock coat with tails was becoming less and less popular in London for informal wear in the 1850s and 1860s. The tails were first removed for horse-riding in Hyde Park, for practical reasons, and then for general town wear. In the evening, though, tails were a must for anyone who wanted to look chic. Men got into the habit of putting a straight-collared velvet jacket over their evening suit when they went off to smoke after dinner so that their clothes wouldn’t stink of stale cigars, and this smoking jacket1 gradually became shorter. Apparently it was Bertie who first asked Henry Poole to make a smoking jacket out of black wool, with a silk collar so that it could be worn all evening at more informal get-togethers with friends (like Napoléon and Eugénie, he had innumerable sub-divisions of formality in his various residences). Perhaps Bertie was just too lazy to change into and out of a smoking jacket, or – more probably – he wanted smoking to be a permanent fixture of the evening rather than limiting it to a post-prandial puff. Either way, the James Bond jacket was born, and has survived to this day.


  Incidentally, Bertie also conspired to give the dinner jacket its other name, the tuxedo. In the summer of 1886, a rich American coffee merchant called James Brown Potter and his wife Cora came to London and were invited to a ball attended by Bertie. The beautiful Cora caught his eye and he invited the couple to dinner. When James asked what he should wear to such an occasion, Bertie told him to consult his tailor.

  Perhaps Bertie had secretly designed a cuckolded husband’s costume equipped with earmuffs and a blindfold, but in the event Henry Poole fitted the American out in one of Bertie’s short dinner jackets. Mr Brown Potter took the jacket home and wore it to a function at his New York country club, Tuxedo Park, from where it spread right across America, branded with its new name. If only Bertie had thought to patent his invention, his gambling debts would have been a thing of the past.

  II

  Bertie was just as influential on women’s fashions in Paris, mainly thanks to his choice of lovers. As we have seen in a previous chapter, his mistresses would sometimes begin dressing like Princess Alexandra as a badge of honour. And because the smartest thing to be in Paris was an English prince’s lover, other women began to adopt the same fashion.

  Alexandra’s sober style led to the abandonment of the crinoline, the parasol-like dress that had turned mid-nineteenth-century women into walking lampshades. This fashion for ultra-wide skirts held out by layers of stiff petticoats had begun in the 1830s, and by the 1850s had become so extreme that the most fashionable women could hardly walk beneath the weight of their underwear, inspiring an American to invent a hooped frame that gave the dress its shape without obliging the woman to wear so many petticoats. The crinoline reached the height (or breadth) of its popularity at Eugénie’s court, where the low-cut bodice left the top half of a lady’s torso enticingly exposed while the domed skirt kept men at arm’s length – at least until a lady stepped out of her evening gown and invited him closer.