Dirty Bertie Read online

  After the collapse of Eugenie’s court and her inflated skirts, things changed. Princess Alexandra was amongst the leaders of a new fashion for a flatter-fronted dress which extended at the back in a sort of train, eventually evolving into a full bustle. Because Alexandra had a scar on her neck from a childhood operation, she would usually wear a choker necklace in public, which also became very fashionable. As her marriage wore on and she became even less sensual than she had been as a young bride, her cleavage disappeared behind higher collars, and, strangely, the eternally sensual Parisiennes adopted this fashion too. In the 1880s Alexandra even inspired Parisian cocottes to imitate her immobile face that one painter of the time, Paul Helleu, described as ‘a silver mirror’.

  These extremes were part of a general French Anglomania largely created by Bertie. Forever turning up in amusing but chic new street fashions, he had shown France that the odd siege or massacre was no reason to abandon a life of fun, and he now became a kind of ideal man for many Parisians – despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the newspapers back in London were constantly complaining about his overspending, his political indiscretions and his fondness for other men’s wives.

  It was for Bertie that the French imported the English style of hunting – that is, driving creatures towards shotguns and massacring them. In the autumn of 1874, Bertie’s friend the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia organized a pheasant hunt at Esclimont, his château in the forest just outside Paris. Journalists from the newspaper Le Figaro were invited along to witness the novel event, and reported that the Duc and the other French royalists were mostly rotten shots, but that Bertie was a fine marksman, personally bagging eighty birds. They were too diplomatic, or too ill informed, to reveal that the Duc had wisely ordered several hundred dead pheasants from a poulterer to make sure that the hunt flattered his guests.

  On Bertie’s next visit to France in March 1875, he was invited to another chasse à l’anglaise at the Château de Serrant on the Loire, home of another French royalist friend, the Duc de La Trémoille. Here, Bertie reportedly bagged 300 pheasants in a single Monday morning. How many of them were dead before he shot them is impossible to know.

  The guns naturally had to be accessorized with Bertie-style tweeds, and occasionally this new French taste for the English-landowner look caused confusion. There is an anecdote about a French aristocrat who took to dressing up as an English country gent at his château. One day, he showed some English visitors around his stables, and at the end of the tour, one of them gave him a tip. Because of the way he was dressed, they had all assumed he was a stable lad (for which the French have an English name, incidentally – un groom). The aristo thought this was so funny that he had the tip framed and hung it in his family gallery alongside his noble ancestors.

  It also became fashionable in the chic parts of Paris to speak like Bertie and pepper one’s French with English words. The biographer Philippe Jullian tells a story about a snobbish Parisian being served a bad wine in a restaurant, and declaring that from now he was only going to eat at the Café Anglais where he would be sure of getting ‘un bon claret’ – claret being the exclusively English word for what the French would call a Bordeaux rouge.

  Bertie’s personal appearances in Paris became highly important events in the city’s cultural life. The best evidence for this is an opera written by Jacques Offenbach and his librettist Albert Millaud in 1874, when they were still rebuilding their careers after the Commune. The opera was Madame l’Archiduc, a typically fluffy story about an archduke who falls in love with a servant, into which Millaud had (very fashionably) inserted a duet sung in Franglais. Two characters at an inn are pretending to be English, and sing a song with lines like ‘Oh yes! Come, come, boivez wine, so beautiful, divine’ and ‘Very well, I tank2 you, oh my dear’. Deliberately ungrammatical nonsense that a Parisian audience would have found hilarious.

  When Bertie visited Paris in March 1875, he went to see Madame l’Archiduc, helping to make it a hit after a slow start at the box office. And he probably got a great kick out of the Franglais song. If he had any literary sensibility at all (which is arguable), he might have noticed one telling line in the duet: ‘Oh! Ce rosbeef very fine.’ In the context of the scene, this could be taken literally to mean that the roast beef served at the inn is excellent, but ‘rosbif’ (as it is usually spelt nowadays) is also a slang term for an Englishman. Everyone in the theatre that night would have known that le prince anglais was in attendance, and it’s easy to imagine the singer bowing towards Bertie as he sang the line. And it may not be going too far to surmise that Offenbach and Millaud inserted the Franglais scene with the precise intention of attracting Bertie along to hear it. If so, their strategy worked perfectly, because the first time Bertie visited Paris after the opera opened, he went along.

  Naturally, during the performance Bertie was seen to spend most of his time gazing through his opera glasses at beautiful women in the audience, but then most of the audience would have gone there in the hope of being gazed at. And there would have been plenty of opera glasses trained on Bertie, too, to see what he was wearing that night. In the 1870s and 1880s, Paris was a republic, but in terms of style its ruler was a prince.

  III

  Bertie and Alexandra can’t claim all the merit for the English influence on Parisian fashion – at least where women’s clothing was concerned. A lot of the credit has to go to an Englishman called Charles Worth.

  Worth first came to Paris in 1845 as an ambitious twenty-year-old fabric salesman to work for the Maison Gagelin, a popular shop selling both cloth and ready-made clothing. Worth began designing dresses, and was soon promoted to head his own department in the business. When the Maison Gagelin was invited to provide clothes for the wedding of Empress Eugénie in 1853, Worth contributed some of his dresses, which were noticed by Paris’s new First Lady. After winning a prize at the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle (where he exhibited in the French section, of course, for Gagelin), the Englishman found himself a financier – a Swede called Otto Bobergh – and opened his own shop in the chic rue de la Paix, between Opéra and Concorde.

  It was a canny move – this was exactly the right time to be starting a luxury business in Paris, because in Napoléon and Eugénie’s capital, impressing people with your dress sense was a key part of a woman’s social success. What was more, Worth’s shop soon had the city’s number-one customer on its books, the maîtresse of style, Eugénie herself. Once it became known that the Empress shopped chez Worth, any Parisian lady worth her sel was dying to get on to his client list – and being turned away if she wasn’t important enough. Interestingly, amongst the élite customers accepted by Worth were the famous cocottes, notably the two English stars of Paris’s sex-for-money scene, Cora Pearl and Catherine ‘Skittles’ Walters. And this in no way drove away the more respectable ladies – in the Second Empire, the high-class prostitutes formed a parallel aristocracy.

  As well as a keen eye for business and a sense of style, Worth had come up through the ranks and therefore possessed a true working knowledge of new fabrics on the market and the way they behaved when cut. His success was no coincidence – his customers knew that their dress would fit perfectly, and we have seen how important that was when it came to the plunging necklines at Eugénie’s court. Any bit of bad tailoring would have caused an embarrassing fashion accident.

  Worth was a true craftsman-artist. His skill, and his unbeatable client list, helped him impose his own dicta-torial rules. The most imposing Parisian aristocrat could no longer come and tell the tailor to carry out her instructions – she would wear what he told her. She had to buy dresses for the morning, afternoon and evening as well as more relaxed tea gowns and nightgowns to be worn at home. She would also buy new designs each season, because fashions would change, by order of Worth – although she could also be sure that her particular version of the design would be unique. Furthermore, the lady would accept Worth’s choice of accessories, made by his associates in t
he shoemaking, bagmaking and millinery trades. In short, he was creating what the French call le total look as well as inventing the business model followed by all the best haute couture houses today.

  Understandably, Worth closed up shop during the Franco-Prussian war when most of his clients left the city, but he returned after the Commune – minus his Swedish business partner, but with new designs in mind. It was when he made this Parisian comeback that he put an end to the crinoline.

  The reopening of his shop was taken as a key sign of regeneration in the city. In a diary entry for January 1872, the writer Edmond de Goncourt records seeing a traffic jam in the rue de la Paix, caused by carriages jostling to get into the courtyard of a building. He walks closer and: ‘Looking above the entrance to the courtyard, I read: Worth. Paris is just as it was during the Empire.’ What he meant was that the rich, fashionable women were back in town and the first thing they were doing was rush to get the latest English designs.

  It would of course have been a miracle if everyone in Paris approved of this Anglo influence. Goncourt’s diary for 1875 contains a hilarious description of English tourists eating at the chic Café Voisin, one of Bertie’s haunts: He writes:

  The joy with which the Anglais stuff themselves is a truly disgusting thing that you don’t see in any other civilized people. As they eat, their whole brain is concentrated on chewing and gulping. The men utter little grunts of animal satisfaction, while their pink-and-white-faced women glow with mindless intoxication. The sons and tomboy daughters grin lovingly at their meat. All of them – men, women and children – put on a show of bestial obsession, mute repletion and imbecilic ecstasy.

  What Goncourt was witnessing, of course, was a family of English tourists who had come to a fashionable Paris café to enjoy the food, rather than look around to see who was with whom and gossip accordingly. In this respect, Bertie would never have ‘disgusted’ Goncourt – he was an Anglais in Paris who always behaved exactly like a Parisian.

  * * *

  1 Interestingly, the French word for a dinner jacket harks back to these origins – it is le smoking. The fact that it is an English term is probably not only a homage to Bertie. Even though the activity of smoking is still considered fairly chic by many French people, their word for smoking, fumer, and anything associated with it, sounds rather vulgar. Fumier, for example, means dung.

  2 This misspelling reflects, of course, the French inability to pronounce the ‘th’ sound. Mispronouncing ‘thank you’ is a favourite French game, and variants include ‘Saint Cloud’ – the suburb of Paris, pronounced ‘san cloo’ – and ‘ton cul’ (‘ton coo’), which means ‘your arse’. In fact, in Madame l’Archiduc, the singer might well have pronounced the line ‘Very well, I ton cul, oh my dear’ to get an extra laugh.

  10

  BERTIE MAKES AN EXHIBITION OF HIMSELF . . . AGAIN

  ‘He loves France both in a fun-loving and a serious way.’

  Léon Gambetta, French politician, talking about Bertie

  I

  THERE WAS NOW a hiatus in Bertie’s Parisian expeditions while he went on a long trip to India and Sri Lanka. The seven-month voyage – which was basically a big-game hunting trip at the state’s expense – was his idea, and was approved by Victoria as a good diplomatic move, although she objected when Bertie said that he wanted to go without Alexandra. The Empress of India had probably not read the Kama Sutra, but knew all about the effects on her son of sultry foreign women.

  Bertie successfully argued that his wife’s health wasn’t up to the tropics (though Alexandra herself was bitterly disappointed at being left behind), and even managed to put together a travelling party consisting mainly of his friends, including his roistering sidekick Charles Wynn-Carrington. But Victoria had a word in certain ears and Canon Arthur Stanley, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, was sent along as Bertie’s chaplain and guide. Just before the party left on their eastern jaunt, Stanley preached a sermon at Westminster Abbey aimed at his fellow travellers, imploring God to ensure that: ‘Wherever they may go, may they see that the name of England and English Christendom may not be dishonoured, that morals shall not be relaxed, that the sensual flag1 shall not be raised, and that the standard of national morality shall not be lowered but raised aloft.’ Which would have been an ideal prayer every time Bertie left for Paris.

  Of course, before leaving, Bertie found time to dash across the Channel to revisit a few royalists and make sure that Mesdames Standish and de Sagan weren’t feeling lonely. He was also seen at the Jockey Club, and spotted steering a pair of cocottes around town. All in all, a refreshing Parisian break before the rigours of a state visit in the Orient.

  While en voyage from October 1875 to May 1876, Bertie apparently stayed away from the local ladies, but let himself go with the wildlife, blasting at all creatures great and small and doing his personal best to turn the subcontinent’s tigers into an endangered species.

  More to his credit, he also took a potshot at some of the racist Englishmen of the Raj. While in India, Bertie wrote home to complain to the Foreign Secretary about the bad treatment of Indians by the British military – he suggested that the locals should be ‘treated with kindness and firmness at the same time, but not with brutality or contempt’. He even seemed to be contradicting the whole ethos of colonialism when he added that, ‘Because a man has a black face and a different religion from our own, there is no reason why he should be treated as a brute.’ Bertie was a snob, but he was usually a polite one. And these were not mere theories – as a result of his complaints, the British governor of the city of the southern city of Hyderabad, the so-called Resident, was sent home in disgrace. In colonial clubs across the subcontinent there must have been much spluttering into gin and tonics about moralizing by dissolute young pups.

  And before Bertie had even reached England again, he was being accused of immorality at home. One of the friends on his Indian trip, Lord Aylesford, had returned early after receiving a letter from his wife informing him that she was planning to elope with her lover, Lord Blandford. (She clearly didn’t understand the word ‘elope’.) In the 1870s this was scandalous because it meant divorce, which, as we have seen, was then a more heinous social misdeed than publicly shooting ponies. When Bertie’s sympathy for Aylesford became known, Blandford’s younger brother, Randolph Churchill (father of Winston), was furious and announced that he had letters from Lady Aylesford proving that Bertie himself had been one of her lovers. The scandal was developing like the plot of an Oscar Wilde play, and Bertie added to the melodrama by challenging Churchill to a duel with pistols on the north coast of France – an offer that Churchill rightly scoffed at as pure fantasy on Bertie’s part.

  In the end, this absurd upper-class Pandora’s box had the lid put back on it by the Aylesfords deciding not to divorce after all, but the feud between Bertie and the Churchill family would linger on until the mid-1880s. All in all, it was not a great homecoming for Bertie.

  II

  Luckily, France would come to his rescue. Despite the power struggle going on in Paris between the republicans and the different royalist factions, by 1876 all parties had concurred that the best way to celebrate France’s recovery from war was another Exposition, to be held in 1878. It was to be a massive enterprise, with a vast showground straddling the Seine at Trocadéro and taking up all of the Champ-de-Mars from the riverbank to Napoléon Bonaparte’s old school, the École Militaire. And, proving that despite all its recent turmoils, France had not forgotten its most faithful English friend, the President of France, Patrice de Mac Mahon, asked Bertie to become Honorary President of the British section of the Exposition, as he had been in 1867.

  Mac Mahon must have been shocked when Bertie refused the honour. What? Had the Indian trip erased all his fond memories of France? Hadn’t he enjoyed himself at the 1855 and 1867 exhibitions? Didn’t he want to come to Paris, admire a few machines, sit on a podium or two and then sneak off to the theatre?

 
; But Bertie had good reason to refuse the honorary president role: he preferred to be an executive president, while also taking on the job back home in London as the President of the Royal Commission for the Paris Exhibition of 1878. In other words, he was to be one of the team overseeing preparations for the whole Expo as well as being the active head of the British delegation. As such, not only would he attend the opening and closing ceremonies, and a few in between, he would also have to come to Paris regularly to check on the progress of his British ‘pavilions’ and the rest of the exhibition site. He would be over there non-stop. It was Bertie’s dream job.

  It must have also been a key moment for him. Here was a chance to be involved in something for once, and to take on the official diplomatic role that he had been yearning for for so long. It was no sinecure, either – the exhibition space to be filled by the Brits was second in size only to France’s own. Bertie would have to supervise the building of the British exhibition halls, as well as overseeing the selection and approval of all the exhibitors, not only for the British Isles, but also for the colonies, including Canada and Australia. It was an enormous task that he would embrace wholeheartedly for the next two years.

  The curious thing is that the thoroughness with which Bertie now undertook the job, and the success he made of it, are achievements that are almost entirely overlooked in most of his biographies, perhaps because his biographers are captivated by the other passion that entered his life at this time – his most famous and most beautiful mistress, Lillie Langtry.