Dirty Bertie Read online

  In any case, despite his mother’s ability to dictate his travel plans, Bertie must have felt much freer now. He had done his dynastic duty, and even if Victoria reminded him constantly that a morally dissolute prince would make a bad king, his own kingship must have looked a long way off. His mother was not yet fifty, and she led such a sheltered life that there was little chance of her succumbing to fever and exhaustion as his father had done. If anything, she seemed to have been made ageless by widowhood, pickled in mourning.

  And if Victoria alternated between refusing to let Bertie take part in anything political and shouting down his opinions about Denmark and Prussia, why shouldn’t he amuse himself in a neutral country – France?

  According to most sources, Bertie’s first chance to go on a full-length French jaunt as a bachelor came in the spring of 1867, when he was invited by Napoléon III to attend that year’s Exposition Universelle.

  Bertie went to Paris with his brother Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, who was two-and-a-half years younger and even more weak-willed than Bertie himself. Alfred, ‘Affie’ to his family, had a violent crush on Alexandra, and it is quite conceivable that Bertie might have taken him to France to show him that there were enough available women out there for him to stop pestering the Princess.

  It wasn’t a state visit, but Bertie and Affie appeared on the VIPs’ podium at the Exposition and attended a variety of official functions with other royals. Their sister Vicky’s husband, Friedrich of Prussia, was there, as were Prince Oscar of Sweden, Prince Umberto of Italy and the Sultan of Turkey, amongst others. And in between functions and tours of the Expo grounds, the brothers used their spare time to explore the city itself. In fact, Bertie’s trip to Paris was much like an archetypal husband’s conference junket: Those endless dinners and parties will be such a bore, darling, and I’ll miss you terribly, but it’s all part of my job.

  Parties there certainly were. Bertie and Affie weren’t invited to all the imperial receptions because some of them were reserved for heads of state and crowned sovereigns. But they were the honorary hosts of a ball given at the British Embassy for 1,100 guests that was attended by Napoléon and Eugénie. Bertie opened the dancing with the Empress and, as one London journalist reported, ‘was extremely talkative and gallant, and made himself so charming that one would almost think he was striving to win the hearts of all the ladies present’. The observant correspondent went on to write that:

  After dinner, there was a cotillon [a sort of square dance], and the Prince danced with the celebrated beauty the Marquise Georgina de Gallifet,1 whom he had met in the garden and engaged to dance with him after a long conversation. The cotillon lasted nearly two hours, during which time the Prince talked incessantly with the Marquise, and it was observed that he could hardly resist the charms of the renowned Parisian beauty.

  The tone for Bertie’s trip was set.

  Affie was less successful. The same journalist observed that ‘he was very shy compared to his brother; and while the Prince of Wales made many a lady blush with the fire of his glance, the Duke of Edinburgh, if a lady only looked at him rather intently, instantly reddened with confusion.’ Affie bowed out of the dancing and was later seen in the dining room, ‘making a hearty meal of half a roast fowl and some sherry’. Still, it was early days, and the young Duke had come to Paris to learn.

  Sadly, Napoléon was less available as a mentor than he had been on Bertie’s previous visits because he was starting to suffer from serious health problems. In 1864, he had had an embarrassing heart attack while visiting his mistress, a young ‘actress’ called Marguerite Bellanger. The Emperor was also plagued by painful attacks of gout, acute haemorrhoids and agonizing bladder stones. He was in a temporary period of remission when Bertie arrived in Paris for the Expo, but even so Bertie found Napoléon a much-diminished man, and wrote to his mother that he looked ‘ill and worn’.

  If Victoria was relieved to hear this, she was mistaken, because Bertie was to prove himself more than capable of going it alone.

  II

  The Exposition wasn’t all about partying, though. On his mother’s advice, Bertie refused an invitation to spend his Sunday at the races in Chantilly, north of Paris – although he was seen ‘accidentally’ catching a glimpse of a race from a balcony while breakfasting at the Château de Chantilly. And he seems to have taken the official reason for his visit seriously, spending a lot of time touring the huge exhibition space on the site where the Eiffel Tower would be built a few decades later.

  Since Bertie’s first outing to a French Expo in 1855, technology had moved on, and there were plenty of innovations to see. Exhibits at the 1867 show included industrially produced false teeth, fishnet-making machines, refrigerators, tumble dryers, mechanized bread makers and deep-sea diving suits that were demonstrated in a ‘human aquarium’.

  In a detailed account of all the royal visits to Paris for the 1867 exhibition called Les Souverains à Paris the writer Adrien Marx praised Bertie’s excellent attendance record – he was ‘one of the princes seen most frequently at the Champs de Mars’, and was observed letting himself be ushered patiently around all the stands and pavilions by exhibition guides.

  The correspondent for an Australian2 newspaper, the Melbourne Argus, was a lot more sceptical, but expressed similar admiration: ‘Both the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh have done the exhibition pretty thoroughly, and if they take away with them, after their rapid pedestrian feats, any definite idea besides that of huge boredom, they are clever fellows.’ The reporter was not surprised to catch Bertie taking time out from admiring machines and national costumes to puff a quiet cigar on the roof of the Chinese pavilion.

  And it wasn’t only the sheer number of exhibits that Bertie found tiring – apparently he was turning into one of the Expo’s biggest attractions himself. Other visiting royals were not recognized by the French public, the Australian said, and he saw the King of Belgium wandering around the show being completely ignored, whereas Bertie was often mobbed: ‘The other day, when the Princes were dining at the Russian restaurant, the windows and doors were perfectly lined with foreign ladies, flattening their noses with praiseworthy diligence, so as to note every mouthful that was eaten.’

  And a lot was certainly eaten. Both the Australian reporter and Adrien Marx reveal the menu3 for a private lunch given at the Expo, which consisted of:

  Hors d’œuvre and shrimps

  Turbot sauce hollandaise

  Fillet of beef Madeira with stuffed tomatoes

  Lamb cutlet with peas

  Sautéed chicken

  Roast duckling

  Salads

  Asparagus

  Soup

  Strawberries, cherries, apricots.

  Wines: Haut Sauternes, Saint-Julien.

  Despite the hours that Bertie put in at the Expo, he was, of course, less fascinated by innovations in false-teeth design than by the huge changes that his favourite city had undergone since his earlier visit. By 1867, Napoléon III’s plans for renovating his capital were well on the way to completion, and it must have looked to Bertie as if the new Paris had been specifically conceived for philandering.

  This wasn’t (it would be nice to think) the initial purpose of the massive urban regeneration that went on under Napoléon III and continued after his demise. By the 1850s, Paris had become an overcrowded, filthy and unhealthy city. Picture the Marais or the Latin Quarter today, with their narrow, winding streets and leaning medieval buildings, and take away the street sweepers, rubbish collectors, running water, sewage pipes, lampposts and laws. And then add in crowds of hungry Parisians and rats.

  Sitting in the centre of all this squalor was the royal palace, the Palais des Tuileries, with its costume balls, gala dinners and priceless art collection. What pleasure-loving emperor wants his playground to be hemmed in by sick, embittered poor people, the same Parisians who had hacked4 the aristos – or anyone perceived to be aristo – to death only a few decades earlier?

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bsp; Consequently, as soon as Napoléon came to power, he set about doing to Paris what the Great Fire of 1666 had done to London – giving it a thorough clean-out. He had admired England’s urban parks and tree-lined avenues when he was exiled there at various times in the 1830s and 1840s during France’s first post-Bonaparte period. To achieve a similar result in his own capital he set about expropriating city neighbourhoods and carving a new road system through them – the boulevards. The biggest of these were the propeller-like group of avenues radiating out of the place de l’Opéra; the southern loop of the boulevard Saint-Germain through the Latin Quarter; and the great north–south avenue between the Gare de l’Est and Montparnasse, which had meant flattening most of the buildings on the île de la Cité except for a small parcel around Notre-Dame (even Napoléon was wary of the wrath of more omnipotent powers than himself).

  Lined with theatres, cafés and boutiques, the Opéra’s grands boulevards became instantly fashionable. In his book Souvenirs de la Vie de Plaisir sous le Second Empire, a former Parisian playboy called Gaston Jollivet remembers that he rarely left this area except to venture westwards along the Champs-Élysées and into the new residential areas beyond the Arc de Triomphe. He confesses that he ‘knew as little of other neighbourhoods as though they were in Central Africa’. These were also to be Bertie’s main hunting grounds during Napoléon III’s reign.

  To implement his plans, Napoléon chose Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a Parisian politician so ruthless that he famously demolished his own birthplace during the renovations. Napoléon entrusted Haussmann with a mission to ‘aerate, unify and beautify the city’. This demand for unity is what gives much of Paris its image today: the six- or seven-storey apartment buildings with their sloping zinc roofs, balconies on the fifth floor and startlingly similar façades with almost identical rows of windows. Under Haussmann, the architects had no choice but to conform.

  Social unity was also the goal. The well-off and well-dressed had been deserting the city’s festering streets in droves, and now Napoléon wanted them back. The new haussmannien buildings all had shop space on the ground floor, and roomy apartments above, with a whole floor of specially built chambres de bonne – maids’ rooms – at the top. The more elegant of these buildings often had two floors of servants’ quarters as well as an escalier de service – service staircase – so that the wealthy occupants didn’t even have to see deliveries being made or buckets being carried about. In Napoléon’s new Paris, even the middle classes were meant to feel as though they were living in a palace. None of his Parisians were going to be calling for his head on a pole.

  There were also health reasons for the renovation – the new underground sewers meant that the days of Paris’s cholera epidemics were at last over. And the improvements went far beyond the expanding boundaries of the capital – in 1840, for example, eight years before Napoléon came to power, there had been 500 kilometres of railway in France. By the end of his reign in 1870, there were 17,000, including Paris’s new Petite Ceinture (Small Belt), the predecessor of the Métro, which ferried cargo and commuters around the edge of town, relieving congestion in the centre. And, by no means coincidentally, the railway extensions also included lines out to Napoléon’s country châteaux in Fontainebleau and Compiègne and the fashionable racecourse at Chantilly.

  So Napoléon was a genuine reformer with a desire to modernize his country and rival the economic exploits of England. But he was also a shameless hedonist who seems to have decided that industrial progress and urban renovation should be harnessed to give his France a superior art de vivre – more elegant people, smoother travel, fresher food and more beautiful homes. It was a French version of Vorsprung durch Technik, all of it geared towards creating an atmosphere of permanent seduction.

  It has often been said that Napoléon’s boulevards were designed to bring air and light to the city or to allow troops to circulate easily and quell rebellions. But this is not the whole truth – they were also places where Parisians could amble and ogle.

  In the daytime, the broad, clean pavements were crowded with ladies on innocent shopping trips, the ideal prey for men on the prowl. The Parisian monsieur-about-town Gaston Jollivet recalled that when he spotted a good-looking woman walking along the boulevard, he would quickly step ahead of her and then turn around to ask: ‘Are you following me, madame?’ If she stopped to talk, he could invite her to a café or offer to buy her a handkerchief or a pair of gloves from one of the newly opened boutiques. If she didn’t take the bait, another would soon pass by.

  Similarly, the new theatres and cafés were perfect places to entertain recently made acquaintances, or to meet up with lovers and ladies of the night, and there was now plenty of parking space where carriages could wait outside to whisk couples discreetly away.

  The brothels didn’t need to be hidden down dark medieval alleys any more, but if they were, the wider streets criss-crossing the city made it easier to reach them. A cab could take a group of roistering men within a few streets of the amoral slums, and they were much less likely to get their clothes and wallets confiscated before they’d had their fun. Napoléon was creating his ‘City of Light’,5 but there were still plenty of shadows where lecherous men could satisfy their darker appetites.

  On the fringes of the city, the new parks with their wide tree-lined alleys – the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes – were places where posh Parisians in open carriages could doff their hats to each other, or, like Madame Bovary in Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel of the same name, opt for a closed vehicle and indulge in some mobile lovemaking. Gaston Jollivet used to enjoy driving around the artificial lake in the Bois de Boulogne, watching people ‘in a dizzying variety of carriages, big and small, seeing who was with whom, who was alone, who dared to show themselves with their lover, and – even more shocking – who ventured out with their own spouse’.

  The memoirist Comte de Maugny summed up Napoléon III’s new Paris well: ‘Never was there more elegance,’ he wrote in his Souvenirs du Second Empire, ‘more desire to amuse oneself, more dazzling parties and more beautiful people.’ For the young Bertie arriving in 1867, it was a city of endless opportunities.

  The workers who had to create all this elegance by slaving for long hours on dangerous, heavily polluting machines might not have shared Bertie’s enthusiasm, especially if they had been thrown out of their old apartment buildings because Haussmann decided to turn their neighbourhood into a park or a boulevard. But two sets of people were all in favour of the changes in Parisian society engineered by Napoléon III: first, there were the emerging bourgeois inhabitants of the haussmannien neighbourhoods, who were opening new shops and working in the burgeoning service industries; and then there was a new upper echelon, the haute bourgeoisie. Napoléon had instigated a very English system of financing his public works with private funds, thereby helping bankers, builders and industrialists to make immense fortunes. And thanks to his enforced lack of snobbery, these nouveaux riches could now rise to the very top of la bonne société instead of being looked down upon by the aristocrats. They could buy or build themselves a château or hôtel particulier (a mansion within Paris) and hold glittering receptions that would attract the crème de la crème of the city – including visiting royalty like Bertie.

  During Napoléon III’s Second Empire, Paris was awash with chic people, either aristocratic or able to act the part, with money and plenty of time to spend it. And the great thing for Bertie was that he was instantly a member of this club, with automatic privileges of rank. He was a popular member, too, because he was not only a prince but also a jovial, friendly young man who loved nothing more than joining in the fun and splashing cash and champagne about. Even better for Bertie, this generation of fun-lovers with whom he got on so well was interested in only one thing: sex.

  III

  This, at least, was the opinion of the novelist Émile Zola, a chronicler of his times who wrote a series of thematic novels that give a stark (if sometimes over
-detailed) picture of France in the mid- and late-nineteenth century. Zola covered, for example, the worlds of art (L’Oeuvre), food (Le Ventre de Paris), crime (La Bête Humaine), mining (Germinal) and even shopping – his book Au Bonheur des Dames is set in one of Paris’s new department stores.

  Zola’s novel about sex is Nana. This is a pet name derived from Anna, probably a reference to a notorious actress/prostitute of the times called Anna Deslions, nicknamed the ‘lioness of the boulevards’. She was famous because of her affair with Napoléon III, her raven hair, and what one French commentator discreetly called ‘certain talents’. But the title of the novel is more than a name-check. In modern French une nana is a general slang term for a girl, but in Zola’s day it meant a prostitute.6 The novel is as generic as that – it is the life of a typical Parisian sex worker, albeit a high-class one who associates with the moneyed members of Napoléon III’s new haute bourgeoisie. And in the fictional Nana’s case, she even gets to meet the real Bertie.

  Zola’s opinion of Napoléon’s Paris was brutally direct. He wrote in his preface to Nana that the novel described ‘a whole society chasing ass. A pack of dogs behind a bitch who is not in heat and laughs at the dogs following her.’7 The story was, he said, a ‘poem of male desire, the great lever that sets the world in motion’.

  When talking about the sexual goings-on in mid-nineteenth century Paris, it is important not to over-romanticize what was essentially sex tourism, and pretty sordid behind its glamorous façade. But at the time it must have seemed to young Bertie that this was just the way Paris swung. The city was awash with registered, legal prostitutes, as well as an incalculable number of insoumises – a word that describes someone who refuses to bow to authority, as if the women were fighting for their right to prostitute themselves.

  In her Confessions, Napoléon III’s mistress Marguerite Bellanger said that during the Second Empire, the insoumises ‘clogged the boulevards, the Champs-Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne. They filled the theatres, not only in the boxes but also on stage, where they paid to be exhibited. It was one big shop counter, a market for human flesh of varying freshness.’