He went to the Folies Bergère (here at last was a stage show that he understood perfectly), toasted the dancers with Champagne, and even found that the freedom of being in Paris cured his speech impediment. Back home, he had trouble saying his Rs. Here, though, they rolled off his tongue as easily as the witty remarks that made all the ladies giggle.
At the theatre, any danger that the play might be too intellectual was overridden by the pleasure of gazing at the gorgeous actress Sarah Bernhardt. And he once got even closer to her by wangling himself a bit part as a corpse, and lying on stage while ‘la divine Sarah’ wept over her dead prince.
After the theatre, he would go on to dinner at the Café Anglais, where the notorious English call girl Cora Pearl was once served up, naked and smothered in cream, as a dessert. (And the French say English cuisine is boring.)
Not that Bertie did all this on the sly. He usually rampaged around Paris with a gang of friends from the Paris Jockey Club, and he loved everyone to know that he was the Prince of Wales. The ladies were much more attentive as soon as they heard his name, and were sometimes willing to entertain him two at a time.
It wasn’t long before rumours about these princely perversions seeped back to London, where the scandal sheets were all too happy to repeat the juicy details of his exploits. In 1868, a cartoon appeared depicting the Prince abandoning Britannia for a French harlot. And one newspaper story had him showing serious disrespect for his rank. He was just about to go out, it was said, when he got news that a distant royal relative had died. His friends asked what he thought they should do. ‘Put on black studs and go to the play,’ the Prince replied. Queen Victoria was probably not amused.
Bertie invites the Republic to lunch
In 1870, Bertie was seriously afraid that the fun might come to an end. The Franco-Prussian War had broken out, and Victoria’s family was German. Would the French suspect Britain of being secretly pro-Prussian? And, even more importantly, would patriotic French can-can dancers refuse to flash their stockings at him?
It was time, Bertie told his mother, for a diplomatic visit to Paris to smooth things over between the two nations. Victoria wasn’t fooled – she seemed to spend her whole life begging him to stay at home and improve his mind – but the politicians thought it was a good idea. So off he went again, getting up to all his usual tricks and showing the French that the Brits still loved them (preferably in threesomes).
He also did the political rounds, appeasing and annoying everyone in Paris by allowing French Royalists to toast him with Champagne but refusing to utter an anti-republican word. ‘These Republicans may have hot heads,’ he lectured a duc, ‘but they have generous hearts.’
Sure enough, Anglo-French relations survived intact, and Bertie was invited by a newly elected Republican government to help organize the Paris Exposition universelle of 1878. He accepted of course, and contributed his personal collection of Indian treasures for the British pavilion. He was so determined to make the trip that he agreed to send the collection even after insurers refused to cover him. When the exhibition opened, a few Republican deputies tried to provoke the Prince by chanting ‘Vive la République!’ but he simply laughed. He wasn’t going to let politics spoil a launch party.
Meanwhile, another diplomatic crisis had flared up. The Turks had ceded the island of Cyprus to Britain, and the French were enraged, because this gave the detested Royal Navy yet another stronghold in the Mediterranean and threatened to destabilize the fragile balance of power in the region.
No worries. Bertie simply invited France’s most influential (and most Republican) politician, Léon Gambetta, to lunch.
Wanting to keep the meeting secret, the Prince sent a carriage to fetch Gambetta. At first, conversation was stilted and general. Bertie was shocked by the petit bourgeois politician’s appearance. Gambetta wore vulgar patent-leather boots and an ill-fitting frock coat, and his table manners were awful. Gambetta in turn was expecting a scornful snob, a French-style aristo with an English accent.
The Prince’s opening conversational gambit seemed to confirm his prejudices – Bertie asked why France didn’t let its aristocrats take an active part in the country’s life. ‘They don’t want employment,’ Gambetta replied, ‘they just want to sulk. That is their occupation.’ The Prince then suggested that the French do things the British way, which was to give industrialists and scientists a peerage and liven up the aristocracy. It wouldn’t work, Gambetta said, because a hereditary French baron wouldn’t talk to a duc de l’industrie. The Prince sportingly conceded the point and said that now he understood French Republicanism.
The astonished Gambetta said later that he had had an excellent lunch, and that the Prince had even shown ‘Republican bonhomie’. In short, thanks to Bertie, it was infuriatingly difficult to be angry at the British over the Mediterranean or anything else. At the end of the meeting, Gambetta grudgingly conceded that there was nothing France could do about Cyprus, anyway. Bertie had seduced the leading French Republican just as efficiently as he did the Parisian dames.
A throne with a difference
There was a reason why the Prince was in such a permanent good mood. Hard to believe, perhaps, but in 1878 Paris had become even more hedonistic. A new attraction had opened its doors in the city’s theatre district, and made Bertie’s wildest dreams come true.
Le Chabanais was a luxury brothel financed by some of France’s richest businessmen and run by an Irish madam. Behind its prim street door was a hidden world of orgasmic delight. The girls were all very high-class, chosen to look like famous actresses of the day, and the clients were selected just as rigorously. Men didn’t just come to get laid, they came to drink Champagne, be flattered and fawned over by semi-naked beauties, have their witticisms laughed at, and then drift upstairs with their ‘conquests’ to one of the plushly decorated bedrooms.
King Edward VII believed that the entente with French ladies should be much more than cordiale. Here he indulges in a bit of conjugation with the girls from his favourite Parisian brothel, Le Chabanais.
It was all legal, too, thanks to Napoleon Bonaparte, who had created the maisons de tolérance in the early 1800s. His law stipulated that the working girls had to undergo regular medical examinations, which made prostitution not only legal but safe. There was no danger that syphilis or another sexually transmitted disease might give the game away to wifey – or was there? Doctors were often corrupt, and infection was only diagnosed if a madam wanted to get rid of someone. And behind the luxury of the reception rooms, Le Chabanais didn’t even have showers for its live-in girls.
The clients didn’t see the sordid side, of course, and for Bertie it was love at first sight. He reserved a private room and chose the décor himself. He wanted a copper bathtub that he would fill with Champagne, and he designed his famous ‘fellatio seat’, on which two or three people – including one portly Englishman – could have simultaneous oral sex.
The two-tier velvet and gold lacquer chair was a miracle of ingenuity. Victoria might even have been proud of her son for showing such dedication to the science of sex. The top ‘floor’ of the seat consisted of a stool with handgrips and stirrups, so that Person One could sit there with their legs splayed. Below this were footrests that allowed Person Two to stand or squat in front of the occupant of the top floor. At ground level was a long divan where Person Three could lie down with their face just under the genital region of Person Two. It must have taken some long, Champagne-soaked evenings to design it, and even more to get the positions just right.
Interestingly, the love seat later contributed almost as much to international relations as Bertie did when he was alive. During the Second World War, when the high-class Paris bordels were reserved for Nazi officers, the occupying troops decided not to remove the Prince’s coat of arms from the chair ‘because he had a German mother’.
But back to 1878. Bertie returned to London, no doubt with a huge smile on his face, and reported his success with Gambetta. T
he Foreign Office was duly grateful and enquired whether the Prince would be willing to take on this diplomatic role on a more permanent basis. He was being offered his dream job.
Bertie’s international career
Another threat to the Prince’s life of lust and luxury came in 1889, when even Bertie realized that it was diplomatically impossible to attend that year’s Exposition. It was, after all, being held to commemorate the centenary of the Revolution. Sorry, the reply came, but the Prince of Wales was obliged to refuse the invitation.
However, that didn’t stop Bertie the private citizen going.
Back to Paris he came, on a purely unofficial visit you understand, accompanied by his wife and his good friends Lord and Lady Warwick – a nice, calm family trip, then. Well, not really, because Lady Warwick was in fact the Prince’s lover, a hot-blooded London socialite called Daisy Greville.* She was the woman who inspired the song ‘Daisy, Daisy’, the chorus of which refers to her looking sweet upon the seat of a bicycle made for two. The songwriter had clearly heard about Bertie’s furniture designs.
By now, despite his obvious Francophilia, Bertie had begun to annoy a small but important section of the French population – the secret police, who had been told to keep an eye on him in case he was exchanging seditious messages with Royalist women (not that conversation was easy on his fellatio seat). Agents had to follow him about and check up on all his lovers – an arduous task, indeed. So the police were probably relieved when, as well as bringing English lovers to Paris with him, he also developed a taste for travelling American heiresses, who were, after all, citizens of a republic.
Not that the Prince ever confined his attentions to one lucky lady. Montmartre at the turn of the naughty nineties was about as naughty as it would ever get. The coquettish Parisiennes dressed up in swathes of skirts and petticoats, but unlike their Victorian counterparts, the layers of clothing weren’t a moral shield. As one of the Prince’s biographers put it: ‘Dress was a fortification. Each rampart had to be stormed in turn, and the final surrender was all the more valued for the siege that had preceded it.’
Bertie went to war with a vengeance. He had an affair with La Belle Otero, the Spanish star of the Folies Bergère, whose stupendous breasts inspired the twin domes of the Hotel Carlton in Cannes (although it is hard to believe that they were quite that big, grey or pointed). Bertie was also seen around town with Hortense Schneider, a French singer so famous for her aristocratic lovers that she was nicknamed ‘le passage des princes’.
He went to the Moulin Rouge to watch the can-can dancer La Goulue (‘the Glutton’ – because she used to drain men’s glasses while she danced). She would hold one leg high in the air, her petticoats practically slapping the audience’s faces, revealing the heart sewn on her knickers. Her party trick was to kick the front row’s hats off their heads, which shows just how close the men would get to her titillating thighs. She noticed the Prince one night and shouted out, ‘Evening, Wales! Are you going to buy me Champagne?’ Needless to say he did, even though he was slightly shocked that she called him ‘tu’.
As the century wound down, with the Prince getting older and expecting his mother to die or abdicate at any moment, he seemed keener than ever to cross the Channel and enjoy himself.
The exception was 1900. The French were mad at Britain again, this time because of the Boer War. France might be hanging on to its colonies in West Africa, but it didn’t want the Union Jack flying over South Africa. For once, Bertie accepted the advice of the Foreign Office, and called off a planned visit to Cannes. It was a precaution that nearly cost him his life.
He and his wife Alexandra had decided to go and visit the in-laws in Denmark, and were changing trains in Brussels when a fifteen-year-old boy called Jean-Baptiste Sipido fired four shots into their carriage at point-blank range. None of the bullets found their target, prompting the Prince to write and tell a friend, ‘Fortunately, anarchists are bad shots.’ But the incident only served to increase tensions with France, because while the court was deliberating about his age, Sipido escaped from custody and fled to France, where the police refused to arrest him. Next time, Bertie probably thought, I’ll go to the Moulin Rouge – it’s much safer.
The Entente Cordiale reaches its climax
In 1901, Queen Victoria died, her last word being ‘Bertie’. Her dying wish had been that the Prince would keep both his first names as homage to her dear husband Albert, but Bertie decided to call himself simply King Edward. Two names, he said, would be too French.
What with the funeral arrangements and a coronation to organize, the new King didn’t get the chance to return to Paris until May 1903. As head of state, it would have been pretty difficult to nip across with his equerry and hole up in Le Chabanais, so this was an official visit with a valid political excuse. France was still officially unhappy with the Brits over the defeat of the Boers, and suspicious about signs that Britain might be thinking of a rapprochement with Germany – the new King of England and his cousin the Kaiser had been brought closer together over the death of Victoria.
Bertie therefore offered to go to France and ‘do some diplomacy’. The Foreign Office was against the idea, as were the Germans, who were very glad to have two major European powers arguing, but the call of Paris was too strong and Bertie got his way, the only concession being that instead of crossing the Channel and arriving in Paris from the north, he would enter the country via Italy (and maybe stop off at the Carlton in Cannes to admire La Belle Otero’s architectural breasts).
When Bertie got to Paris, though, things looked ominous. He drove along the Champs-Élysées to shouts of ‘Vive les Boers!’ The only Brit who got a cheer was an army officer who was mistaken for a Boer because of his khaki uniform. One of the embassy staff remarked that ‘the French don’t love us’. ‘Why should they?’ Bertie replied, deciding that this trip required even more charm than usual.
So that night, during a speech at the British Chamber of Commerce, he uttered a sentence that was unheard of for a British monarch:
A Divine Providence has designed that France should be our near neighbour, and, I hope, always our dear friend. There may have been misunderstandings and causes of dissension in the past [a slight understatement] but all such differences are, I believe, happily removed and forgotten, and I trust that the friendship and admiration which we all feel for the French nation and their glorious traditions [here he was probably thinking of the Folies Bergère and Le Chabanais rather than the Revolution and Napoleon] may in the near future develop into a sentiment of the warmest affection and attachment between the peoples of the two countries.
Back in London, the ground beneath Westminster Abbey must have been shaking as Edward III, Henry V, Elizabeth I, William of Orange and a whole host of past monarchs spun in their graves.
Even this smooth talk didn’t win Parisians over, however. Rather undiplomatically, Bertie was taken to see a blatantly pro-republican play at the theatre, and, for the first time in his life, had to resist the temptation to applaud the actresses. Worse, he had arranged for La Belle Otero to be there, and the theatre managers had her ejected. He was being subjected to both political and personal snubs.
Luckily, strolling through the foyer during the interval, he spotted a French actress he knew (and he knew many). He went up to her and told her that he remembered applauding her performances (ahem) in London, and that she had ‘represented all the grace and spirit of France’. He said this in French, of course, and his diplomatic quote was soon doing the rounds of Paris high society.
He kept up the charm offensive next day at the Hôtel de Ville, telling the guests, ‘I can assure you that it is with the greatest pleasure that I return to Paris each time, where I am treated exactly as if I were at home.’ Which was a lie – neither his mother nor wife ever let him have a fellatio seat in his bedroom.
And finally, thanks to the sheer force of Bertie’s bonhomie (and perhaps some moral support from the Parisiennes), the climate began
to change. The previous day’s Chamber of Commerce speech got a glowing write-up in the French press, and when Bertie left Paris, it was to shouts of ‘Vive le roi!’ He had single-handedly turned the diplomatic situation around. It was as if all his years of Champagne dinners and bordel parties had borne fruit. He had swept aside the political differences like the petticoats of a Montmartre fille de joie. He had sweet-talked the French into becoming his lovers, and had them crowded around him on his diplomatic fellatio seat.
On paper, the Entente Cordiale, signed just under a year later on 8 April 1904 by the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Lansdowne, and the French ambassador to Britain, Paul Cambon, was just an agreement not to interfere in each other’s colonial mischief in Morocco and Egypt, with a side clause limiting French fishing rights in Canada. And it was an entente – an understanding rather than an alliance – that was cordiale – polite but by no means amicale. It was as if two neighbours had agreed not to throw hedge cuttings on to each other’s lawn any more. It didn’t mean that they would be inviting each other to barbecues.
But in the minds of the French and British people, it was much more than this – it was a vital breakthrough, a promise of friendlier times to come. And it was all thanks to Edward VII, the King formerly known as Prince Bertie.
Because, in a nutshell, the Entente Cordiale, the agreement that would shape Anglo-French relations for the next century (at least), was born in a private room in a chic Parisian bordel. Surely it’s not going too far to say that the Entente was just a political metaphor for the convoluted couplings that used to go on in Bertie’s copper bathtub and on his custom-made erotic furniture.
1000 Years of Annoying the French Page 44
