Dirty Bertie

by Stephen Clarke

  And these unregistered, unofficial hookers were often much richer than we might think. A beautiful, ambitious woman could earn herself a fortune in a matter of months as wealthy men outbid each other for their favours. The real women who, like Nana, aroused and took merciless advantage of Parisians’ desires, were collectively known as the cocottes. They usually came from poor backgrounds out in the provinces and, like Marguerite Bellanger, exploited their charms to climb up the socio-economic ladder – making sure to expose a well-turned calf at every rung. The most beautiful of them got themselves noticed as singers, dancers or actresses, using their on-stage performances to attract lovers of increasing wealth and prestige – Marguerite Bellanger started with an army lieutenant and ended up with Napoléon himself.

  In his memoirs, Gaston Jollivet describes the typical cocotte’s complicated love life. She would, he says, have a principal lover, who would be known to the maids as ‘Monsieur’, and would probably be paying for the cocotte’s accommodation. Then there would be one passionate love affair – with a young, reckless nobleman, for example, who would be known as the amant de cœur (lover of the heart). The cocotte always made it brutally clear, though, that this amant would take second place whenever Monsieur wanted to exercise his rights. There would also be constant one-night stands and quickies, with suitors competing to put on shows of outlandish generosity in order to attract the lady’s attention.

  A letter written by one of the famous cocottes, Augustine Brohant, shows us how the system worked. She tells her lover: ‘Dear friend, I was very touched by your intentions yesterday, and I am enchanted by your gift today. It is hard to express my gratitude for your kind attention to my self-respect. I don’t love you more, but I love you better.’ At least she was honest.

  According to another anecdote, a notorious cocotte was with some men at a café when one of them sent a waiter out to buy a metre of silk so that he could write a poem on it for her. The next day, the woman probably had the verses washed off so that the costly material could be made into a blouse – for a cocotte, life was a battle for survival, a constant struggle to maintain a lavish lifestyle and justify her high prices.

  The cocottes’ servants would also be taking their cut. A good maid would earn generous tips from men wanting to know when her mistress would be home, for example, or for passing a message to the cocotte. The maid would also negotiate hefty commissions from the tradesmen supplying food for the frequent parties and all the clothes required to keep the cocotte looking fashionable and desirable. A clever maid could retire on her earnings from a cocotte’s career without having to sleep with all the men.

  The most skilful of the cocottes, like the fictional Nana, were known as the grandes horizontales and would demand such high prices for their services and so many ‘gifts’ of money, jewellery and real estate that they would often drive their suitors to bankruptcy. Marguerite Bellanger tells us that: ‘To cover us with gold – and I don’t want to set myself above the flock because I was one of the better-paid sheep – sons would steal from fathers or take out ruinous debts, and cashiers would empty their cashboxes.’ She used her status as the imperial bedfellow to attract countless other lovers, and earned herself a château, a lifelong pension and a comfortable future for her illegitimate son. She was such a well-known cocotte that she is name-checked in Zola’s story as a public personage of the time.

  Nana first appeared as a serial in the magazine Le Voltaire starting in 1879, and was published as a complete story in 1880, but the plot begins in April 1867, and the characters are based on real people, including Bertie and some of the actresses he consorted with in Paris that year. The character of the heroine is said to be in large part a portrait of the most notorious cocotte of them all, Hortense Schneider, whose long list of royal lovers earned her the title ‘le Passage des Princes’. It was a highly descriptive nickname: the real Passage des Princes was one of the tunnel-like shopping arcades that were being built along the new boulevards. And if a French person says they are ‘de passage’, it means they are just passing through. Hortense was clearly quite an energetic lady.8

  A police report of the time began its file on Hortense: ‘She arrived in Paris with a pair of clogs and a dress made of canvas. The women Martin and Desfontaines launched her and introduced her to her first lovers.’ It was a typical start to a cocotte’s career. In Zola’s novel, we get to see exactly how hard a lower-class girl worked to elevate herself socially, and how enormous the rewards were. Nana, like all the cocottes, has a full diary of sexual partners – the official gentleman friend who has provided her with a chic apartment, as well as the numerous pretenders to his throne and frequent spur-of-the-moment clients. Zola shows her spending the night with a shop-owner who gets up early to be home at eight o’clock. A young nobleman is watching out for him to leave, and slides into the warm bed with Nana, where he stays until ten o’clock, when he in turn has to leave on business. Another time, an old lady who acts as Nana’s procurer brings a message – does she want to make twenty louis9 at three o’clock this afternoon? Oui, Nana says, just give her the man’s address and she’ll be there. Meanwhile Nana spends most evenings appearing in a risqué play, and often brings home one or more of the men who flock backstage to proposition her. Her dream in life, she confides, is to be able to spend one night, just one night, alone in bed. Though of course she will make time for an English prince.

  Zola takes cruel pleasure in satirizing the twisted morality of the times. Although Nana entertains a horde of married clients, she is shocked when she finds out that one of them is a cocu – meaning that his wife has a lover. Nana can’t believe it: ‘It’s too dirty!’ she says. ‘They’ve always disgusted me, those cocus.’ Her hypocrisy is meant to be ironic, but at the same time it was almost certainly a view shared sincerely by all of her lovers.

  The most vivid sections of the novel are Zola’s descriptions of the raw sexuality surrounding Nana’s performances, including the one witnessed by Bertie. Her stage skills don’t extend much beyond hamming a few clichéd lines and squawking a song, but appearing naked in a see-through costume is something that she does rather well, and the sight of her body drives men wild. Zola describes the scene in front of the theatre before a performance where there is ‘a growing clamour, a buzz of voices calling for Nana, demanding Nana, in one of those bestial moods of brutal sensuality that grip a crowd’.

  Inside, the theatre-goers are a typical Second Empire mix, Zola says: ‘All of Paris was there, the Paris of literature, finance and pleasure, lots of journalists, a few writers, financiers, more filles [prostitutes] than honest women; a singularly mixed crowd made up of all sorts, all of them tarnished by vice.’ And appearing amongst them very soon will be Bertie.

  Nana comes on stage and releases a musk of pure sexuality. She can’t sing or dance, but it doesn’t matter. When she realizes that she’s about to miss a high note, she simply covers it up with a wiggle of the hips and a thrust of her cleavage, earning herself a storm of applause. Watching Nana’s character in the play, Venus, seduce Mars, ‘the audience was possessed, and every man was her slave. She made them go into a rut, like a crazed animal, and it spread throughout the theatre. Her every movement breathed desire into them, her little finger was mistress of their flesh.’

  The news of Nana’s sexual powers inevitably reaches Bertie’s ears, and she learns that he has booked the best seat in the house – in those days, there were boxes on each side of the stage so that the richest customers could sit mere inches above the actresses, who would be looking them almost directly in the eyes as they performed. And Bertie is not the only dignitary expected – the manager is hoping for the Shah of Persia and maybe even the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. But it is the Englishman who arouses the highest expectations.

  Zola always did extensive research for his novels, and in the case of Nana, some of this consisted of talking to people who had been to see Hortense Schneider at the theatre and who had witnessed Bertie in action
there. So when the ‘Prince of Scotland’ (a disguise as thin as Nana’s costume) finally arrives to see one of the actress’s performances, we can be sure that it is a pretty faithful portrait of the real Bertie as he was perceived by the Parisians.

  The most remarkable thing about Bertie’s appearance in the novel is how comfortably he adopts his role as top dog in the Parisian pack of sexual predators. He comes to see Nana’s show three times in a single week, and on the third night, he and a couple of French aristocrats, including the Comte de Muffat, a previously moralistic man who is now under Nana’s spell, are shown into her dressing room unannounced. She is half-naked and hides behind a screen, though not before the visitors have been treated to a tantalizing glimpse of her charms. The theatre manager tells her to come out: ‘It’s His Highness,’ he says, ‘don’t be so childish. Mon dieu, these men know very well how a woman is put together. They won’t eat you.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ Bertie quips in fluent French, and everyone breaks out in forced laughter as the manager congratulates him on his ‘perfectly Parisian wit’.

  So Nana emerges from hiding, her breasts barely covered by a low-cut corset. She is only eighteen, but knows how to toy with the men and apologizes for her undressed state, ‘her arms naked, her shoulders naked, her nipples exposed, in the adorable blond fleshiness of youth’.

  Bertie manages another gallant riposte: ‘I’m the one who should apologize, madam. I couldn’t resist the temptation to come and compliment you.’

  More young men arrive with champagne (and this is only the interval – Nana has to go back on stage in a few minutes) so that the dressing room is soon crammed with people toasting the semi-naked young performer. Zola comments that: ‘No one found this strange mix of people laughable – this real prince, heir to a throne, who was drinking Champagne with a ham actress, at ease in this . . . charade of royalty, amongst dressers and whores, stage hands and procurers of women.’

  Bertie teases the lovelorn Comte de Muffat with an Anglo-French jibe: ‘You don’t pay enough attention to your pretty women. We’ll steal them all.’ And the purpose of his visit to the theatre, and to Paris itself, was just that.

  Bertie stays to enjoy the view as Nana’s dresser helps her into her flimsy, see-through tunic, and Zola notes that: ‘With half-closed eyes, his [Bertie’s] connoisseur’s gaze followed the swollen contours of her chest.’ Bertie asks to watch the rest of the show from the wings, and there, as Nana waits to go on, a fur coat protecting her against the draught, he pounces. Ushering her to one side, ‘the Prince spoke to Nana, still coveting her with his half-closed eyes’ and ‘without looking at him, she smiled and nodded her agreement’. The deal has been done. She slips off her fur coat and walks on stage, practically naked.

  After the show, Nana’s admirers follow her out of the theatre and crowd excitedly around the stage door, and then one of them, the frustrated Comte, suddenly notices that she has disappeared. ‘His Highness had calmly taken her into his carriage.’ The other men are annoyed, but they’re not really jealous of Bertie. This was the natural order of things. Nana was there to be shared, and she went to the highest payer or the highest man in the social hierarchy, in this case the English Prince. Even compared to these sophisticated Parisians, Bertie made winning the game of seduction look effortless.

  IV

  Zola might have painted an accurate picture of Bertie (or of people’s memories of him, anyway), but he was slightly unfair to the real Hortense Schneider. For a start, she was in her mid-thirties when she met Bertie, whereas Nana is still in her teens. Hortense was also a much better singer than Nana, a soprano who became the face and voice (not to mention the curvaceous figure) of German-born Jacques Offenbach’s operettas in Paris. In describing the amateurish acting performances, Zola seems to have been more inspired by a cocotte called Méry Laurent, who, like Nana, was eighteen in 1867, and who made her name as Venus in Offenbach’s hit opera La Belle Hélène, during which she appeared naked in a golden shell, a plump version of Botticelli’s painting of the same subject.

  Hortense Schneider, on the other hand, was a professional performer. A journalist who heard her sing wrote that she had a voice that Auber (a fashionable composer) ‘went to listen to whenever he felt the need to give his ears a delightful washing out’. It sounds like a French medical treatment but was definitely intended as a compliment.

  In 1867, Hortense was starring in La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, a satire by Offenbach of a minor German duchy where the head of state, the Grand Duchess, has a fetish for men in uniform and falls for a common soldier called Fritz. She appoints him head of her army, outranking its previous leader, the aptly named Général Boum. The show, with its apparent anti-Prussian message, was the hit of the season, and on 15 May 1867, Bertie came to see it at the Théâtre des Variétés on the boulevard Montmartre. Like everyone else in Paris, he seems to have fallen instantly under Hortense’s spell.

  In describing the voluptuous Nana, Zola certainly wasn’t exaggerating the real Hortense’s effect on men. The Parisian journalist who quoted the above compliment about her voice also said that she possessed ‘the flesh of a Rubens, a winning smile and flirtatious eyes, a combination which would have driven an archbishop to damnation’.

  A young cabaret singer, Paulus, remembered Hortense as:

  . . . the triumphant figure of the Second Empire. Her court was as popular as that at the Tuileries [Napoléon and Eugénie’s Parisian palace], but more amusing. Any sovereign visiting Paris rushed to her side as soon as they had paid their official respects, to beg the beautiful star for a smile . . . and the rest. And her heart was as open to visitors as her house.

  Amongst Hortense’s admirers and supposed lovers were Napoléon III, Tsar Alexander II of Russia, Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, King Luís I of Portugal, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and Bertie. If she had been a spy or a diplomat, Hortense Schneider could have ended war in Europe for the whole of the nineteenth century.

  In short, in 1867 Hortense was the unrivalled female star of the Paris stage, and having her as a notch on his bedpost was a major coup for Bertie – a more modern equivalent would be a young English prince going to Hollywood and squiring Scarlett Johannson or (if we want to get really modern) Brad Pitt.

  During his visit to the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Bertie seems to have done exactly what the journalist Paulus described – he followed up his bonjour to the imperial couple with a lusty bonsoir to Hortense – and apparently he kept up the relationship for some time. Bertie’s biographer Christopher Hibbert calls Hortense the Prince’s ‘favourite companion’ of 1868, even though at the same time she was carrying on a long-term affair with the Viceroy of Egypt, Isma’il the Magnificent (a name of his own choosing, no doubt), whom she had met when he came to Paris for the Exposition, and whom she visited in Egypt the following year. Like the fictional Nana, Hortense Schneider was a lady who managed her love affairs with the skill of a theatrical agent, which explains how she was able to quit public life in her forties and live out a long retirement on her earnings, theatrical and otherwise.

  V

  In 1867, Bertie also found time to enjoy the company of another notorious Parisienne, Giulia Beneni Barucci, the self-styled ‘number-one whore in Paris’. Known as La Barucci, this sultry Italian who spoke unashamedly bad French was one of the best-known of the top-tier courtesans, the grandes horizontales, and by the age of thirty she had earned enough selling her services to buy herself a mansion on the Champs-Élysées. She was living just across the road from one of her colleagues, La Païva, who had started her career sleeping with English lords in London in the 1840s, and now held chic society soirées, one of which Bertie apparently attended during his trip to the Exposition.

  Today, when we look at photographs of these women, we might be forgiven for considering them dowdy and unattractive, with their lank, pre-shampoo hair parted grimly in the middle and their dresses that hid their lower body behind a firewall of billowing cloth. The
re is a photo of La Barucci in which she doesn’t even have uncovered shoulders, and seems to be dressed for a funeral. But tastes were very different in the mid-nineteenth century, and the men were, if anything, even less alluring, with their comb-down haircuts, straggly beards and cigar breath.

  A contemporary of La Barucci’s gives a description that explains why Bertie was so keen to meet her. She had, the playboy Comte de Maugny wrote:

  . . . large dark eyes, penetrating and hard but languorous at the same time; wide nostrils that quivered like those of a thoroughbred race horse; a lascivious mouth, protuberant breasts, a long, vibrant throat, a curvaceous body that was statuesque from head to foot, with a sweeping waistline; and she was taller than average, possessing the grace of a queen . . .

  You can almost hear Maugny throwing down his pen and leaping on the woman.

  There is a famous anecdote about Bertie’s first meeting with La Barucci in 1867. He and his brother Affie were introduced to her by a French duke, Agénor Gramont, a favourite of Napoléon III and an infamous philanderer who, incredible as it may sound, had previously been France’s Ambassador to the Vatican.

  Apparently, Gramont summoned La Barucci to meet the visiting English princes, and was annoyed when she turned up forty-five minutes late (although Bertie himself was probably used to waiting for ladies, given his wife’s notorious lack of punctuality). To excuse herself, as soon as she arrived La Barucci hoisted up her dress to show everyone that she hadn’t wasted those forty-five minutes choosing underwear. Beneath her layers of crinoline, she was completely naked.