Dirty Bertie

by Stephen Clarke

  Strangely, Gramont seems to have thought that the meeting didn’t go well, although Bertie himself must have been delighted with her no-nonsense approach. When the French duke reprimanded La Barucci, she famously replied: ‘But you told me to behave properly with His Highness. I showed him the best I have, and it was free.’ It was the kind of story that would have echoed around Paris’s theatre corridors and cafés, enhancing the Italienne’s reputation and, of course, attracting even more high-paying customers. As for Bertie, he was already on her list.

  Foolishly though, he let things go beyond the realms of the saucy anecdote and left behind written proof of his dalliances with the Italian prostitute. After La Barucci died of tuberculosis in 1871, her impoverished brother threatened to sell Bertie’s intimate letters at auction in Paris or make sure they were sent to London to cause a scandal there. Bertie dispatched a negotiator to France, and considered having the brother arrested, but finally paid 6,000 francs (five or six years’ wages for a Parisian worker) for twenty letters, most of which he had thoughtlessly signed ‘A.E.’. Still a relatively new player of the game of adultery, Bertie had apparently not realized that what happened in Paris had to stay in Paris.

  In his defence, this was Bertie’s first full excursion into the swampy moral territory of Parisian adultery. It was not surprising that he stumbled into a few patches of quicksand. Many Frenchmen, like Nana’s helpless lovers, were no more cautious, and often got themselves entrapped in the depths of the demi-monde, the ‘half-world’ that was Paris’s soft but treacherous underbelly.

  And apart from his bad habit of signing letters to prostitutes, Bertie seems to have learnt well from his first full Parisian experience. According to French writers of the time, during his several visits in the late 1860s, he became a semi-permanent fixture about the place, building up a catalogue of regular haunts, many of which were fashionable simply because he went there.

  In old age, a Frenchman called James de Chambrier looked back on Napoléon III’s Paris and called Bertie ‘ce Parisien de Londres’ (this Parisian from London). ‘We saw him passing by,’ Chambrier recalls in his book, La Cour et la Société du Second Empire, ‘lively and cheerful . . . everyone in Paris knew his handshake, his frank eyes, his handsome smile . . . Skilful with words, the pen10 and cards, he created solid friendships with people of all backgrounds.’ Bertie’s greatest quality in Parisians’ eyes was, according to Chambrier, that he was ‘completely free of austerity, and not at all fond of his mother’s puritanism’. Which was lucky, given the kind of Parisian places that Bertie frequented in those last heady years of Napoléon III’s empire.

  * * *

  1 This lady in her mid-thirties was one of Eugénie’s dames du palais. She was bisexual, and famous for her string of male and female lovers. No wonder Bertie was so engrossed in conversation with her. Incidentally, she was also the wife of one of Bertie’s closest French friends, Gaston de Gallifet.

  2 Australia has a free website of digitized newspapers dating back to 1803. In the nineteenth century, most of the international content was reprinted from English papers or written by on-the-spot correspondents. It’s at http://trove.nla.gov.au and it’s a wonderful resource. The website invites readers to correct digitized text – some of the scanning is haphazard.

  3 A long menu like this did not imply that everyone ate everything. At larger functions, people would often be served from the bowl nearest to them, or if they were important enough, they would instruct the servants to give them a helping of their favourite dishes.

  4 See the chapter on the French Revolution in 1,000 Years of Annoying the French. The aristos and ‘traitors’ who survived to be guillotined were the lucky ones.

  5 Paris’s nickname, la Ville-Lumière, is said to have several origins, including its reputation for philosophical and scientific enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as Haussmann’s new street lighting and the clearance of densely built medieval neighbourhoods.

  6 The word fille, meaning girl or daughter, was also commonly used to mean a prostitute. If you said, for example, that you had seen ‘une fille dans la rue’ – a girl in the street – and wanted make it clear that you weren’t referring to a hooker, it was necessary to specify ‘une jeune fille’, a young girl. Though how this should make things clearer isn’t completely obvious.

  7 In French: ‘Toute une société se ruant sur le cul. Une meute derrière une chienne, qui n’est pas en chaleur et qui se moque des chiens qui la suivent.’ Cul is a crude word for the backside and, like ass, a general word for sex. Se moquer means both to mock something and not to give a damn about it.

  8 In fairness to Hortense, it is said that her ‘Passage des Princes’ nickname was coined by a jealous rival, another singer called Léa Silly.

  9 A louis was a name commonly given to the napoléon, a twenty-franc gold coin. To give an idea of the value of a louis, one of the workers laying paving stones on Napoléon’s boulevards might be earning about 4 francs a day, a fifth of a louis, so sex with Nana would have cost him about a hundred days’ wages. Not that she would have entertained anyone with dirt under their fingernails.

  10 Chambrier was probably talking about flirtatious messages and thank-you notes rather than essays on French society.

  6

  PAINTING THE TOWN ROUGE

  ‘As long as Parisians are having fun, the government can sleep soundly.’

  William Reymond, French theatre critic

  I

  WHEN BERTIE CAME to Paris in the spring of 1867, he and his brother stayed at the British Embassy, but on other occasions he would behave much like any wealthy tourist. Accompanied by just an equerry or one of his roistering London friends like old Etonian Charles Wynn-Carrington, he would take up residency at his favourite hotel, the Bristol1 on the place Vendôme, and ask for the guest list in case he knew anyone else staying there. Especially if she was female.

  This done, the Prince would then check the Courrier des Théâtres – the listings magazine – and choose the play, opera or musical he wanted to see that evening. Naturally, he had no problem getting tickets, even for the biggest box-office hit, unlike Parisians today who have to book months ahead for any popular show.

  The theatre was the place to go in Napoléon III’s Paris. The city’s new architecture, with its chic apartment buildings replacing the old tumbledown medieval houses, attracted hordes of middle-class migrants into town, and all of them wanted entertainment.

  Whole new city squares were constructed around theatres – Châtelet, for example, with its face-to-face Théâtre Lyrique and Théâtre Impérial, both completed in 1862; the now-defunct Théâtre de la Gaîté, built in the same year just north of Châtelet; and, grandest of all, Napoléon’s new opera house, the Opéra Garnier, with staircases worthy of a château and a grand foyer that looks more like a palace ballroom.

  The design of the new Opéra, which dominates the whole area of the city as much today as it ever did, was so over the top that the Empress Eugénie herself got confused when she saw the plans.

  ‘What is this style?’ she asked. ‘It’s not Greek, it’s not Louis XV, it’s not Louis XVI.’

  ‘It’s Napoléon III,’ the young architect Charles Garnier replied.

  Napoléon was delighted. ‘Don’t worry,’ he reportedly whispered to Garnier, ‘she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.’ The most important thing was that the building should stand out, and that it certainly did, with its huge letters ‘N’ for Napoléon sculpted along the façade.

  More than a dozen theatres sprang up along the boulevards, most of them sumptuously decorated. The foyers and corridors, with their frescoes, sculptures and immense mirrors, were as much performance spaces as the stage itself. The theatres were places where Parisians went both to see plays and to be seen at play.

  Bertie was a frequent visitor to the city’s new venues, though according to an Irish journalist of the time, Justin McCarthy, he had very strict ideas about
the kind of things that should and should not happen on a stage: he had no taste for ‘high art’ and preferred ‘little theatres where vivacious blondes display their unconcealed attractions’. Poetic dialogue did not seem to be top of Bertie’s list of priorities.

  The most fashionable form of theatre of the day was vaudeville. We think of this as a nineteenth-century invention, but it had been a popular genre in France for centuries before it came into its own in Napoléon III’s Paris. Originally the name vaudeville described light-hearted, often satirical songs, like those written by a fifteenth-century Norman poet, Olivier Basselin, who came from the Vaux-de-Vire – the Vire valleys. By Napoléon III’s time, these had evolved into musical comedies featuring catchy new songs and farcical plots based on misunderstandings and barely credible coincidences. The French playwright Etienne Jouy, who wrote the libretto for Rossini’s opera William Tell, scorned vaudeville as ‘looking hard for puns and usually making too much of them’ – though this would have been perfect entertainment for a conversationalist with a short attention span like Bertie.

  Along with the only slightly more highbrow opéras comiques, vaudeville plays were quite simply a good night out, with songs that you might still be whistling as you strolled or drove away along the boulevard after the show. And we shouldn’t forget that half of the enjoyment for Bertie was the idea that he might sleep with the star of the play or an attractive audience member. As one French observer put it, Bertie ‘understood what theatre was about’. If he didn’t like a show, he could simply walk around inside the building ‘without being distracted by what was on stage’.

  Bertie wasn’t alone in this – fashionable Parisian males didn’t consider the raison d’être of the theatre to be the plays and operas advertised on the posters outside. Gaston Jollivet tells us that ‘in the late afternoon, men would drift towards the opera house in the rue Le Peletier, where the dancers were coming out of rehearsals’. And later, at the performance, ‘many men would miss the second act if they had met up with a lover’. It needed a very special performance on stage to hold a man’s attention.

  We have already seen Bertie in action with Hortense Schneider at the Théâtre des Variétés, and he made similar appearances at a host of other Parisian theatres. One of his favourites was the Théâtre du Gymnase on the boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle, which, fortunately for Bertie, had made a U-turn in its choice of repertoire to fit in with the moral climate of Napoléon III’s régime. Previously known for its edifying dramas, it switched over to more populist plays featuring what one commentator called ‘compromising situations, turpitude and calculated effrontery’. Exactly Bertie’s type of show. And it was a small theatre, with boxes where spectators could sit on a level with the stage. Bertie didn’t even need to go backstage – the actresses could step directly on to his lap.

  Another of his evening haunts was the Théâtre du Vaudeville, which relocated in the 1860s, moving a kilometre or so from the place de La Bourse to a brand-new building on the boulevard des Capucines at Opéra.2 The Vaudeville troupe was famous for having put on the first stage version of Alexandre Dumas the younger’s novel La Dame aux Camélias, the highly topical tale of a rich cocotte who falls in love with a young bourgeois man and gives up her amoral lifestyle (and all her generous clients) for him. It’s a sincere love story, but just to underline to middle-class audiences that a tainted woman can never change her spots, the former cocotte heroine, Marguerite, has tuberculosis and wastes away, coughing increasingly large bloodspots into her lace handkerchiefs.

  In the mid-1860s, the story would have been given extra poignancy because, coincidentally, Marguerite was the name of Napoléon III’s official mistress, a practising cocotte. In any case, La Dame aux Camélias was a huge hit when it opened in 1852, and is said to be the first play in Paris ever to have a run of more than a hundred performances. Bertie almost certainly saw a version of the show, especially because later in the century, the role of Marguerite was played by one of his mistresses, Sarah Bernhardt (of whom much more later).

  The goings-on in Paris’s theatres are vividly described by the retired but unashamed playboy the Comte de Maugny in his memoirs, Souvenirs du Second Empire. He looks back fondly on riotous evenings in the late 1860s spent watching the Italian opera troupe Les Italiens who performed regularly at the Odéon theatre, where Bertie was known to go. Maugny tells us that the Odéon had large, convivial dressing rooms where you could sit and chat (meaning, of course, arrange dates with the performers), and that sometimes the female singers would swoop out into the front row to choose a willing suitor.

  When a cast was particularly good-looking, Maugny says that the front rows would be booked by members of gentlemen’s clubs who would bombard the stage with offers of supper after curtain-down. The ballet was one of their favourite targets. On one occasion, Maugny notes, fifty or so members of the Jockey Club (one of several Paris clubs that Bertie belonged to) ‘occupied the front seven rows, and dominated the room, providing the dancers with their protectors’. Apparently young ballet dancers needed protection from predatory males by other predatory males.

  The Jockey Club was so influential in the world of Parisian theatre that it was not the done thing for an opera director to stage a ballet scene in the first act – club members were notorious for arriving late at performances, and did not want to miss the sight of so many short skirts on stage. In Napoléon III’s Paris, it was therefore de rigueur to bring out the full company of dancers in Act 2. It is even said that one opera failed because the director defied the Jockey Club and put his ballet in the first act, provoking a boycott by the playboy set. This all sounds very frivolous, but the attitude amongst the rich, aristocratic young men of Paris that the city belonged to them and should run to their timetable would have grave consequences when anarchy broke out at the end of Napoléon III’s reign.

  Sometimes the posh male members of the audience even invaded the stage. One of Bertie’s French biographers, André Maurois, describes how, during performances of Fédora, a melodrama written for Sarah Bernhardt by Victorien Sardou, the actress would allow gentlemen admirers to take part in the action. ‘At the end of one act, [she] wept by the deathbed of a murdered prince. Many Parisians enjoyed playing, for one night only, this silent, invisible role. And the Prince took his turn.’ Anything, it seems, to liven up an over-serious play.

  André Maurois tells another story that illustrates how Bertie would let nothing come between him and a night at the Opéra.

  Once, in Paris, he was just about to leave for the theatre with a few friends when news arrived that a distant royal relative had died. His friends looked at each other, clearly disappointed that their evening was going to be spoilt.

  One of them dared to ask, ‘What shall we do?’

  The Prince thought for a moment and came up with the answer: ‘We’ll put on black cufflinks and go to the play.’

  II

  Even the lightest opera or vaudeville play was heavyweight compared to the entertainment at other bastions of Paris’s nightlife: the café-concerts. They had started out in the mid-1850s as places where classical actresses might come and declaim monologues from Racine or Corneille. But they quickly evolved a mixed, crowd-pleasing repertoire of what one French specialist has described as ‘short comic items, vaudeville scenes, impressions, excerpts from operettas, as well as popular songs that could be naïve, suggestive, erotic or just plain anatomical’.

  Famous venues like the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère would come into their own later in the nineteenth century, after the painters and poets of Montmartre had made their hangouts in northern Paris more fashionable.3 But in Napoléon III’s Paris of the 1860s, the café-concerts in ‘safer’ areas around the Champs-Élysées, Opéra and the grands boulevards were already popular with satin-cloaked night owls like Bertie.

  The Café des Ambassadeurs and its twin, the Alcazar d’Été, were smart night spots where risqué singers and flirtatious dancers would perform for the bourgeois.
These two café-concerts were set in almost identical buildings, a cross between a hunting lodge and a Greek temple, in the gardens along the Champs-Élysées. The Ambassadeurs was one of Bertie’s favourites, conveniently situated just around the corner from his hotel. Edgar Degas’s painting Le Café-Concert aux Ambassadeurs gives an idea of the atmosphere that Bertie must have enjoyed there. Amidst Greek columns and a leafy décor, four women in brightly coloured, low-cut dresses are on stage. One, in scarlet, leans out into the audience as she sings, her right hand provocatively on her jutting hip, her left pointing at someone in the crowd, perhaps to aim a risqué line at an admirer. Another performer, in pastel blue, sits and gazes demurely over her fan, possibly to make eye contact with a rich member of the audience who has made it clear that he would be interested in some après-action. Degas gives us a close-up on the audience, too – a man sporting a floppy moustache and a top hat is apparently accompanied by three women, at least two of whom seem more interested in him than the show – reminding him, no doubt, that he is spoken for. At least for tonight.

  In the 1860s Bertie watched and ‘got to know’ a star of the Alcazar d’Été, a singer called Thérésa. And when Bertie ‘got to know’ a female Parisian artiste, it didn’t usually mean that they met after the show to swap boeuf bourguignon recipes. Thérésa, whose real name was Emma Valladon, was famous for songs that combined bawdy lyrics with yodelling. These songs, known then as tyroliennes, were so fashionable that Thérésa was invited to perform for Napoléon III in person. It’s easy to understand why the Emperor would enjoy lines like these:

  Bastien talks of marriage, but marriage demands reflexion,

  The same man every night in bed – a very strange invention.

  Though given the Emperor’s interpretation of his own wedding vows, the Empress Eugénie might have found the song less amusing.