Dirty Bertie

by Stephen Clarke

  Thérésa’s rise to fame was a fairly typical one. She was a simple country girl from Normandy who came to Paris to work in clothes sweatshops when she was only twelve, and was fired because she spent too much time singing in bars and taking bit parts in theatres. After doing the rounds of low-paying café-concerts, in 1863 she found her yodelling voice and suddenly had producers outbidding each other for her services. She even published her autobiography – Mémoires de Thérèsa, Écrits par Elle-même (Thérésa’s Mémoirs, Written by Herself) – though unfortunately for us it came out in 1865, before Bertie’s first outings to the café-concert. By the time he saw Thérésa in the late 1860s she had become even more successful and was earning 1,500 francs a month, probably about 500 times her wages as a teenage seamstress.

  In her autobiography, which is well enough written to suggest that Thérésa might have had a little help with the grammar and spelling (unlike modern celebrities, of course), she tells a typical hard-luck story of battling her way to the top. She hints at other singers taking immoral short cuts to fame and fortune, but assures her dear readers that she preferred to struggle honestly to pay her rent. She even describes a scene in which a bailiff lets her off her debts in exchange for a song. Perhaps it’s just modern cynicism that makes this sound like a blatant euphemism.

  In any case, a make-up seller tells Thérésa that she is ‘une idiote’. She should be more like ‘petite L****’ who ‘in the last six months has gobbled up a baron and two viscounts, and now she’s tucking into a duke!’ Thérésa insists that she’s going to make it on the strength of her singing alone, although if we are to believe the rumours, within a couple of years she would be carving herself choice morsels of French emperor and English prince.

  Judging by her photos, Thérésa was not what you would describe as a beauty, even in those plumper times. Degas painted her on stage in a picture called La Chanson du Chien, and did nothing to romanticize her huge biceps and manly jaw. Neither, apparently, did Thérésa herself, because one of the reasons for her popularity was that she was giving her upper-crust audiences a caricature of the crude, low-class Parisienne, combining a powerful voice with lewd gestures and meaningful winks. One French journalist who saw Thérésa said that she had a ‘marvellous frankness and an infectious good humour that was incomparable’. He also pointed out, defending the singer against accusations that she represented all that was bad about Napoléon III’s Paris, that she had little choice: she was obliged to play to ‘the bad taste of an unhealthy period when society was rotten from the top down’.

  III

  Before and after the theatre, chic Parisians including Bertie and his friends would crowd into the cafés along the boulevards. Under Napoléon III, going out to dinner and supper had become more fashionable than ever, and new venues were constantly springing up.

  One innovation that had been brought about by the invention of the boulevard was the café terrace. There was now space in the street to set up tables, and plenty of reasons to people-watch. Men would loaf at strategic vantage points like the Café de la Paix on the corner of the place de l’Opéra and admire what one observer poetically called ‘the little feet that went clop, clop, clop’. And he wasn’t talking about Shetland ponies.

  Strange as it may sound, another new invention of the new boulevard eateries was the menu. Only now did it become common practice for Parisian restaurants and cafés to print a list of dishes and let their customers come in off the street and choose. The old-fashioned restaurants, like the ones clustered around the Palais-Royal, had always insisted that clients pre-order dinner the previous day. Yet another reason for diners to migrate outside the old city centre and up to the boulevards, where chic new establishments like the Café Anglais and the Maison d’Or – two of Bertie’s favourite hangouts – were soon doing a roaring trade.

  The menus weren’t as varied as they are today. In the 1860s, the Café Anglais would propose only a soup, one fish course, one roast meat, one vegetable and a chocolate mousse. But then people didn’t really go there for the food – they were more interested in the other customers.

  The Café Anglais, on a corner of the boulevard des Italiens, was already a legendary meeting-place when Bertie began going there. In 1866, it had earned a mention in Offenbach’s operetta La Vie Parisienne. The librettists Meilhac and Halévy wrote that it was:

  The place that mothers fear,

  That terrible place where under-age sons

  Spend the money earned by their fathers,

  And fritter away the dowry of their sisters.

  They describe:

  Bursts of laughter, champagne-fuelled rows,

  People fighting over here, dancing over there,

  While the creaking piano plays popular songs

  To accompany strange debauchery.

  The debauchery, in which Bertie was apparently an enthusiastic participant, went on mainly in the upstairs rooms. Unlike Paris’s boulevard cafés today, the Café Anglais occupied the whole of a five-storey building. Downstairs was the public room, the salle commune. This was the place for business lunches or where married ladies could be seen without being frowned upon. The upper floors were reached via a side entrance and a hidden staircase. Respectable dames would never go upstairs for fear of bumping into prostitutes or their husbands. Up there were the cabinets privés – private lounges – where illicit gatherings large and small would go on, served by discreet waiters.

  Though not all the waiters could be trusted to keep a secret. At the Café Anglais, a well-placed bribe would ensure that a communicating door would stay slightly ajar, so that people in the salle commune could see who was coming in the back door.

  The most famous of the Café Anglais’s cabinets was ‘le Grand Seize’ (Big Number Sixteen). This was a sumptuous private room with plush red sofas and walls swathed in velvet, and Bertie was an habitué there. One of its most frequent female visitors was the notorious cocotte Anna Deslions.4 And it was in this room, though apparently not in Bertie’s presence, that one of his favourite grandes horizontales performed a stunt that turned her into a legend.

  Cora Pearl was an Englishwoman whose real name was Emma Crouch and who was born in either 1835 or 1842 depending on which story you believe. The daughter of a cellist and composer, she had some real musical ability – maybe not as much as Hortense Schneider, but certainly enough to earn her a role in the 1867 production of Offenbach’s operetta Orphée aux Enfers. Apart from a voluptuous figure and a beautiful face, her other great quality was a determination to get rich quick. She is said to have turned to prostitution after being raped, and had a reputation for taking lovers, asset-stripping them and then humiliating them.

  A social commentator writing under the name of Zed painted a vivid picture of how Cora’s mind worked:

  One day at her apartment we saw an unbelievable account book, divided into three columns. One contained the names of her clients, most of them public figures or friends of ours. In the second she had recorded the date of their . . . stay. In the third was the sum donated by each pilgrim for the hospitality he had received. And the fatal register also contained, and may God forgive me, a column of remarks, not all of which were very flattering.

  Even Bertie wasn’t spared Cora’s vengeful sense of humour. When he sent her a huge consignment of rare orchids, she showed her scorn for the gesture (no doubt because it cost him a lot but earned her nothing) by inviting some friends over, throwing the flowers on the floor and dancing a hornpipe on them.

  Perhaps Bertie was being over-romantic. Most men knew all too well that the only way to earn Cora’s (temporary) affection was to give her cash – one lover gained her favour by sending a box of marrons glacés (glazed chestnuts) individually wrapped in 1,000-franc notes.

  Cora embraced the spirit of the times with brash displays of her burgeoning wealth. She bought a luxury apartment near the Champs-Élysées and fitted a pink marble bathtub with her initials inlaid in gold. And to maintain her lifestyle, she
courted scandal. Partly thanks to her widely publicized affair with Napoléon III, she was the first cocotte to be called a grande horizontale. She also had another nickname – ‘Plat du Jour’, which translates nicely as ‘dish of the day’; this she earned one night in the Grand Seize room at the Café Anglais.

  A dinner party was being held there, and Cora bet the men present that they would not be able to slice up the next course to be served. They accepted the wager, and she left the room. A few minutes later, the waiters came in bearing an immense serving dish. Laid out on top, garnished with strategically placed sprigs of parsley, was a naked Cora Pearl. It is a dish of the day that Paris has never forgotten.5

  During the 1867 Exposition Universelle, the immoral goings-on at the Café Anglais weren’t confined to the upper floors. There were so many wealthy tourists in town that even the salle commune was invaded by professional belles de nuit touting for business. Much like the hostesses in a girlie bar, they would earn themselves food, drinks and tips, and hope to find a man to take home in exchange for little more than the day’s rent at their boarding house. It wasn’t all glamour in Napoléon’s Paris.

  Another of Bertie’s favourite Parisian cafés during the late 1860s, and the city’s most expensive, was the aptly named Maison d’Or, the House of Gold, which would later change its name to the almost identical Maison Dorée – the Gilded House – a recognition perhaps that its charms were superficial.

  It occupied a large building on the boulevard des Italiens, almost across the street from the Café Anglais. According to the Courrier Français, a weekly magazine of the time, the Maison d’Or was a pioneer of its genre: ‘This is the place that began the reign of the café splendide, where paintings, mirrors, gold and luxurious furnishings dazzle the eye. Everywhere there are medallions, pendants, light fittings, sculpted panelling and ornate ceilings.’ Its wine cellar was reputed to contain 80,000 bottles.

  In the daytime the Maison d’Or was mainly frequented by financiers holding meetings and impressing clients, much like Paris’s luxury hotels today. In the evening, though, the café lit its lamps and beckoned in the jeunesse dorée and older men with money to throw about. Bertie began as the former and grew into the latter, so it was only natural that he should become a regular.

  The Maison d’Or also attracted famous writers: Alexandre Dumas père, creator of The Three Musketeers, established a newspaper in the building; one of Balzac’s characters held a ruinously expensive dinner there; and the café features in Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu – the main character Swann comes looking for his beloved Odette here, doesn’t find her, and so falls even more deeply in love with her.6

  The café attracted such a rich, fashionable and influential clientele that it became known as the ‘heart, mind and stomach of the boulevard’. Though in calling it this, Parisians were neglecting the other body parts that were put to good use in the private rooms upstairs.

  The layout of the Maison d’Or was much the same as the Café Anglais. The restaurant was divided into two sections, one with a large door opening out on to the boulevard and the other a separate area accessible only from the side street, the rue Laffitte. Here, in the private cabinets, married men could relive their bachelor days confident in the knowledge that Madame would never find out – unless she was in one of the other cabinets and bumped into hubby on the way out to the rue Laffitte.

  Even without female company, rich men would meet here for illegal gambling, so discretion was the key. A typical anecdote of the times has two strangers arriving upstairs at the Maison d’Or late at night and trying to get into a cabinet. Their way is blocked by a man who asks them what they want.

  ‘To play cards,’ they tell him.

  ‘Would you like to tell me your names?’ the regular asks.

  ‘Never!’ they reply.

  ‘Très bien, go in.’

  The most prestigious of the cabinets at the Maison d’Or was number 6, though at one point it endangered its reputation for privacy. Customers began to complain because the waiters were refusing to close the curtains and allow the occupants the secrecy that they could get in the other cabinets. Only later was it revealed that a rich Englishman was living opposite, and was paying the staff to let him enjoy a spot of voyeurism.

  Gaston Jollivet and his friends had a regular reservation at a Maison d’Or cabinet, and their favourite game was to invite soupeuses sensationnelles – sensational female supper guests. The man who invited the most scandalous lady didn’t have to pay for his meal. Gaston tells the story of his proudest moment. One evening he is at the theatre, cruising the corridors in search of feminine company. He gets stuck behind a strange couple – a woman who is ‘considerably padded’ and her friend who is ‘as thin as a pickled herring’. Then he recognizes the padded one’s voice – it is the singer Thérésa, whom he’d seen at the Alcazar the previous night. He accosts the ladies and invites Thérésa – with her thin friend, of course – to supper after the show. She hesitates but he clinches the deal by accidentally dropping his hat and making her laugh.

  After the show, he escorts Thérésa and her chaperone to the Maison d’Or. Making a triumphant entry into the cabinet, he orders the most expensive dishes on the menu, secure in the knowledge that his friends will foot the bill. Thérésa also tucks in so heartily that over dessert she has to unlace her corsets and let her ample form hang out.

  Everything goes swimmingly, Gaston tells us, until one of his friends starts licking the food off Thérésa’s fingers, and offers to take her home. He has a carriage waiting outside. Poor Gaston gets stood up. Definitely not the kind of humiliation that would have happened to Bertie.

  IV

  In many of these nocturnal activities, Bertie would not have been a lone operator.

  His wife, of course, was almost never invited along, even for a respectable night out at a non-risqué play. In any case, poor deaf Alexandra would not have been able to hear theatre dialogue, so what was the point? Only once during Napoléon III’s reign did Bertie take Alexandra to the Hôtel Bristol for a few days. This was in May 1869, when they were on their way home from a seven-month trip to Egypt, Turkey and the Crimean battlefields (how Alexandra must have enjoyed limping around the Russian plains having the carnage described to her). She was pregnant when the royal couple arrived in Paris, and she expended all her energy at a ball given by Napoléon at the Château de Compiègne, so it is not hard to imagine Bertie advising the weary Princess to put her feet up at the Bristol while he nipped out alone.

  He would often go out with an English brother in arms or French friends. His love of company and need for constant amusement meant that he was more than happy to join one of the roving, testosterone-fuelled gangs that Gaston Jollivet and the Comte de Maugny describe so well. Paris’s élitist clubs were, of course, delighted to add an English prince to their membership, and Bertie was quickly voted into the Jockey Club, the Yacht Club de France, the Cercle des Champs-Élysées and the Union Artistique, all of them regular meeting places for rich men in search of boisterous fun.

  Like their English equivalents, these were places where, so Maugny tells us, aristocrats mixed with ‘nouveau-riche millionaires’ for ‘gambling, smoking and boasting’. The men would go out to a show and supper, and then, the champagne still bubbling in their veins, head back to the club – usually a chic house or apartment – in the small hours of the morning. There, Maugny says, ‘until dawn, in this private company, men would have the most shocking conversations and perpetrate schoolboy jokes that would have caused a priest to burst his spleen’. Behind closed doors, the top de la top of French manhood would, for example, pretend to be donkeys and ride each other rodeo style until everyone was shaken off. All this, of course, after doing very similar things with actresses in the cafés’ private rooms.

  All in all, with Napoléon III as his role model and Paris’s rowdiest males as his playmates, Bertie was sure of expert guidance when he first went prowling the streets of Paris, which m
ust explain how he met all the naughtiest women so quickly. He did venture out on his own as well, though, to sample a slightly more refined type of gathering – the salon.

  By the time Bertie first attended a salon, these exclusive get-togethers had been part of Parisian social life for centuries. They were parties where the rich and fashionable listened to sparkling conversation – and showed off their ability to get invited to salons.

  The host (or more often the hostess) of a salon was only as fashionable and powerful as the calibre of his or her guests. Top of the pile was, naturally, the Empress Eugénie, who could call on anyone in the city to grace her Monday-night parties, the Lundis de l’Impératrice. Eugénie, presiding regally from her armchair, would surround herself with her beautiful dames du palais and lead a select group of a couple of dozen people in conversation, dinner and dancing.

  Everything about these soirées was highly stylized. The male guests had to come dressed in a special black uniform, with below-the-knee knickerbockers and stockings, and play the gallant Frenchmen to the classiest women in Paris. Foreign royalty, including Bertie, would flock to the Tuileries at Eugénie’s command, along with the most prestigious diplomats (especially those with charming wives) and anyone who was flavour of the week. The scientist Louis Pasteur, famous as the inventor of pasteurization,7 was invited along to give the Empress and her friends a demonstration of one of his new microscopes. He apparently showed them the difference between human and frog’s blood. It would be nice to think that Eugénie was witty enough to serve cuisses de grenouille for dinner that night.

  Outside of the imperial court, the key to a successful salon was to have enough pulling power to attract a mixture of long-established aristocratic names and new, exciting celebrities, usually (this being France) writers, painters and philosophers. Back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the hostesses had usually been grandes dames themselves, but things had changed under Napoléon III, and now a cocotte could compete for space in the social calendar on an equal footing with a duchess.