Dirty Bertie

by Stephen Clarke

  For obvious reasons, Gallifet and Gambetta didn’t become bosom buddies, but Gallifet has left us with what reads like an admirably even-handed account of the conversation between Bertie and Gambetta.

  Bertie asked why French republicans seemed so determined to keep royalist aristocrats like Gallifet out of politics. Gambetta replied, ‘There is no longer an aristocracy in France. There are only dukes who have no army to lead.’ (This sounds very much like a jibe at Gallifet.) He added that French nobles ‘have no desire for employment. They just sulk. That is their occupation.’ Here, Bertie must have recognized a description of frustrated friends like Henri d’Orléans who had seen their hopes of a return to power crumble to dust over the previous few years.

  Gambetta’s ironic jibes kept coming, and Gallifet was fair enough to record them. ‘You can see [the aristocrats] in our army and navy,’ Gambetta said, ‘or in the diplomatic service. In those professions they look very good, I admit.’

  Bertie then asked, ‘Why not do as we do in my country, where we ennoble the most distinguished men in industry, science, literature, commerce, and so on?’ Again, we see Bertie’s belief in the self-made man – he was a truly modern king in the making.

  Gambetta was worldly enough to know that this English system wouldn’t work in France: the traditional aristocrats would not be willing, he explained, ‘to rub shoulders with the Duke of Industry, the Duke of Science and the Duke of Arts . . . As a republic, we can have only one aristocracy, that of knowledge and merit. And it doesn’t need titles.’

  Bertie conceded: ‘You are a real republican, Monsieur Gambetta,’ to which the man at the opposite end of the social and political scale replied, ‘And I consider it logical that you should be a royalist.’

  Not since Napoléon III’s brief reign had Britain and France expressed such an amicable acceptance of each other’s political differences, and even then, the maverick Emperor had been viewed with suspicion by the Brits. In the past, the idea of having a republic on the other side of the Channel had always been seen as a direct threat to Britain’s monarchy. Suddenly that fear seemed to have dissipated, and the seeds of the lasting friendship that would later unite the traditional enemies in two World Wars were being sown by Bertie, who, until now, had been thought incapable of sowing anything except wild oats.

  Gambetta summed up Bertie’s affinity with France perfectly when he told his friends later that: ‘It is no waste of time to talk with him over a cheerful supper at the Café Anglais. He loves France both in a fun-loving and serious way, and his dream for the future is an entente with us.’

  Gambetta’s actual words to describe Bertie’s loving France were ‘gaîment et sérieusement’. The French word gai means happy and light-hearted, while sérieux implies frankness, trustworthiness and real dedication. For example, the last thing you want in life is a plumber who is pas sérieux – your pipes will be leaking forever. In choosing this word, Gambetta hit the nail on the head – Bertie’s relationship with France had evolved from a teenage crush into a deep, protective affection founded on mutual trust, understanding and admiration.

  Fortunately this ‘seriousness’ didn’t mean that the original spark had died. On the contrary, Bertie still found France incredibly sexy, as he was about to prove . . .

  * * *

  1 Presumably, in Bertie’s case, a pennant featuring two pearl earrings and a cigar rampant on a background of gambling-table green.

  2 Australia was at the time a loyal British colony, so that this ‘we’ would have referred to Britain and its whole empire. Also, the writer was almost certainly British, and syndicated in newspapers in the colonies.

  3 Three years later, in 1881, serious talks about a Channel Tunnel began. Bertie was of course enthusiastic about any way of speeding up travel to France, and went to visit the proposed tunnel opening near Dover. But when opponents of the project lobbied against any breach in England’s ancient sea defences, he changed his mind. In any case, it was much more discreet to cross the Channel by yacht.

  4 Gambetta died of an infection after wounding himself in the hand while pistol-shooting. He was with his mistress at the time, and it was rumoured that he sustained the gunshot wound when he stopped her committing suicide.

  11

  THE FRENCH MAKE WORK FOR IDLE HANDS

  ‘Mademoiselle La Goulue, you have the prettiest legs in Paris.’

  Bertie flatters Paris’s most notorious can-can dancer, in public

  I

  AS THE 1880S began, and Bertie turned a plump, unhealthy forty, two influences came to bear on his life. First, Britain’s mainstream journalists, who had until now been fairly discreet (unlike their republican colleagues), became more like their modern descendants – prying and prurient. There had always been a public appetite in Britain for royal gossip, but now, with literacy on the rise, there was more money to be earned selling juicy stories about the upper classes. Later, in June 1891, The Times would set out this new attitude in black and white – Bertie had no right to a private life, an editorial said, because he was ‘the visible embodiment of the Monarchical principle’, a slightly pompous way of saying that it was in the public interest to tell people if he was caught with his trousers down in a married lady’s sitting room. In the 1880s, though, the self-justification was less well formulated, and the British reading public simply enjoyed scandal about high society, and especially the highest socialite, Bertie.

  Far safer to go to Paris, where a man’s private life was his own affair – and that of the madams and prostitutes he chose to spend it with. Consequently, during this period of disapproval at home, Bertie’s Parisian escapades rose to new heights (or lows, depending on one’s moral point of view).

  The second theme in Bertie’s life during this period was a heightening social conscience. This grew partly out of frustration that, despite his success as an Anglo-French negotiator, his mother refused to trust him with anything that really interested him – foreign, and especially European, politics. But Bertie also seems to have become increasingly aware that there were people around him who had no money for fresh cufflinks to meet every occasion, who drowned their sorrows in cheap gin when he was crowning his pleasures with champagne, and who didn’t need to take annual spa cures to lose the pounds they had put on by eating four or five meals a day.

  In 1884, Bertie became the head of a Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Class, and had to be prevented from causing a riot by doling out money in the slums he visited. At the same time, his appointments diary, and that of his wife Princess Alexandra, began to fill up with hospital openings, most of them new institutions designed to care for the poor. Bertie would often twist friends’ arms to contribute to these charitable causes, and rich men knew that if they made a donation to one of the Prince’s schemes, they would be invited into his circle of friends and might even earn the privilege of lending him money to cover his gambling debts.

  These public shows of concern for the needy had the added advantage of making Bertie increasingly popular with his future subjects, so that they became more forgetful about any indiscretions that might leak out into the press. When he acceded to the throne in 1901, he would continue these frequent public appearances in aid of the poor, and they would help him gain a reputation as a real people’s monarch – a sort of plump, bearded, cigar-smoking Princess Diana.

  And like so much in Bertie’s life, it seems to have been Paris, and more specifically his newly discovered taste for the city’s poorer neighbourhoods in the late 1870s and early 1880s, that sparked his new awareness of social issues. This was the time when the working-class areas of Montmartre and Pigalle came into their own, and when top-hatted toffs like Bertie made their first forays outside the realm of opera houses and expensive cafés and into the shadier world of street singers and straight-talking can-can girls.

  II

  By the end of the 1870s it was clear that France’s young republic was going to survive. The final proof came in June 1879, whe
n the last credible contender from the Bonapartist clan met a grisly end – thanks to the Brits.

  Louis-Napoléon was the 23-year-old only child of Eugénie and Napoléon III, and, since his father’s death in 1873, he had been making preparations to return to France and seize power. Like Henri d’Orléans, who went away to get battle experience in the American Civil War, Louis-Napoléon decided that the ideal training for a coup d’état was to see some action in uniform.

  If all the adult French males with imperial or royal blood and political ambitions had actually got on their cavalry horses and charged on Paris, they might well have stood a chance of conquering their country, but in true French fashion, they seem to have spent more time talking about action than taking it, which explains why they were all destined to fail. At least Louis-Napoléon did so in spectacular style.1

  Anticipating the day when he would march off the cross-Channel ferry and regain possession of his father’s châteaux (those that hadn’t been destroyed by the Parisians, anyway), Louis-Napoléon badgered his mother and Victoria to let him join the British army. After much resistance, they eventually gave in and let him board a troop ship bound for Southern Africa, where Britain was trying to convince the Zulus that they did not own any of their homeland.

  Louis-Napoléon’s commanding officers had been briefed not to let their imperial charge get into any physical danger, but he was Parisian and, as such, a persuasive (or at least irritating) talker, and parleyed his way on to a scouting mission into enemy territory. The small British troop was surprised by Zulu warriors, who put an end to France’s chances of having another emperor with seventeen blows of their spears.

  The decaying body was shipped back to England, where Bertie grieved with his friend and spiritual mother Eugénie, and even served (along with his brothers) as a pallbearer at the Catholic funeral – an unheard-of breach of Anglican royal protocol.

  The two families had been closer than most people realized – when Louis-Napoléon sailed for Africa, there were plans afoot to make him Bertie’s brother-in-law. Victoria and Eugénie had agreed that it would be a good idea to marry Louis-Napoléon to the Queen’s youngest daughter, Beatrice. It was an intriguing prospect – Britain allied by marriage to the family of its greatest rival, Bonaparte. The match never happened, but if the Duke of Wellington had not died some twenty-seven years earlier, the shock of the idea alone would have killed him.

  Bertie had helped with the complex protocol problems surrounding Louis-Napoléon’s funeral – deciding, for example, when and where Queen Victoria could be seen paying her respects to the Catholic son of a former French emperor. But Victoria was still adamant that he couldn’t be trusted with more serious affairs of state. After the general election of March 1880, when Bertie dared to express an opinion about who should be the new Prime Minister, Victoria responded furiously that he had ‘no right to meddle’.

  He was almost forty years old and being treated like a teenager. It must have become even clearer than ever that the only subject on which he would ever be taken seriously was France – and for the moment, the only people taking him seriously on that subject were the French themselves. Not surprising, then, that in between domestic chores like holding dinners for foreign dignitaries and opening new hospitals, Bertie now threw himself into an even deeper exploration of the good French things in life.

  III

  When he couldn’t be on the other side of the Channel, Bertie imported French amusements into London. Chief amongst these in the summer of 1879 was the 34-year-old actress Sarah Bernhardt. She was a cocotte in the great tradition of Hortense Schneider and the fictional Nana. In 1874, while starring at the Comédie Française in Racine’s classic tragedy Phèdre, Sarah had been put on the official police register of Parisian courtesans and was known to have the crème de la crème on her client list. In her police file, one of her customers, the politician Charles de Remusat, is quoted complaining that ‘when he arrived chez Sarah at number 4, rue de Rome, he sometimes had to wait in an anteroom while another gentleman left the premises’. La divine Sarah was a very popular lady. She liked to shock people by boasting that she was unsure whether her illegitimate son – conceived when she was nineteen – belonged to the writer Victor Hugo (author of Les Misérables), the left-wing politician Léon Gambetta or the royalist general Georges Boulanger.

  Sarah also courted scandal by her appearance. Refusing to bow to contemporary tastes for the busty, corseted classic female form, in public she wore waistless robes that emphasized her boyish figure. She was even photographed by the British press sporting trousers and a jacket, though these were in fact the overalls she wore when painting. Her make-up, too, was decidedly unlike the delicate natural blush of Lillie Langtry and her imitators. Madame Sarah went in for white face-paint, bright lipstick and kohl-black eyelids, as if she were permanently on stage.

  When she was performing, she was said to be entrancing. Even Lillie Langtry, her main rival for Bertie’s affections, acknowledged this, remembering in her memoirs that Bernhardt’s ‘superb diction, her lovely silken voice, her natural acting, her passionate temperament, her fire – in a word, transcendent genius – caused amazement’.

  Like so many of Bertie’s mistresses, Bernhardt also had real character. She had stayed on in Paris during the siege and helped to turn a theatre into a military hospital. And having been expelled from the prestigious Comédie Française troupe for slapping a star actress, she was recalled on the strength of her performances when the theatres opened again after the Commune.

  Hardly surprising, then, that Bertie was to be seen at the first night of every one of the productions put on by the Comédie Française in London in the summer of 1879, and paid a visit to an exhibition of her paintings in Piccadilly. Not only this, he also announced that the shocking Miss Bernhardt was to be invited into London society, including his own Marlborough House, where he is known to have ‘entertained’ her. She once sent a note to her director at the Comédie, apologizing for missing a rehearsal: ‘The P. kept me occupied.’ A euphemism if ever there was one.

  Not everyone in London shared Bertie’s Parisian tastes, however. Lucy Cavendish, a close friend of the royal family, and one of the Queen’s maids of honour before her (Lucy’s) marriage, was outraged. In her diary for 30 June 1879, she says that:

  London has gone mad over the principal actress in the Comédie Française who are here: Sarah Bernhardt – a woman of notorious, shameless character . . . Not content with being run after on the stage, this woman is asked to respectable people’s houses to act, and even to luncheon and dinner; and all the world goes. It is an outrageous scandal!

  The aristocratic Lucy went to see the French company, but made a point of snubbing its star. On 8 July, she announces to her diary that: ‘Had the delight of my one and only Comédie Française at the Gaiety; N.B. without the notorious woman.’ And this was an attractive 37-year-old talking, not some ancient dowager.

  Bertie ignored society’s disapproval, and got his royal French friend Henri d’Orléans, aka the Duc d’Aumale, to arrange a dinner in London at which Sarah Bernhardt was to meet a selection of English ladies hand-picked by Bertie himself. However, things didn’t go to plan. Charles Dilke described the awkward soirée: ‘As they [the society women] would not talk to Sarah Bernhardt and she would not talk to them, and as the Duc d’Aumale was deaf and disinclined to make a conversation on his own account, nobody talked at all . . .’

  Bertie, social animal that he was, must have suspected that this would happen, and probably laughed with Sarah afterwards about the contrast between this stuffy London gathering and the riotous nights they had spent in Paris society. Like Sarah’s performances at the theatre, the dumb dinner would have reminded Bertie even more keenly why he enjoyed so much going to France. And at this time, he was enjoying himself there more than ever . . .

  IV

  As Bertie himself had proved, the contrast between Parisian and English attitudes to sex was becoming increasingly
– laughably – clear. Sarah Bernhardt might be snubbed in London, but when Bertie went along to the Théâtre des Variétés to see the actress Jeanne Granier, a star of the operetta scene who was known to be his lover, the French audience applauded her performance and cheered Bertie as if to congratulate him for his good taste in mistresses. The London newspapers would have splashed the scandal across their front pages and caused duchesses to faint in their breakfast rooms, but in Paris he received public praise for indulging in adultery with a painted lady.

  Perhaps it was the apparent banality of extra-marital affairs that led posh Parisians like Bertie to go in search of even edgier thrills. As the Third Republic matured, a spirit of democracy began to seep into the city’s nightlife. The excitement was no longer restricted to rich gents who could afford theatre tickets every night and private rooms at the Café Anglais. The nightspots on the boulevards were still very much in business, as were élite private places like the Jockey Club, but the well-heeled men about town started to stray up the hill towards Pigalle and Montmartre where a bohemian community of artists, musicians and intellectuals had established a new in-crowd.

  Two writers of the time, Georges Renault and Henri Château, combined their anecdotes from 1870s and 1880s Montmartre in a joint memoir. Their book, called, succinctly, Montmartre, attributes the area’s sudden popularity to Napoléon III’s revamping of the city centre. With so many of the medieval alleyways in the old Quartier Latin being flattened by Haussmann’s roadbuilders, students and arty types migrated to the hilltop village that had become synonymous with the anti-establishment spirit of the Commune. Here, the housing was cheap but cramped and badly heated, so everyone gathered in the bars and cafés. Lots of the poorer prostitutes also lived in Montmartre, and when they began to mingle with the artists and poets, the combination of hardship and hedonism spawned a whole new subculture of risqué cabarets and pay-per-dance bals populaires.