The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  Cora, the Devon girl who spoke “Cockney French,” quickly turned herself into the most desirable woman in Paris. She wasn’t classically beautiful; one critic writing in the London Truth said she had “a round face, carroty hair, an unamiable temper, and a laugh which if bereft of jollity stretched her coarse mouth from ear to ear. That mouth was visibly formed to eat and drink, to talk slang and to swear.” But Cora’s red hair quickly became legendary, earning her the nickname “La Lune Rousse” (the Red Moon).[3] Plus she had an unblemished complexion and a body that was a “marvel of nature”: her breasts were accounted so perfect that plaster casts were taken of them to make bronze sculptures. She also gained a reputation for being life-changingly adventurous in bed; one of her (anonymous) admirers described her “as a specimen of another race, a bizarre and astonishing phenomenon.” It was rare to find a courtesan who loved sex as much as Cora did, and this added greatly to her mystique. If the appeal of undreamed-of sensuality wasn’t enough to ensnare a potential lover, Cora was also a consummate hostess.

  Her parties were like no others in the city, a combination of lascivious cabaret and fine cuisine. As many as fifteen lucky gentlemen at a time would be invited to see her immersed in a bath of champagne, dancing naked on a bed of orchids, or served up for dinner on a silver platter, wearing nothing but a few sprigs of parsley. She wore shimmering body paint, covering herself in silver, stars, and pearls. She dyed her hair red, black, and blond, and transformed her eyes with brilliantly colored eye shadow and mascara. Once, she even dyed her dog blue to match an outfit (it died shortly afterward). She was bright, witty, outrageous, and reassuringly expensive. At her peak during the 1860s, she was burning through an income of 50,000 francs a month (equivalent to about $130,000 today), all of it provided by her “protectors,” most of them members of the French royal family. When the emperor’s half brother, the Duke of Morny, died, she took up with his cousin “Plon-Plon,” Prince Joseph Charles Bonaparte (1822–91), Napoleon’s nephew. In return for her exclusive attention, he gave her a mansion and the money to buy a large collection of racehorses, which she ran with English jockeys. As her reputation grew, women copied her style. At a dinner one night, she boasted that whatever she wore in public would be in the shops the next day. To prove her point, she took one of the gentlemen’s hats, crushed the brim, stuck an ostrich feather in the peak, and walked down the Bois de Boulogne. Sure enough, the next day, a copy of the ludicrous headgear was for sale in a fashionable boutique. Cora usually preferred something classier, and she helped establish the reputation of the English couturier Charles Worth, whose wincingly expensive dresses she bought by the armful. Through her patronage, he became one of Paris’s most celebrated designers and was the first one ever to sew a named label into an item of clothing.

  In 1870 the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war brought all partying to an abrupt halt. The defeat of Napoleon III sent him and most of his family into exile, depriving Cora of her protectors. She went to London but her reputation got there first: She was snubbed by polite society and refused a room at the Grosvenor House Hotel. She returned to a very different Paris. To starve the city into submission, Prussian troops blockaded it for four months. Conditions deteriorated rapidly and the citizens were forced to eat rats, dogs, and horses. Even the animals at the city’s zoo weren’t spared: Restaurant menus survive that feature dishes made from elephants, camels, wolves, and bears. On January 25, 1871, Bismarck ordered the bombardment of Paris with heavy artillery, and three days later, it surrendered. Since the siege began, more than forty-seven thousand civilians had been killed or seriously wounded. By the end of May 1871 another thirty thousand had fallen in the street battles of the Paris Commune. The pleasure-seeking days of the Second Empire seemed a very distant memory.

  Cora responded to this change in her fortunes in a surprisingly practical way, turning her large house into an impromptu hospital, tearing up bed linen to make bandages and making sure her patients were given the best possible care. This made a serious dent in her finances, but by early 1872 she had found a new admirer. Handsome, wealthy, and deeply unstable, Alexandre Duval was the son of a successful restaurateur. He fell in love with Cora, squandering the several million francs of his inheritance on her to prove his devotion. When bankrupt, and thus of limited value to Cora, he continued to stalk her, alternating between jealous rages and proposals of marriage. It all came to a head one afternoon when Duval arrived at Cora’s apartments on the rue Chaillot and begged to be allowed to stay. She ignored him and tucked herself up in bed. In the meantime, he shot himself in the chest on her doorstep.

  Somehow he survived, but the story circulated that Cora had left him bleeding in the street and wouldn’t call for help. She countered that she had had no idea he’d used the gun on himself, protesting that he was always prone to exaggeration and melodramatic gesture, but the damage to her reputation was done. She was portrayed as cruel and heartless, and overnight she found herself persona non grata in Parisian society. She lay low in Monte Carlo, where she stayed with a friend until the scandal died down, but it quickly became clear that her career as a courtesan was over. Without a protector or an income, pursued by her creditors, she was forced to sell her houses and possessions and for the last ten years of her life lived as an itinerant gambler, drifting around the racetracks and casinos of Europe, rather like Casanova.

  Unlike him, she didn’t have much luck, and by the time the French journalist Henri Rochford bumped into her in the early 1880s, she was an “ugly old wreck” who accosted him for racing tips. The woman whose beauty and wit had once brought in more than $1.5 million a year was reduced to playing roulette at the Monte Carlo casino—on the cheap tables where only 5-franc bets were allowed. One night, her former lover Alexandre Duval (now recovered and married to someone sensible chosen by his mother) was spotted at the next table, where the minimum bet was 100 francs. He did not even acknowledge her.

  Just before her death from cancer in 1886, she published her memoirs in an attempt to make some money. They attracted disappointing reviews, largely because she refused to dish the dirt on her former lovers. The New York Times was typical: “One has only to read her book to see she has no wit at all. The volume makes no appeal to unhealthy curiosity. It is dull. The woman is not even malicious.” In fact, her memoirs, while not remotely in the league of those written by Casanova or Catherine the Great, have a warmth and honesty that is genuinely moving. The French novelist Zola portrayed her sympathetically in his novel Nana (1880).

  Cora Pearl was only fifty-one when she died. She went peacefully and without bitterness.

  I have had a happy life; I have squandered money enormously. I am far from posing as a victim; it would be ungrateful of me to do so. I ought to have saved, but saving is not easy in such a whirl of excitement as that in which I have lived. Between what one ought to do and what one does there is always a difference.

  Cora would have got on well with the novelist and social commentator H. G. Wells (1866–1946). Wells liked to call himself “the Don Juan of the intelligentsia”: Even at the age of seventy-four, having lost all his teeth, he was proud that he could still enjoy the company of prostitutes. He once said that “to make love periodically, with some grace and pride and freshness, seems to be, for most of us, a necessary condition to efficient working.” If Cora turned sex into work, Wells turned to sex in order to work.

  Wells inherited infidelity from his father, Joe, a nonchalant ladies’ man who supplemented the modest income he made in his china shop as a fast bowler for Kent: He had once taken four wickets in four balls against Sussex. His sporting career was permanently interrupted when he fell off a ladder and broke his thigh. The accident happened while he was helping a girlfriend climb over a wall one Sunday morning while his wife was at church. The service ended sooner than expected and Joe—pretending to prune a vine—was caught red-handed. Some years earlier, his son Bertie (never Herbert) had also broken his leg, aged seven. He always said this was th
e beginning of his love of books: His father brought him piles of them to read in bed while he recovered. When he was thirteen Wells wrote his first story, a comic strip called “The Desert Daisy,” but his literary ambitions were put on hold after his father’s accident. Never particularly well off, the loss of Joe’s cricketing income meant Bertie could no longer be sent to school at the Bromley Academy. To bring in money he was apprenticed at a draper’s shop, but was sacked for being too common, an experience he was to chronicle in his novel Kipps (1905) about a draper who comes into money and tries to mingle with the upper classes. Wells himself was more interested in mingling with women—lots of them.

  During his two years as a draper, Wells showed extraordinary powers of self-discipline. He devoted every scrap of spare time to educating himself and was proud to say that during these years he never read a work of fiction or played a single game. His hard work paid off and he secured a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, studying biology under the great T. H. Huxley. Dirt poor, shabbily dressed, and permanently hungry, Wells graduated with a degree in zoology, discovering the joys of English literature and socialism en route. He worked as a teacher, first at a boarding school in Wales and then in Kilburn, where his star pupil was A. A. Milne, author of Winnie-the-Pooh. While lodging with relatives, he fell in love with, and married, his cousin, Isabel Mary Wells. He was twenty-five and she was twenty-two. Until then, his only sexual experience had been with a prostitute several years earlier.

  The newlyweds moved to Wandsworth, where Wells continued to teach, earning extra money by writing educational journalism and producing his Textbook of Biology, which stayed in print for thirty years. On the side, he was also making up for lost time in the sack. By 1894 the marriage was over. Wells moved in with, and then married, one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he called Jane. Although Wells wasn’t your typical Lothario—he was short and scrawny, with a limp mustache and a squeaky voice—he bubbled with ideas and self-confidence, and loved to talk, fixing people with his piercing blue eyes. He discovered that women found him irresistible.

  His political awakening, his immersion in Darwinism, and his struggle to pull himself out of poverty led him to believe that love meant freedom from restraint and the judgment of others, and this could only be achieved if he had more than one sexual relationship. In Jane he found a woman who seemed happy to go along with this radical logic, allowing him to keep an apartment in town for assignations and to hang photographs of his lovers in the family home. She was even prepared to deal with the human fallout of Wells’s endless bacchanals, taking one of his spurned lovers, the Austrian journalist Hedwig Gatternigg, to a hospital after she had slashed her wrists outside his flat, distraught at the idea that he didn’t truly love her.

  Wells’s health had troubled him since his time at the boarding school in North Wales. He had been aggressively fouled while playing soccer and, falling badly, had acquired a crushed kidney and hemorrhaged lung. The lung problems developed into a condition that his doctors suspected was tubercular and he wasn’t given long to live. This added urgency to his sexual conquests, but also gave him time while convalescing to begin writing the scientific romances for which he is still best known. In a tremendous four-year burst of creativity he produced The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). He founded modern science fiction at a stroke, marrying thrilling, apocalyptic stories with the latest scientific and political ideas. He would later come to disparage their popularity, but they propelled him to the front rank of English novelists and gave the couple much-needed financial security. Moving to the healthier air of Sandgate on the Kent coast, he discovered a thriving community of fellow writers, with whom he soon became good friends, including Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and George Bernard Shaw. He gradually got fitter and began a lifelong passion for cycling: “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race,” he wrote. By 1909 he felt well enough to reenter the intellectual ferment of London, and he, Jane, and their two boys, Gip and Frank, moved to 17 Church Row in Hampstead.

  Wells’s “open marriage” scandalized literary London, but it worked for them. He called her “Bits” and “P.C.B.” (Phylum: Companion of the Bath). She called him “Bins” (short for husbinder) or “Mr. Binder” or sometimes “Pobble.” They communicated in “Picshuas”—little scrawled cartoons that caricatured incidents in their marriage and that, Wells said, “softened our relations to the pitch of making them tolerable.”

  This childlike domestic contentment gave Wells a secure base from which to sally forth on his carnal adventures, to explore the “sexual imaginativeness” that Jane could not provide. His lovers included the birth-control campaigner Margaret Sanger and the novelists Dorothy Richardson and Elizabeth von Arnim. Richardson was a school friend of Jane’s and her underrated novel Pilgrimage (1915) invented the stream-of-consciousness technique that Virginia Woolf later made famous. It also contained a vivid portrait of life in the Wells household. An affair with Bertie, it appeared (rather as with Casanova), could be great fun and a tonic for the ego. Here he is writing to Margaret Sanger:

  My plans in New York are ruled entirely by the wish to be with you as much as possible—& as much as possible without other people about. I don’t mind paying thousands of dollars if I can get that.

  He added that she was, at all costs, to dress up in the “costume of a tropical island…. Everything else is secondary to this.”

  In 1907 Wells addressed the Cambridge University Fabian Society, which had been founded the previous year by a sparkling young undergraduate called Amber Reeves. After the talk, Wells bundled her onto a train and took her to Paris for the weekend. She was, he wrote:

  a girl of brilliant and precocious promise… a sharp, bright, Levantine face under a shock of very fine abundant black hair, a slender nimble body very much alive, and a quick greedy mind.

  Two years later, she was pregnant with Bertie’s child. This dismayed her mother and father (they were friends of Wells’s), and the couple ran away to Le Touquet and tried to make a go of it. It lasted three months. Amber was lonely and depressed and Wells put her on a ferry back to England. There, she found comfort in the arms of a mutual friend, a young lawyer called George Rivers Blanco White, who gallantly married her before the child was born. Amber’s daughter, Anna-Jane, was eighteen before she found out that H. G. Wells was her real father.

  In 1912 the precocious feminist journalist Rebecca West wrote a critical review of Wells’s novel Marriage, calling him an “old maid.” As we know, Wells liked spirited young women, so he (forty-six) invited her (twenty) to tea. She gave birth to his son Anthony in 1914, and the boy was told that Wells was his “uncle.” Anthony’s second name was “Panther,” the nickname Wells had used for Amber. (Amber had called him “Jaguar.”) Messy as all this sounds, it actually worked out quite well for everyone. In 1939 Amber wrote to Wells to say that neither she nor her daughter had ever, for a moment, felt “they were not worth the price.”

  Wells visited Russia twice, in 1914 and 1920, and there he met and impressed the writer Maxim Gorky. Not everyone was so generous. After a brief meeting, Lenin called him “a dreadful bourgeois and a little philistine!” For his part, Wells disliked the cult of personality that surrounded Karl Marx, whose face loomed from every wall and bulletin board:

  About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast solemn woolly uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world. It is exactly like Das Kapital in its inane abundance, and the human part of the face looks over it owlishly as if it looked to see how the growth impressed mankind. I found the omnipresent images of that beard more and more irritating. A gnawing desire grew upon me to see Karl Marx shaved.

  The highlight of the second trip for Wells was, tru
e to form, the addition of a new lover. She was his interpreter, Baroness Moura Budberg (1892–1974). The Baroness had been married twice, first to the tsarist diplomat Count Johann Benckendorff and then, after he was shot by the revolutionary authorities in 1919, to Baron Nikolai von Budberg-Bönningshausen. She had also been the mistress (at different times) of Maxim Gorky (who had recommended her to Wells) and the British spy Sir R. H. Bruce Lockhart, author of the bestselling Memoirs of a Secret Agent (1932). Moura was known as the Mata Hari of Russia. Her MI5 file recorded “that she can drink an amazing quantity, mostly gin.” It was she who, as early as 1951, was to tip off MI6 that Sir Anthony Blunt was a communist, her other claim to distinction being that she was the great-aunt of Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats. She was twenty-four years younger than H. G. Wells, but it was no casual fling. After the death of his wife, Jane, in 1927, Moura became Wells’s closest female friend and he would later confide: “She was the only woman I really loved.” Moura was equally smitten. When quizzed by Somerset Maugham on what she saw in “the paunchy, played-out writer,” Moura replied: “He smells of honey.”

  If Wells showed no signs of slowing down in his personal life, this was matched by his phenomenal productivity as a writer. In a career spanning fifty years, he published more than 130 books. Instead of mellowing, his political and social philosophy got more extreme as he got older, and his later books alternate between a kind of Utopian authoritarianism (he was a keen supporter of eugenics) and muscular “we’re all doomed” pessimism. His finest work of nonfiction, The Outline of History (1920), became an international bestseller, describing the modern world as “a race between education and catastrophe.” Wells was a passionate advocate of world government and he knew his subject, interviewing both Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lenin and Stalin. He rejected both communism and fascism from the start, and if few people now take his political philosophy seriously, the Nazis, at least, felt otherwise. Top of the blacklist of intellectuals to be liquidated after their planned invasion of Britain was the name H. G. Wells.