The salons sound very grand, though the word only means living room, and the gatherings would often consist of little more than carefully placed armchairs and regularly served refreshments. It was up to the guests to enliven the décor by looking or sounding so wonderful that le tout Paris would hear about the hostess’s fabulous party. Bertie’s own high-society bashes in London could have been called salons if the level of intellectual conversation had risen beyond the number of grouse to be bagged in Norfolk or how funny it was to pour alcohol on someone’s head. Paris’s salons aimed much higher than that, even when the hostess was a prostitute.
Bertie is known to have attended the salons of respectable people like the Austrian Ambassador Richard von Metternich, who was popular in Paris not just because of the political importance of the Austrian empire in the Franco-Prussian power game, but also because he had married his stupendously beautiful niece Pauline. The couple had been in Paris since 1859 and Pauline hosted what was widely acknowledged to be the most glittering salon in Europe. In the late 1860s she had just turned thirty and was at the height of her beauty. A portrait of her by the society painter Franz Xaver Winterhalter shows a voluptuous, dark-haired young woman gazing out at the world and challenging it to live up to her expectations. It was not surprising that she became a ‘close friend’ of Napoléon. Whether this friendship came at a price isn’t entirely clear, but given the fact that she was also a close friend of Eugénie’s, and that the Emperor apparently kept up a non-stop seduction campaign for the whole time Pauline was in Paris, it might be safe to say that she didn’t give in to his advances.
Pauline’s beauty ran deep. She had a boundless enthusiasm for life that would have endeared her instantly to Bertie. She is credited with teaching Parisians how to ice-skate (Eugénie herself became a big fan of the sport) and for reassuring women that they could smoke cigars without losing their femininity – a subject very close to Bertie’s heart.
Bertie also attended the salons organized by Mathilde, Napoléon’s scandalous cousin, in her mansion in the rue de Courcelles, a chic area just beyond Opéra. These were highly select gatherings, but were one step down the ladder towards the demi-monde, the shadowy place where reputable and disreputable Paris met. The only drawback for Bertie was that Mathilde cultivated an image as a literary hostess, and invited arty types like Gustave Flaubert, the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev and the Romantic poet Théophile Gautier. There is a painting by Sébastien Charles Giraud called Le Salon de la Princesse Mathilde, Rue de Courcelles which depicts a very chic but stilted-looking party in a luxurious sitting room. Amidst chandeliers, candlebras, gilted panelling and deep carpets, a group of people in evening dress are chatting. The men sport frock coats and white high collars, the women wear flowing off-the-shoulder dresses. But there are only eight of them, one apparently an aged matriarch in a lace cap. There is a piano, but it sits alone and unplayed. Not the fun and frolics that Bertie usually looked for while he was in Paris.
This probably explained why he was more often seen at the salons given by the cocottes, where the mood was ripe for flirting with fast women and there was less chance that some writer might start warbling on about the need for more realism in the modern novel. During at least one of his trips to Paris between 1867 and 1870, Bertie went to visit the grande horizontale La Païva at number 25, Champs-Élysées, a magnificent building that has survived to the modern day and now houses a restaurant on its ground floor. In the late nineteenth century, its courtyard and the avenue outside would have been crowded with the carriages of the rich and racy.
A painting called Une Soirée chez la Païva by Adolphe Monticelli looks much more fun for someone like Bertie than an evening with Mathilde. The décor is insanely kitsch, with walls that seem to be made of solid gold, and the guests are having a riotous time. There are only eleven of them, but eight are women and three are standing on the table. A devilish man in a white top hat has a girl under each arm and seems to be singing a bawdy song, if the shocked expressions on the faces of several of his listeners are anything to go by. Meanwhile in the foreground, a woman in a scarlet dress is knocking back a glass of champagne with an abandon that suggests that it’s been a long, eventful night. Champagne, lewd songs, luxury and loose women. This was why an English prince came to Paris.
But whether the entertainment was refined or debauched, the Parisian salon was a perfect environment for Bertie, because he was such a skilful social animal. His French bodyguard Xavier Paoli, who saw him in action over many years, expressed this perfectly:
No matter what the milieu, be it a political salon or the theatre, at a club, the races or a restaurant, his curiosity was always alive. He was keen to listen to others’ opinions and observe their attitudes. He didn’t speak a great deal, but his talent for making others speak was admirable. His affable directness put you at ease, his loud joyous laugh made you trust him.
In short, Napoléon III’s Paris had turned young Bertie into a French playboy seducer.
V
It was all too good to be true, and the end was very near, for Napoléon at least. As early as 1861, a literary critic called William Reymond had described the Second Empire’s fatal flaw. In Paris’s theatres, he said, costumes could be as revealing as you liked, but the text could contain no political allusions. The intention was to keep the French – or Parisians, anyway – in a permanent erotic daze because, as Reymond put it: ‘As long as Parisians are having fun, the government can sleep soundly.’ But beneath the veneer of luxury and sex, the less privileged parts of Napoléon’s France were grumbling, and their grumbles would soon swell to a murderous roar.
Bertie himself experienced an early symptom of the coming disaster that shows how deeply the discontent had spread. In 1869, he tried to organize a party at the Château de Versailles, in the Trianon, the small palace that Eugénie had recently turned into a museum dedicated to its most famous former resident, Marie-Antoinette. Napoléon and Eugénie approved of Bertie’s idea and offered to lend him their chefs and staff for the occasion, along with a set of imperial crockery so that the table would look sufficiently regal.
However, Bertie was co-organizing the party with two Parisian friends who had never been invited to a reception at the Tuileries or a house party at one of Napoléon’s country residences. When these two men heard that they would be hosting a meal cooked by imperial chefs and served on plates decorated with a golden N, they called the whole thing off. Rich men refusing a chance to party? Bertie must have been shocked. France was clearly not as carefree as he had always thought.
The summer of 1869 was the last of the Second Empire. Out at Fontainebleau, there was the usual parade of rich, witty guests, but it was like Berlin at the end of the 1920s or New York just before AIDS – the frenzied, live-like-there’s-no-tomorrow partying could not go on. The privileged people at Napoléon’s court were, to put it crudely, fiddling with each other while Rome burnt.
In fact, ever since the Exposition of 1867, the Emperor’s declining health had reflected the state of his country. People were beginning to see through his new clothes.
Napoléon may have overseen great strides in progress at home, but his foreign policy was a disaster. For example, he had backed the Confederate South in the American Civil War, which understandably annoyed the US government. This mistake caused a débâcle in Mexico, which Napoléon had tried to turn into a sort of French colony. Back in 1864, in a bid to ally himself with the Austrians (who were rivals of the dangerous Prussians) he had helped to install the Austrian Emperor’s brother Maximilian as ruler of Mexico – Emperador Don Maximiliano I. When a revolution threatened to oust the Franco-Austrian régime in April 1867, the recently annoyed Americans stepped in on the side of the revolutionaries. Napoléon saw the way the pendulum was swinging and ordered French troops to sail home, leaving Maximilian to defend himself. The inevitable happened, and as Maximilian crumpled in front of a firing squad, so did Napoléon’s hopes of keeping a Franco-Austrian alliance aliv
e.
At the same time, France’s rivalry with Prussia caused what is probably the most exciting thing ever to happen in Luxembourg. To annoy the Prussians, in March 1867 Napoléon offered to buy the duchy of Luxembourg from its owner, the King of Holland. Luxembourg was a highly fortified buffer zone between France and its warlike German neighbours, so it would have been like acquiring a ready-made Maginot Line. Napoléon’s cunning plan succeeded on two counts – first, his offer of five million guilders was accepted; and secondly, he annoyed Bismarck, Chancellor of Prussia, a lot. So much, in fact, that Bismarck ordered the King of Holland not to sell to the French. Given that, at the time, almost every European nation was connected to almost every other by contradictory treaties, the Dutch King invoked an agreement with Prussia whereby he had to submit the sale of Luxembourg to Bismarck, and suddenly the deal with France was off. When Napoléon did not rise to the bait and try to take Luxembourg by force, his humiliation was complete.
This was especially bad news for Napoléon, not because he was looking forward to enjoying the many charms of Luxembourg without having to show his passport, but because the French were fiercely nationalistic, and were furious with him for this public slap in the face. Even the pomp and ceremony surrounding the 1867 Exposition Universelle couldn’t entirely distract his patriotic people.
Despite all his outward signs of self-confidence, Napoléon became increasingly aware that you couldn’t prop up a régime with ballgowns and candelabras alone, and took some steps to appease his critics. In January 1870, he persuaded a moderate republican called Émile Ollivier to become chef du gouvernement (prime minister). Ollivier reduced press censorship and removed unpopular politicians like Haussmann, who was still merrily demolishing poor neighbourhoods and enriching property speculators. Ollivier was so willing to compromise his former politics that he even sent out the army to crush a strike in the metalworks at Le Creusot in central France, killing six workers.
In fact, throughout most of the Second Empire, republicanism and revolution were always in the air, even if they were usually smothered by the heady perfumes of Napoléon’s courtiers.
Emile Zola captures this mood of political unrest and hurt nationalistic pride in his novel Nana. As the Second Empire heads for its downfall, the heroine Nana, both a symptom and a cause of the decadence, sets the tone. After her fling with Bertie, she has gone on to humiliate a whole series of men, ruining several, driving two to suicide and two more to crime. In May 1869 she goes to the races at Longchamp, the new racecourse in the west of Paris. Napoléon and Eugénie are attending, but all eyes are on Nana as she preens herself amidst her own court of male admirers, and the high-society women can barely hide their jealousy.
Bertie is up in the royal box, and Nana examines him through binoculars. He’s looking fatter, she thinks, and wider, than when she last saw him. She pours scorn on the whole gaggle of courtiers and imperial hangers-on.
‘These people don’t impress me any more,’ she tells her friends. ‘I know them too well. I’ve got no more respect for them. They’re all dirty, from top to bottom.’ Bertie, she now decides, is ‘a prince, but a bastard all the same’. It seems that the Anglo-French friendship that has been alive ever since the Crimean War and Bertie’s childhood visit to Paris is finally crumbling.
One of the races features a filly called Nana, an outsider that belongs to one of her lovers. The favourite in the race is an English horse, and Nana’s friends can’t bear the thought of it winning: ‘“A fine thing if the English one wins,” shouted Philippe in an outburst of patriotic pain. His feeling of suffocating fear began to spread through the tightly packed crowd. Surely they weren’t going to suffer yet another defeat?’ But at the end of a breathtaking race, the French outsider wins and Nana hears the whole stadium chanting her name: ‘Vive Nana! Vive la France! Down with England!’
If anything like this actually happened, poor Bertie must have felt that his dream world was crashing down around him – could this mean that his French lovers had fallen out of amour with him already? Could they really be so fickle?
In the case of Napoléon III, the answer was a loud ‘oui’. He fell from power just as suddenly as more recent, and much more repressive, dictators like Romania’s Nicolae Ceaus¸escu and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.
It was yet another dispute between ruling European families that finally put an end to his partying. When Spain’s Queen Isabella abdicated in June 1870, the Spanish government offered the throne to a German, Leopold of Hohenzollern, a Catholic married to a Portuguese princess. Napoléon protested at the idea of being encircled by Germans, and Leopold stepped down, but the French Emperor went a step too far and demanded an official, written renunciation, saying that a refusal would be a casus belli. Bismarck refused, despite (or more likely because of) France’s threats, and on 19 July 1870, when Napoléon would have preferred to be hosting a garden party at Fontainebleau, the French Emperor declared war. His personal view was that the conflict was doomed to failure, but his hand was forced because the French people and its politicians were howling for Prussian blood.
It soon became clear that France’s officers had been spending too much time in dress uniform chatting up the ladies, and that its heavy industry had been concentrating too hard on producing trains and pleasure boats, and not enough on armaments. With his troops outnumbered two to one, commanded by inexperienced officers and outgunned by new Prussian artillery, Napoléon pulled on his fighting boots and trudged eastwards, declaring that he was resigned to ‘death on the battlefield’.
On 1 September, after a few inconclusive skirmishes, he suffered a final defeat at Sedan, near Metz. When he tried to negotiate peace in person with Kaiser Wilhelm I,8 who had after all been one of his guests of honour at the Exposition of 1867, Bismarck prevented the meeting and held out for total surrender. Napoléon was taken prisoner, along with 92,000 of his soldiers, and his régime was at an end. On 4 September, a French republic was proclaimed.
Probably the most relieved person in Europe was Queen Victoria. A year earlier she had written to Bertie while he was in Paris with Alexandra, complaining about its ‘luxuriousness, extravagance and frivolity’, and saying that it ‘reminds me of the Aristocracy before the French Revolution’. A clairvoyant queen indeed.
Now, as France tumbled (or rose, depending on your point of view) towards republicanism, Victoria repeated her favourite theme in a letter to her eldest daughter Vicky (a sympathetic ear – Vicky was, after all, the Empress of Prussia), declaring that Bertie had been ‘carried away by that horrid Paris . . . and that frivolous and immoral Court’ that was characterized by an ‘utter want of seriousness and principle in everything’ and a ‘rottenness which was sure to crumble and fall’.9 What the Queen seems to have meant was that France was great fun when she and Albert were enjoying Napoléon and Eugénie’s hospitality in 1855, but less harmless when she saw its effects on her son, the future King Bertie.
Bertie felt France’s blow much more personally. When Napoléon was captured at Sedan and Eugénie had to flee a Parisian mob with the aid of her American dentist, Bertie wrote a remarkably insightful letter to his friend Charles Wynn-Carrington.
‘I fear there will yet be a fearful carnage in Paris if peace is not made,’ Bertie predicted, declaring that revolution would be the ‘final and inevitable result. It is a sad business, and so unnecessary. France will not recover from this shock and humiliation for years to come.’
As well as sympathizing with his homeless French friends, Bertie was of course worried for himself. If France descended into violent revolution, there would be no more champagne parties. No longer would an English prince be able to stroll the boulevards puffing cigars and shaking hands with admiring passers-by. The theatres would put on operettas ridiculing everyone rich and royal instead of just poking fun at Prussian duchesses. And the cocottes would want to sleep with dashing revolutionaries instead of plump English toffs. Quel désastre!
But even Bertie could not ha
ve suspected how unpleasant France’s ‘sad business’ was about to get.
* * *
1 Now called the Hôtel de Vendôme, and not to be confused with the current hotel Le Bristol just down the road from the French presidential palace in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
2 This building still exists and is now a rather elegant multi-screen cinema.
3 See Chapter 11.
4 See Chapter 5.
5 Though these days it probably only gets served to professional footballers.
6 This is the kind of foppishness which, in this author’s humble opinion, makes Proust so impossible to take seriously.
7 It is interesting to note that Pasteur initially invented his preservation technique not to save people from drinking bad milk, but to stop wine going bad. His were the priorities of a nineteenth-century Frenchman.
8 The grandfather of Kaiser Wilhelm II who would later lead Germany into World War One.
9 Victoria was of German origin, so Schadenfreude came naturally to her.
7
IF YOU CAN’T BE WITH THE ONE YOU LOVE . . .
‘Your Highness should come and live here and make monarchy more popular.’
‘Oh no! You use up your kings too quickly.’
Conversation between Bertie and French actress Anna Judic
I
THERE IS A frequently told story about Bertie getting caught red-gloved at adultery with an aristocratic English lady. A certain Sir Charles Mordaunt came home to his country mansion one summer’s day to find his wife, Harriet, showing off her carriage-driving skills in the grounds by putting her two white ponies through their paces. Her one-man audience was the Prince of Wales, who was standing on the front step of the house as though he owned the place. They weren’t actually doing anything illicit, but Harriet was clearly ‘entertaining’ Bertie one-to-one at home, and everyone knew what that meant. It was all very awkward, because husbands were usually dignified enough to keep out of the way when the Prince was on the prowl. Wanting to avoid any hint of confrontation, Bertie quickly took his leave and left the married couple to deal with the embarrassing situation. This Sir Charles did by undoing the harnesses of the two white ponies, which he had given to Harriet as a birthday present, leading them on to the front lawn and then shooting them dead before her eyes. The message was clear – in Victorian England, there were times when male pride was even more important than a neat front lawn.