There is even one story which has him in a yacht cabin with a lover when he hears approaching footsteps. ‘Is somebody coming?’ he asks. ‘Well, it certainly isn’t you,’ replies the witty lady – who must have been the one to tell the story in the first place, unless Bertie pushed the English talent for self-deprecating humour to its extreme limit.
But if his libido was flagging, Paris was the perfect place to give it a jolt, and not necessarily with diseased, poverty-stricken hookers. At the end of the 1870s, the city was refining its sexual subculture. If a man like Bertie wanted a really sophisticated erotic experience, he no longer had to pursue an actress or a cocotte in the hope of squeezing his name into her crowded diary. Now the brothels and their legal prostitutes were becoming très chic, and were adding new variety to the pleasures they offered. Even the most jaded libido could find exactly the titillation it required. And the place with the widest selection of sexual delights for sale was a bordel called Le Chabanais.
Founded in 1878 by an Irish madam called simply Madame Kelly – and her financiers, of course – it was designed to attract men like Bertie who had enough money to fulfil their wildest fantasies. And it was, of course, perfectly legitimate – all the two dozen or so girls were registered with the police, had twice-monthly medicals, and paid (in theory at least) tax on their earnings.
The brothel occupied the whole of a building at number 12, rue Chabanais, in a reasonably smart section of the old city between Opéra and the Palais Royal. Today the building is a nondescript mixture of shopfront and apartments, and in those days it would have looked still more anonymous from the outside – even the most sophisticated bordels were obliged to protect the neighbours from seeing anything untoward by closing their doors and shutters. Hence the French name for a brothel: maison close. Apart from the frequent comings and goings of its customers, the only giveaway as to what was going on inside was a sign on the wall of the restaurant on the other side of the street saying: ‘You can be just as comfortable in here as opposite.’
That was a bold claim, because Le Chabanais was designed at a cost of 1.7 million francs – about £3.5 million at today’s values – as the (whipped) crème de la crème of Paris brothels. A writer called Paul Reboux, author of a lament for France’s classic pleasure houses called Le Guide Galant, dubbed it ‘the Château d’Yquem of the wine list’, this being a sweet, golden Sauternes, vintage bottles of which can fetch thousands of euros at auction.
The new brothel prided itself on offering something luxurious for all tastes, both in the selection of beautiful women available and the setting in which they could be enjoyed. The naked or skimpily dressed prostitutes would mingle with clients and serve them refreshments in a downstairs salon, and after a glass or two of champagne, some nibbles and flattering banter, the moneyed male ‘guest’ would have the girl of his choice delivered to one of the fabulous bedrooms upstairs.
On the upper floors, there was a sultry Arabian harem, a Pompeii room with pictures of coupling centaurs painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, a pirate’s den, a medieval bedchamber for men wanting to get a damsel into distress, as well as classical French boudoirs fitted out with authentic antique furniture and wall-to-ceiling mirrors. Le Chabanais was such an institution that its Japanese room was displayed at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, and won a prize for interior decoration.3
Bertie was a regular in the Hindu room – perhaps because, like his mother, he was sentimentally attached to that part of his family’s empire. The chambre hindoue was famous for its ‘gold’ bath – though in fact it was silver-plated copper. Here, Bertie is rumoured to have cavorted in champagne with the good-time girls, though why anyone would get an erotic thrill from sitting in a chilly tub of rapidly flattening wine is hard to imagine. Probably even more dissuasive would have been the enormous cost of emptying out several dozen bottles of bubbly for a quick dip. But the above-mentioned Paul Reboux offers a solution to this enigma – Bertie probably did nothing of the sort. According to Reboux, who seems to have tested many of the establishments he describes during the research for his book, the bathtubs at the Chabanais were more often used by clients cleaning up after their sessions, ridding themselves of the bordello scent before returning to the respectable outside world. A hot, soapy sponge bath at the hands of a skilled professional Parisienne sounds much more like Bertie’s cup of tea than a soak in cold wine.
The Hindu room was also well known for Bertie’s own contribution to the science of sex – the love seat that he is said to have designed himself in 1890.
This extraordinary piece of furniture was worthy of anything at the Paris Expos that Bertie attended. Its design was half gynaecologist’s chair, half bobsled. It was Louis XVIII-style, sculpted in curved and gilded wood, with cushioned areas covered in a pale-green, satin-like material. The lower tier was a long narrow mattress, and the upper section, mounted on four sturdy legs, was a tipped-back seat with vertical armrests rather like thick ski poles. At the front edge of this upper tier there were two gynaecologist’s stirrups – gilded so as not to look too medical.
There has been a lot of speculation as to how the seat was used, but there probably was not one single answer. It is obvious that the armrests and stirrups of the top section could have been used by a woman sitting with her legs apart and receiving the attention of a man standing or kneeling in front of her. Meanwhile another woman could have been lying on the bottom section watching, or joining in somehow. Alternatively, Bertie himself might have sat on top and been attended to by a woman kneeling before him. Then again, maybe sometimes he enjoyed just lying down below and watching things going on above. With all the time and money he had at his disposal, Bertie was free to explore every angle.
It is said that Bertie commissioned the seat from a chairmaker called Louis Soubrier in Paris’s furniture-manufacturing district around the Bastille. Soubrier was a specialist in antique reproductions (no pun intended), and may well have contributed other pieces to the themed rooms at the Chabanais. According to Reboux, Bertie’s love seat was not the only piece of imaginative furniture in the building. In the so-called Louis-Philippe room, named after the corpulent French king of the same name, there was also a chair where overweight clients could enjoy themselves ‘before taking the rest that follows such unaccustomed exertion’. Tubby Bertie might well have needed that.
All these furnishings were sold off at auction in 1951 after France passed a law outlawing its maisons closes.4 This was not done to protect women from exploitation but because the brothels had been tainted by collaboration during the war. Many of them had been set aside for German soldiers, while black marketeers and Nazi sympathizers had used them as meeting places. The famous ‘gold’ bathtub was acquired by some fans of Salvador Dali, who had it installed in his suite at the Hôtel Le Meurice. Bertie’s seat was bought by the brother of the writer Boris Vian, and after being sold on twice more, it was bought back by the original furniture maker’s great-grandson.
Bertie was by no means the only prince to find his way to the Chabanais in the late nineteenth century. It became so well known abroad that foreign royals often had a trip to the brothel inserted into the official programme of their state visits to Paris. A quick romp would appear on the agenda in code as a ‘visite au Président du Sénat’. It is said that on one occasion, a ‘visit to the President of the Senate’ was accidentally included in the diary of the Queen of Spain, and embarrassed Parisian officials covered up their gaffe by taking the lady on a pointless courtesy call to the man in question.
VII
The living conditions of the girls at the chic Chabanais were far less luxurious than the rooms where they performed their services. In fact, the prostitutes’ quarters were less than basic – after all, a good proportion of them were expected to spend their nights with clients, so they didn’t need much personal space. The clients’ bedrooms often had large bathtubs, but the women’s private facilities would have been shared and rudimentary – a shallow squat tub on the fl
oor, the odd bidet for minimal protection from disease and pregnancy. Medical examinations were obligatory in theory, but the doctors who visited the brothels were open to bribes. Clients of Le Chabanais were lucky that the establishment had such a high reputation to defend, because it meant that any woman showing symptoms of disease would be banished immediately – but she would almost certainly end up at a less scrupulous brothel, where prostitutes could keep on working until their symptoms became too visible to hide.
There has been a lot of romanticism about the sophisticated decadence of Le Chabanais and other Parisian bordels, and the easy-going willingness of the filles de joie who worked there. It is said, for example, that when Victor Hugo died in 1885, all the capital’s working girls gave their favours free of charge for a day in honour of a great ‘ladies’ man’. But this sounds very much like a legend to confirm nostalgic male fantasies about Paris’s nineteenth-century prostitutes being big-hearted and grateful for the custom.
The women working at Le Chabanais would have been under strict orders to maintain this myth, to laugh at Bertie’s witticisms as he puffed on his cigars and drank his overpriced champagne, and then act out a pastiche of pleasure when he ‘invited’ them to come upstairs and see his portliness in naked close-up. He would probably not have seen any contradiction between his behaviour at Le Chabanais and his avowed concern for London’s paupers. To him, it might even have seemed that these highly organized Parisian sex sessions were part of a medical programme – vitamin boosts for his libido, workouts for his ageing heart, tonics to ensure that he would have the energy to perform his good works back at home.
Because as he advanced into middle age, Bertie began using France less as a playground than as a giant health resort . . .
* * *
1 For the full story of the young Bonaparte’s unfortunate demise, see 1,000 Years of Annoying the French.
2 ‘Dog-skin Nini’ – a name that probably referred to her cheap coat rather than her personal hairiness.
3 Bertie must have been sad because this was the only Expo in his lifetime that he missed – for a reason that we shall see in Chapter 13.
4 Reboux tells a story about an Englishman wandering forlornly around the neighbourhood a few years after the Chabanais closed. An antique dealer asked him what he was looking for. ‘Une vierge,’ the Englishman replied. Thinking the tourist wanted a statue of the Virgin Mary, the antique dealer asked him, ‘Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth?’ (Referring to centuries.) ‘Oh, I don’t care what arrondissement she comes from,’ replied the Englishman.
12
WE ALL LIKE TO BE BESIDE THE SEASIDE
‘If there had been a medical examination for kings, as there is for soldiers, he would have been declared unfit for duty.’
Émile Flourens, French Minister of Foreign Affairs, writing about Bertie
I
FAT CIGARS AND fatty meals were beginning to take their toll on Bertie’s body. As the French politician Émile Flourens wrote while Bertie was still alive, the closer he came to inheriting the throne, the more ‘obesity deformed his body . . . and seemed, beneath the weight of bloated flesh, to paralyse all physical activity and intellectual strength’. Apparently not all French politicians of the time were fans of the English Prince.
Bertie had long been a regular at German spas like Homburg and Baden. At the time, people believed that the body could be cleansed and recharged with a brief cure of mineral water, light meals and brisk walks – it was fashionable to stride as fast as one could along the avenues, giving quick bows and tips of the hat to important fellow curists, but stopping to talk to no one. The only problem with this treatment was that for Bertie, ‘light meals’ meant not requesting his usual cold chicken by the bedside in case he got hungry in the night. And a spot of over-indulgence in the evenings was not thought too damaging.
Bertie and his doctors soon began to notice that mineral water and power-walking wasn’t enough. Although he had barely entered his forties, his breath was getting shorter and his veins were starting to clog. Hardly surprising, really, when he was virtually chain-smoking cigars, with cigarettes in between as light relief. He would usually light up one cigar and two cigarettes before breakfast, then fill his cigar and cigarette cases for the day, and get through twenty cigarettes and twelve cigars before dinner. In the evenings he was rarely to be seen without a cloud of smoke hovering around his head, and his less discreet mistresses complained that he stank of stale tobacco.
Seeking an additional, albeit pleasurable, remedy for his ills, from 1883 Bertie opted to spend as much time as possible during the damp English months of February and March on the French Riviera. This was the new English name for the section of France’s south coast east of Cannes, rubbing French noses in the fact that until 1860 the area had belonged to Italy. The French had no collective name of their own for the Riviera until 1887, when the writer Stéphen Liégeard said that ‘this shore bathed in sunbeams deserves to be baptized the Azure Coast’. The term Côte d’Azur was immediately adopted by the patriotic French in opposition to the British name.
Bertie was by no means the first royal to winter in the south of France. Leaving aside kings like Richard the Lionheart, who didn’t really go in for rest cures, Bertie’s great-great uncle, the Duke of York, brother of George III, first escaped to Nice in the winter of 1764. The town had since become so popular with Brits that at the beginning of the nineteenth century it gained its Promenade des Anglais, the English prom financed by a certain Reverend Lewis Way so that the expats would be able to walk along the beach without stumbling on its large round pebbles. After all, it didn’t look good if people came to the town for their health and ended up with broken ankles.
Similarly, ever since the mid-1860s, Monaco had been offering a healthy mix of seawater bathing and gambling, and in 1878 the resort felt rich enough to commission a new casino from Charles Garnier, the man who had designed Paris’s opera house. This was the start of the principality’s reputation as a place to lose one’s excess pounds, in both senses of the term.
Menton, just along the coast towards Italy, was another resort being developed by the Brits. A Manchester doctor called James Henry Bennett arrived there in 1859, looking for nothing more than a pleasant place in which to die of his chronic lung disease, and found to his surprise that he got better. He opened a surgery there and wrote a book called Mentone [sic] and the Riviera as a Winter Climate. In this, he rejected towns further south – Turin was foggy, Rome full of malaria and Naples a cholera trap – and praised both Menton’s clement weather and its cleanliness, which he ascribed to the locals collecting their own excrement for use as fertilizer: ‘They husband their manure with jealous care, and let none escape into the sea.’ Dr Bennett also had a piece of advice that Bertie might well have been wise to follow: ‘It is’, he warned, ‘impossible to effectually pursue health and pleasure at the same time.’
The clean-living doctor quickly began to attract English patients, amongst them Robert Louis Stevenson, and in only ten years or so, Menton grew into one of the most fashionable winter resorts on the Mediterranean coast.
Cannes, meanwhile, had been transformed from a fishing village into a bustling resort by a succession of British immigrants. It had first been discovered in 1834 when a certain Henry, Lord Brougham and Vaux (pronounced ‘broom and vokes’, rather like some nineteenth-century house-cleaning implement) was taking his daughter to Italy for the winter to ease her lung condition. However, they found the border closed at Nice because of a cholera outbreak, so they stopped for the night at an inn in Cannes, where they apparently enjoyed an excellent bouillabaisse. Next morning, Lord H. B. & V. took one look at the bay and decided that he didn’t need to go to Italy after all. He bought a piece of land, built a villa, and was soon inviting high-society friends to join him there. More villas sprang up on the wooded hillsides, and Brougham, a skilled orator (or rather, a determined one – he once spoke in the House of Commons for six straight hours), persu
aded the French state to pay for a decent jetty. This attracted the yachting crowd, who began to flock south in search of somewhere less bracing than Cowes.
In 1837 a certain John Taylor, estate agent, arrived in Cannes, and from then on the town became a collection of ‘prime seafront locations’, ‘dream homes in the sun’ and ‘stunning vistas’. The health benefits of the climate were also being touted, and before the 1830s were done, over-indulgers from all across Europe were coming for the sea air, year-round sunshine and what one French history of the town calls its ‘vegetable smells’.1 Thermal spas began to open in Cannes, offering cures for lung diseases, indigestion, gout and kidney trouble – in fact, almost every ill that afflicted the hard-drinking, chain-smoking, over-eating upper classes, including Bertie.
He frequented all these resorts and, according to his future French police bodyguard Xavier Paoli, was well known on the coast by the mid-1870s. In 1878, when Paoli, then an ordinary policeman, first saw Bertie getting off a train in Nice, the station master pointed him out and said: ‘He knows everyone in Nice and we adore him.’
As of 1883, Bertie elected Cannes as his favourite winter hideaway, probably because he had been singing the praises of the Riviera back home, and his mother got into the habit of coming down to Nice and Menton. It was best to base himself a few kilometres away. There wasn’t much fun to be had if the black-clad Queen was hovering in the background.
Bertie and Victoria were by no means the only royal personages to spend time on the coast – every winter, the local papers listed visiting monarchs from as far away as Russia and Brazil, as well as the touring hordes of European aristocrats – but Paoli gives Bertie the credit for the fashionability of the whole Riviera.