The Prince and the Assassin. Steve Harris
certainly out of place in the salons of Paris’.12
After supper the princes ‘danced on, with unflagging spirit, until half past five’ and at a ball at Tuileries Palace, the two ‘indefatigable dancers’ made them ‘general favourites with high and low’.13
The ‘high’ were the aristocracy of Europe and Asia, where Alfred rubbed shoulders proudly wearing the sash and Grande-Croix badge of the Légion d’honneur, Honour, presented to he and Edward by the Emperor.
The ‘low’ were les amoureux, with whom the princes rubbed more than shoulders. This was their private mission, to have a right royal time immersed in the gastronomic, theatrical and sexual fare of the demi-monde (half-world) a term originally coined by playwright Alexandre Dumas to describe the world of women who lived and thrived in the freedom and ambiguity on the edge of respectable society.
Paris was the epicentre of decadence in the court of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie, constructed around the Emperor’s own voracious sexual appetite. Nubile ladies-in-waiting with low-cut dresses and nicknames such as Salopette or Cochonette, meaning slut or sex-mad, were maintained by Eugénie, and courtesans, dancers and actresses gave the theatrical quarter of the capital a reputation as the clitoris of Paris.
In close to 200 brothels—endorsed by Napoleon as a necessity to minimise sexual disease—enterprising madames in their maison de tolerance offered themed rooms providing all manner of outlets for aristocracy wanting to unleashing inner perversions and tastes. As Alexandre Dumas the younger wrote, ‘Women were luxuries for public consumption like hounds, horses and carriages’.14
With the right beauty and cunning a cocotte could graduate from entertaining favoured guests in private rooms to become a grande horizontale to rich patrons, including emperors and aristocrats from throughout England, Europe and Russia, archbishops and the bourgeois. Such women with lavish apartments, servants, personal carriage, fabulous gowns, extravagant jewels, prominent clients and outrageous exploits were known as mangeuses (eaters-of men and fortunes).
Their luxurious mansions featured boudoirs with featured tableaux painted by Toulouse Lautrec, erotic imagery on everything, including radiators, and individually themed rooms. One at Le Chabanais, where Edward would come to have a coat of arms on his preferred bed, was in the style of an Orient Express carriage, complete with railway soundtrack. Special guests bathed with prostitutes in a giant copper bath filled with champagne, and when his gastronomic girth later threatened to restrict his sexual appetite, Edward would come to enjoy threesomes in a handcrafted ‘love seat’.
One mangeuse, Giulia Benini Barucci, marketed herself as La Barucci, ‘the number one whore in Paris’. She had a mansion on Champs Elysee, complete with liveried footmen and a grand white-carpeted staircase with velvet covered banisters. It was rumoured that when she first met Edward she begged forgiveness for being 45 minutes late and promptly lifted her crinoline skirt to reveal nothing but ‘the white rotundities of her callipygian charms’, telling others ‘I showed him the best I have, and it was free!’15 La Barucci kept letters and photos of her aristocratic clients, with her brother Piro not averse to demanding additional payments from some. Along with letters ‘of a delicate nature’ from Edward, she also kept a large photograph of Alfred in full Highland costume inside a crimson velvet frame signed ‘Alfred’, and an album of the Royal Family inscribed ‘Alfred to Giulia 1868.’16
Another royally favoured mangeuse was Coral Pearl, formerly Emma Crouch. Although not conventionally beautiful, Cora was sexy, with a tiny waist and fine breasts. She delighted men with her spontaneous and outrageous spirit. When a dinner party guest broke an expensive glass, she impulsively broke the rest of the set to make him feel more comfortable. She became famous for attending a masquerade ball as ‘Eve’, with ‘little deviation from the original’, dancing naked on a bed of orchids, bathing in champagne in front of male guests, and urging a group of clients around the dinner table to be ready to ‘cut into the next dish’: herself, carried in by four men on a huge silver platter, naked except for a sprinkling of parsley.
By the time the princes arrived Pearl had ‘already munched up a brochette (skewer) of five or six historical fortunes with her pretty white teeth’,17 a fortune that would include three Parisian houses, including a small palace, courtesy of Prince Napoleon, the Emperor’s wealthy cousin, and jewellery worth more than a million francs and a stable of 60 horses.
This was the world which Alfred and Edward had come to know and love. Now, while tensions emerged in the affairs of Europe as Chancellor Bismarck sought German unification under Prussian leadership, pressure which would ultimately lead to the Franco-Prussian War and Napoleon’s defeat, capture and exile in England, the princes pursued their favourite haunts.
Fashionable cafés like Café Anglais provided gastronomic satisfaction, and so much more. During the exposition it held the famous Dîner des Trois Empereurs or Three Emperors Dinner, in honour of Tsar Alexander II, Kaiser Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck. Sixteen courses with eight wines were served over eight hours at a cost of 400 francs per person (about AUD$13,000 in today’s prices).
From the respectable salon maintained downstairs, where married women could be safely seen amid rich wallpaper, walnut, mahogany, and gold leaf patina mirrors, gentlemen could quietly make their exit via a hidden staircase to where a courtesan of choice would entertain them in cabinets prive. Café Anglais’ 22 private rooms featured what food historian Nathanial Newnham-Davis would describe as ‘scene of some of the wildest and most interesting parties given by the great men of the Second Empire.’18
For the princes, a seemingly respectable night at the ‘ballet’ or ‘opera’ might be much more about the star performers, those ‘vivacious blondes (who) display their unconcealed attractions’, as one Irish journalist wrote. It was hard to resist the ‘unconcealed attractions’ of performers like Coral Pearl and Hortense Schneider, a voluptuous 34-year-old singer who a police file indicated could ‘have driven an archbishop to damnation’.19 She was famous as a diva soprano on stage, and for her off-stage provision for visiting Royals as le Passage des Princes — en passage, or just passing through.
Pearl and Schneider co-starred in Jacques Offenbach’s operetta La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein, a biting satire of royal misbehaviour at the theatre des varieties. The leading men of the Jockey Club and English and French nobility attended, one observer noting that only women of the demi-monde could be seen in the boxes.
Jockey Club members generally did not turn up to the theatre until they had finished dining, forcing most theatres and Opera Paris not to schedule any prime items until after interval, during which time patrons visited the Foyer de la Danse, an exclusive salon where performers were selected for a personal après-show performance.
In the exclusive Offenbach performance, Alfred watched Schneider play a coquettish monarch with a dangerous weakness for men in uniform while Pearl, in the sensation of the season, played Cupid, appearing ‘half naked’ in diamond-encrusted bikini and boots. A critic in The Examiner said she was the most notorious and ‘fastest’ member of the demi-monde who evinced ‘not one artistic quality in a part which demands many’. 20
Artistic quality was not a princely priority. In Nana, Emile Zola’s later researched novel about the demi-monde, a ‘Prince of Scots’ visited Hortense Schneider in her dressing room, where she received him still scantily dressed in her Duchess costume. Zola described the prince, bearded and of pink complexion, as having ‘the sort of distinction peculiar to a man of pleasure’, and ‘his eyes half-closed, followed the swelling lines of her bosom with the eyes of a connoisseur’.21
Princess Victoria was also in Paris. She had not seen much of her brothers, but had seen and heard enough to tell her mother there was ‘much that shocks and disgusts me here’, including theatre which made her ‘very hot and uncomfortable.’22 She lamented: ‘What mischief that very court and still more that very attractive Paris has done to English society…what harm to our two eldest brothers.’
Queen Victoria did not need to be reminded of the evil of Paris. She told her daughter: ‘Your two elder brothers unfortunately were carried away by that horrid Paris…that frivolous and immoral court did frightful harm to