were tired of the permanent black dress, and what would be her insistence that Albert’s rooms and routines remain exactly as when he was alive, such as servants daily delivering hot water for his shave, keeping his nightdress in her bed, and even visiting his cows.
Some had expected Victoria to abdicate soon after Albert’s passing, and whatever the concerns about Edward, her isolation worried the British Government which well understood that Royalty’s public standing and influence, even its existence, depended on public connectedness. It was difficult enough to justify royalty by divine right and absolute authority, so loyalty and esteem was essential and this required visibility. But Victoria refused invitations to commemorate the opening of public buildings, ensured the weddings of her children were drab and private affairs, and only rarely appeared to unveil a statue of her husband or reluctantly
open Parliament.
Anti-monarchical sentiment, if not outright republicanism, mounted. Victoria was hissed and booed on a rare trip to Parliament, such that even she wondered if ‘something unpleasant’ might happen. Newspapers and MPs questioned the cost of royalty and suggested Victoria was teaching people to think little of her office and that ‘the monarchy is practically dead.’3 A notice appeared on the railings of Buckingham Palace declaring ‘these commanding premises to be let or sold in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business’.4
There was ‘a great crisis of Royalty’, as Prime Minister William Gladstone observed. The Queen had an ‘immense fund of loyalty but she is now living on the capital’, he said, because Royalty was stuck in ‘a deep and nasty rut’5 as ‘the Queen is invisible.’6 And her heir was not seen as the answer. ‘The Prince of Wales is not respected’,7 some Freemasons writing letters hoping the Prince of Wales would ‘never dishonour his country by becoming its King’8 and one MP opining that even the staunchest supporters of Royalty ‘shake their heads and express anxiety as to whether the Queen’s successor will have the tact and talent to keep royalty upon its legs and out of the gutter’.9
Nevertheless the Widow of Windsor could not be persuaded from her black isolation, but diplomatic and political reality meant she could not prevent Edward and Alfred providing a royal presence in Paris.
The princes were ready for Paris, and she for them. Edward was married, but his slender attractive wife Princess Alix and a growing family was no restraint on his appetite for a good time and female company. Carrying their third baby, Alix at one point was almost near death, a bout of rheumatic fever forcing her to lay in bed with a frame to keep the bedding off a troubled leg. But as soon as three-month old Louise was christened in May, Edward left behind his ailing wife—and gossip that he might have contributed to her increasing deafness by passing on syphilis—to await Alfred’s arrival in Paris. ‘She don’t mind at all,’ he told the Queen, dismissing her concerns.10
The Queen was worried. She and Prince Albert thought the requirement of royalty was discipline, and that ostentatious courts, frivolous pleasures, immoral leadership and flattery of the monarch could only ever led to societal trouble. Now their two sons, well known for their ‘frivolous pleasures’ were heading for the ‘immoral court’ of Paris she despised.
And while ‘Dirty Bertie’ drew the most attention in free-spirited, boozy private men’s clubs like the Jockey Club and the new Yacht Club de France, Alfred had also learned much from the tutelage of his brother and fellow sailors. And since the arrival of Edward’s first son, Prince Albert Victor, he no longer had to endure the strictures of being the spare heir.
Courtesans would cheerfully say that ‘every girl is sitting on her fortune if only she knew it’, and now the exposition city was opening its bosom, and more, to its visitors. Alfred arrived in Paris early on 13 May to join his brother in a full feast of the high life before setting off for a long journey to faraway Australia.
By the time they left six days later, correspondents in Paris pointedly wrote that the future King and his ‘sailor brother’ had been ‘feted to their hearts content’ and must have ‘taken home a very lively remembrance of their visit’.11
On the surface, they were dutifully engaged in the exposition on the great military ground of Champ de Mars, especially the armaments and naval displays, and fulfilled a full card of official banquets, balls and receptions. Even official events raised some eyebrows. At the British Embassy, supper was just getting underway at 2am when guests were taken aback by Alfred’s surprise party offering: his Scottish piper, in full highland uniform, marched in, lustily playing his bagpipes. The Illustrated London News said highland music might be acceptable in the mountains, ‘but is 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
