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 English Society…and was very bad for Bertie and Affie.’23 She was well aware of the excesses of the city, where she could see a ‘fearful extravagance and luxury, the utter want of seriousness and principle in everything…all showed a rottenness which was sure to crumble and fall’.24 High-ranking officials were also lamenting the princes’ behaviour. General Sir William Thomas Knollys, comptroller of Edward’s household, noted in his diary that reports of their visit were ‘very unsatisfactory’, including suppers ‘after the Opera with some of the female Paris notorieties’ and he later opposed Edward returning to Paris after the exposition given ‘the scenes I had led to believe had taken place’. Lord Stanley noted in his diary: ‘Much talk in society about the P of Wales and his disreputable ways of going on. He is seen at theatres paying attention to the lowest class of women, visits them at their houses etc.’25
Already concerned by what she sensed went on at Marlborough House, the Queen was appalled by what she heard of her sons’ latest behaviour in ‘horrid’ Paris. Edward was concern enough, but now Alfred was becoming just as ‘decadent’ and ‘a source of no satisfaction or comfort’26 as he too ‘succumbed to Venus’.27
It was a real relief he was leaving for a long sea journey to the far reaches of the Empire. Her hope was that safely away from immoral company, he might learn to become more disciplined and royal. His hope was for a break from maternal and royal expectations on an unprecedented sea voyage and the savouring of Antipodean pleasures and liberties.
Neither could have any idea that this was a voyage that would culminate in unimaginable events which would shake a country and Empire to its foundations.
endnotes
1 Victor Hugo, Guide officiel à l’exposition universelle de 1867, (Paris: 1867).
2 Theo Aronson, Queen Victoria and the Bonapartes, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), p. 67.
3 Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession, p. 194.
4 Longford, Queen Victoria R. I., (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), p. 321.
5 Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession, p. 225.
6 Sir Phillip Magnus, Gladstone: A Biography, (London: Murray, 1954), p. 207.
7 ibid.
8 Christopher Hibbert, Edward V11, A Portrait, (London: Allen Lane, 1976), p. 108.
9 ibid.
10 Ridley, Bertie, p. 104.
11 Sydney Morning Herald, (20 July 1867).
12 London Illustrated News, (25 May 1867 BLN).
13 Sydney Morning Herald, op cit.
14 Isabelle Tombs
