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Alfred, the unprincely

That frivolous and immoral court did frightful harm…and was very bad for…Affie…the utter want of seriousness and principle.

— Queen Victoria.

The Continent’s biggest city was abuzz as tens of thousands of visitors flocked to the Exposition Universelle de 1867, a world fair to demonstrate all the brilliant éclat that was France, and surpass Paris’ first exposition in 1855 and the underwhelming 1862 exposition put on by rival Britain.

Exposition Universelle des produits de l’Agriculture, de l’Industrie et des Beaux-Arts de Paris was Emperor Louis Napoleon III’s proclamation of Paris as the heart of a new world order, the mother of an emerging global civilisation of peace and prosperity under the cultural and spiritual leadership of France.

Seven million people descended onto the grand new boulevards of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussman to absorb 50,000 exhibits of human activity and excellence from 42 nations, a Napoleonic demonstration that the bounty of man and nature could be transformed into a universal harmony for all. As Victor Hugo effused in a preface to the exposition guide: ‘…O France, adieu!…thou shalt no longer be France: thou shalt be Humanity! No longer a nation, thou shalt be Ubiquity…as Athens became Greece, as Rome became Christianity, thou, France, become the world.’1

Notwithstanding the French challenge to her Empire’s pre-eminence, Queen Victoria would not be in attendance. She had visited the first Paris exhibition, taking her family at a pivotal moment in the rapprochement between the two countries in the Crimean War. Napoleon visited Windsor and then went on a full charm offensive with Victoria’s family as his guests in Paris, refitting the Palais de Saint-Cloud for their stay, and purchasing anything which was seen to please the Queen at the exposition.

Edward, the Prince of Wales, had also been seduced, as Victoria presciently noted. ‘The beauty of the French capital, the liveliness of the French people, the bonhomie of the French Emperor (Napoleon III), the elegance of the French empress (Empress Eugénie) made an indelible impression on his pleasure-hungry nature.’2

Now in 1867 both sons had a pleasure-hungry nature, but the Queen was, six years after her ‘day turned into night’ when her beloved Albert died, still in isolated mourning. Alfred and Edward 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 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 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 & Robert Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: The British and the French from the Sun King to the Present, (London: Random House, 2010), p. 375.

15 Joanna Richardson, The Courtesans: The Demi-Monde in 19th Century France, (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1967), p. 28.

16 Ridley, Bertie, p. 149.

17 Richardson, The Courtesans, pp. 28, 31.

18 Nathanial Newnham-Davis, Gourmet’s Guide to Europe, (London: Ballantyne, Hanson and Co, 1908), p. 6.

19 Stephen Clarke, Dirty Bertie: An English King made in France, (London: Random House, 2015), pp. 127, 119.

20 Examiner, (27 April 1867 BLN).

21 Ridley, Bertie, p. 105.

22 Hannah Pakula, An Uncommon Woman - The Empress Frederick: Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), p. 253.

23 Ridley, Bertie, p. 105.

24 ibid., p. 278

25 ibid., pp. 105,106.

26 Kiste & Jordaan, Dearest Affie, p. 68.

27 Robert Travers, Phantom Fenians of New South Wales, (Kenthurst, Aust: Kangaroo Press, 1986), p. 11.