Dirty Bertie

by Stephen Clarke

  Venues with names like L’Enfer (Hell), Le Ciel (Heaven), La Truie qui Chante (the Singing Sow) and the Cabaret des Assassins (which was decorated with pictures of real murderers) sprang up in every available building. It wasn’t long before this frenzied new nightlife attracted the attention of the city’s richer thrill-seekers, and by the early 1880s, according to Renault and Château, ‘high society and the demi-monde [the cocottes and their clients], the bourgeois and everyone else met in Montmartre in search of fun’.

  Bertie and the silk-scarf set would come up the hill accompanied by bodyguards. The police, who until then had been keeping an eye on the English Prince to make sure he wasn’t planning to overthrow the Republican régime, now acted as his unofficial guides to Paris’s underworld. Protection was a real necessity for anyone slumming it while wearing an expensive pocket watch and carrying a gold-topped cane. Renault and Château say that the Moulin de la Galette, which was painted by Renoir in 1876 and Van Gogh in 1886, was a ‘badly frequented workers’ place’ that specialized in dancing and drinking: ‘Who knows how many temporary marriages, quickly consummated and just as quickly dissolved, took place between two quadrilles in that stifling atmosphere?’ It was unwise for a chic Parisian to venture in unprotected.

  Bertie was seen at the Chat Noir, a club that was founded in 1881 on the boulevard de Rochechouart, at the foot of Montmartre, its initial aim according to Renault and Château ‘to serve bad wine to poets and painters’. The décor was meant to be arty and history-themed, but turned out more like an antique shop or a ‘baroque museum’, with stuffed birds and obscene nudes alongside religious stained-glass windows. To preserve this iconoclastic atmosphere, a bouncer dressed in a gold costume would ‘make sure that dastardly priests and soldiers’ stayed away. The club’s owner, Rodolphe Salis, also created an artistic movement, Les Incohérents, an apt name for a bunch of artists and writers tanked up on absinthe.

  Salis was a shrewd businessman, though, and quickly developed the Chat Noir into a place where ‘the gentry, the bourgeois and the vulgar [could] drink Victor Hugo’s absinthe in golden goblets’. Soon, gents like Bertie were pulling up outside in their horse-drawn cabs, often accompanied both by a bodyguard and a woman they had picked up at the theatre or in a boulevard café. They would be whisked past the bouncer and squeeze into the smoky den populated by raucous, chain-smoking artists and their models, and a piano bashing out singalong tunes. The best-dressed customers, often princes and visiting heads of state, would be welcomed by Rodolphe Salis himself with what Renault and Château describe as ‘humility that was not entirely free of insolence’. On one occasion, Salis is said to have greeted Bertie with an enquiry about Queen Victoria’s health, asking loudly, ‘Et cette maman?’ – ‘And how’s Mum?’

  The singers on stage would add to this spirit of irreverence, welcoming chic new arrivals with comments like: ‘When did you get out of prison?’ or: ‘Where’s that tart you were with last night?’ Bertie himself became the butt of these jokes at the Chat Noir. One night, when he was being ushered to the best table, a performer called out: ‘Look at him. He’s the spitting image of the Prince of Wales.’ In French, it was much more risqué: ‘On dirait le Prince de Galles tout pissé’; literally a ‘pissing image’. Bertie, though, would surely have loved this sign that he had been accepted here – as he was in palaces and Paris’s finest restaurants – as one of the locals.

  The songs performed in these places went a stage further than the farces and double entendres of vaudeville and the operettas. The Montmartre singers told true stories drawn from the life of Paris’s underclass. One of the most popular performers, Aristide Bruant, whose red scarf and wide-brimmed hat were made famous by Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster for his show, wrote a song about a real streetwalker called Nini Peau d’Chien,2 a ‘sweet, kind’ girl who was to be found touting for business around Bastille ‘with love sparkling in her mousy eyes’. Another of Bruant’s songs began with a lament that it had become impossible to find a prostitute in Paris who hadn’t become ‘un débris’ (a wreck) because of her job. There was only one place where you were always in luck, he went on: the Bois de Boulogne, where ‘there were even royal birds’ touting for ‘rich old bastards’. Bertie might not have laughed at that.

  Another of Toulouse-Lautrec’s favourite models was the can-can dancer La Goulue, who had a well-documented encounter with Bertie. She was typical of the girls who found themselves dancing in Pigalle. She was born Louise Weber in the suburbs of Paris and raised by her elder sister, a washerwoman. Young Louise caused her first scandal when only twelve by taking communion dressed in a tutu and ballet shoes, and left home at fifteen to live with her boyfriend, a soldier. She then progressed to a rich lover with a house near the Arc de Triomphe, before leaving (or being dumped by) him and earning money dancing in cabarets and posing for paintings and nude photos. Toulouse-Lautrec depicted La Goulue entering the Moulin Rouge in a dress cut so low that you can see her navel. Renoir chose a more romantic image for his picture Danse à la Ville, in which La Goulue is in the arms of a white-gloved gentleman.

  Her photos, meanwhile, often show her wearing nothing but stockings, see-through knickerbockers or, in one case of bizarre fetishism, what looks like an ancient Roman helmet. Making money from pornographic photos was an accepted sideline for the can-can dancers, whose speciality was, naturally enough, to be photographed doing the splits and advertising their sexual flexibility.

  The can-can girls’ main job at a cabaret was to chauffer les messieurs – get the men hot under the collar – and La Goulue was one of the most gifted chauffeuses. Like a modern footballer, she switched employers in exchange for ever-increasing wages, and became the best-paid dancer on the circuit, headlining at the Moulin Rouge for six straight years. She earned her nickname, which means something like ‘the glutton’, by leaning out into the front row as she danced and grabbing men’s drinks, which she would then swallow in one gulp. Her most popular trick amongst her male fans, though, was her skill at high-kicking right over their heads and knocking their hats off. Given that her outfit was usually a flouncy skirt that exposed bare thighs between her loose knickers and over-the-knee stockings, at a time when most women were loath to reveal anything below the waist except their shoe, the effect on a well-oiled audience – including Bertie – is not hard to imagine.

  Bertie apparently met La Goulue in 1893 at a café-concert called Le Jardin de Paris, and she instantly proved that she knew how to attract a man’s attention even if he was a little too grand to have his hat kicked off on a first date. As soon as she saw Bertie, so the story goes, she called out, in an accent that would have been the Parisian equivalent of the broadest Cockney: ‘Hey, Wales, you paying for the champagne? Are you treating me, or does your mother have to pay?’ She called him ‘tu’, as if they were best friends or lovers.

  Bertie came back with one of his trademark pieces of public French repartee: ‘Mademoiselle La Goulue, you have the prettiest legs in Paris,’ he is said to have replied. He then invited her for supper after the show, which was apparently followed by what the French picturesquely call une partie de jambes en l’air – a legs-in-the-air party. Very appropriate for a can-can dancer.

  Another famous cabaret founded around this time was the Divan Japonais, in a side street leading up from Pigalle to Montmartre. It was the first-ever French striptease joint, and is yet another venue still known today because of a Toulouse-Lautrec poster – his decadent picture of the black-dressed dancer Jane Avril watching a concert while a blond-bearded dandy peers lustfully over her shoulder. Lautrec designed his poster in 1892, but before that the Divan had used more conventional advertisements – for example, a flyer featuring a man in evening dress with a topless beauty draped across his shoulders.

  Incidentally, the Divan Japonais got its name because of the oriental décor that was already in place when it was bought in 1873 by an entrepreneur called Théophile Lefort – though in fact the furnishings were originally intend
ed to be Chinese. But then the men in the audience didn’t go there to quibble about interior decoration.

  The Folies Bergère (Shepherdess Follies), which is of course still operating today as a semi-naked dance revue, was not in Montmartre at all. It opened down in the boulevard area of the 9th arrondissement as an opera house, and only switched over to more fashionable café-concert shows in the late 1880s. At Bertie’s time there wouldn’t have been any semi-naked dancers – they didn’t arrive until around the time of the First World War.

  Similarly, the Moulin Rouge was another latecomer to the scene. It was founded at the foot of the hill in 1889 as a deliberate ploy to attract rich people into the neighbourhood, and charged much higher prices for food and drink than its older neighbours. In fact it was a pastiche of the goings-on in the real windmills like the Moulin de la Galette, a sign that Montmartre was already going mainstream. It was dreamt up by a Spanish-born entrepreneur called Joseph Oller and his partner Charles Zidler, who opened another café-concert, the above-mentioned Jardin de Paris, right down on the Champs-Élysées. Places like this, along with the Folies Bergère, were completing the circle – by the end of the 1880s, the edgy Parisian cabaret had left the hilltop and come down to the rich boulevards so that men like Bertie didn’t need bodyguards if they wanted to listen to songs about low-class prostitutes.

  Bertie had been present at the birth of this phenomenon that is still at the heart of Paris culture today, and stayed long enough to watch it grow tame. At which point, like an experienced pearl diver, he knew where he had to go when the pickings grew lean – even deeper down . . .

  V

  Back in the 1860s, when Napoléon III’s court was still at its brightest, one of the most brilliant stars of his entourage was Pauline von Metternich, glamorous wife of the Austrian Ambassador. She was famous for her perfect shoulders, her excellent taste in all things artistic, and her independent spirit. As we saw earlier, it was Pauline who introduced Parisian ladies to two pastimes that had previously been reserved for men only – smoking and ice-skating. But she also sought thrills elsewhere, and started a trend for what became known as tournées des grands-ducs – grand dukes’ tours – which sound like outings to visit friends’ palaces but were in fact night-time excursions into poorer areas of Paris. We have seen earlier examples of aristocrats slumming it – women going to the upstairs rooms of boulevard cafés, the Empress Eugénie herself pretending to be a peasant at a country dance – and Pauline’s tournées were similar, the crème de la crème descending a few levels in society and giving themselves something to gossip about next day.

  After the fall of Napoléon III, however, with Montmartre giving anyone with a bodyguard and a sense of adventure the chance to see the working classes close up, new thrills were harder to get. Men with a real need to see how the other half lived were forced to find oases of depravity that hadn’t been cleaned out by Baron Haussmann’s demolition men.

  And it is known that Bertie frequented at least one of Paris’s louchest dives.

  This was a notoriously sordid cabaret called Le Père Lunette, appropriately situated at 4, rue des Anglais, a narrow alley in the old Latin Quarter named after the English students who had colonized it in the thirteenth century, when they came to study at Paris’s university. In Bertie’s day, demolitions were taking place all around this dismal corner of Paris, and today the rue des Anglais is set between two wide, post-Haussmann streets, but in the early 1880s, rich visitors would have had to walk for several minutes after leaving their carriage in the new boulevard Saint-Germain, with their bodyguard pushing aside lolling drunks and potential muggers. The writer Oscar Méténier described the street in 1882 as ‘dirty, stinking and pitch-black’. Bertie’s impeccable shoes would definitely have stepped in substances they weren’t designed for.

  Méténier, a former policeman, was writing an article about Le Père Lunette and its rich patrons for a magazine called Panurge, named after the quack doctor in François Rabelais’s story of over-indulgence, Pantagruel. Méténier’s description of the rue des Anglais seemed designed to put off all but the most curious. He wrote:

  When night falls, the place swarms with shabby, tattered people . . . they gesticulate, shout, yell, swear, whistle, yap. The dim light of the lanterns outside the shady hotels . . . lights up pale, sinister faces. Number 4, a door reinforced with bars and set below a drawing of a giant pair of glasses, is a meeting place for aristocrats of crime and poverty. As you enter, a warm fug made up of the foul breath of the drinkers and the vapour of cheap eau-de-vie makes you retch.

  Not Bertie’s usual kind of hang-out.

  The women chez Le Père Lunette didn’t look much like Lillie Langtry or Sarah Bernhardt, either. They even made La Goulue look classy. Méténier says:

  Around a horseshoe table sit nameless creatures, the establishment’s female customers. Anything goes. All of them, young and old – because there are young girls, too, toothless and prematurely wrinkled – beg for a consolation drink from the unknown lovers that fate throws their way, and, drunk, slumped, blank-eyed, swearing, they reward their benefactors with hideous caresses and repugnant kisses.

  At the back of the café, behind a rough wooden partition, was a room called Le Sénat (the Senate), named after its amphitheatre-like benches where prostitutes sat waiting for customers. Any man wandering in here would have to be desperate, and either already infected with a sexually transmitted disease or willing to catch one. The poor women here were at the bottom of the heap, and might have been thrown out of a legal brothel, where the prostitutes were obliged to undergo regular medical examinations, for showing too obvious symptoms of, say, syphilis.

  It is impossible to believe that Bertie would have succumbed to temptation here. He knew all about syphilis – some of London high society’s biggest names had turned into raging lunatics and died atrociously because of it. There was nothing romantic in the rue des Anglais. This was sex at its most sordid. The attraction to the chic voyeurs who came here must have been that the horrific squalor was only a matter of yards away from the glittering new lights of Paris. It was a living zoo of sleaze that would soon be cleared away – both buildings and people – by Haussmann. The more heartless visitors must have seen it as proof that the uneducated lower classes were no better than animals. Worse, even, because at least animals don’t get drunk and catch ‘immoral’ diseases.

  On Bertie, though, the effect of this morbid sex tourism seems to have been different. Parisian poverty appears to have made him more acutely conscious of the similar conditions that existed back home. He had done his share of slumming in London as a younger man, but that had been in music halls which were palaces compared to Le Père Lunette. There was no way that Bertie could go on a tour of the slum brothels in London, even if he didn’t plan to indulge, but he felt that he should do something to alleviate the poverty. And it was in conditions very similar to these Parisian tournées des grands-ducs that Bertie visited the filthy, overcrowded streets of Holborn and St Pancras in 1884, when he joined the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Class. He dressed in what he regarded as poor clothes (no doubt cleaner and smarter than most Londoners had ever worn in their lives) and, accompanied by a detective, went on a tour of the slums. The locals must have guessed that these well-scrubbed, overfed people were do-gooders, but Bertie seems to have found the visit very illuminating all the same.

  A landlord took him to see an emaciated woman slumped in a room with three naked children. She had a fourth, she told them, but it had gone out a few days ago and never returned. This was when Bertie had to be persuaded not to start doling out money and thereby provoking a riot. To his credit, he also went back to the House of Lords and made a speech about the ‘disgraceful’ conditions of the poor.

  Of course Bertie wasn’t going to take a room in one of the hotels in the rue des Anglais and set about upgrading the neighbourhood from the inside. After all, his main purpose in Paris was to escape the suffocating moral atmo
sphere of London, not to bring about social change. After a visit to a Paris flophouse like Le Père Lunette, he would go and clean up at the Bristol, or drop in to see his rich friends for some gambling at the Cercle de la rue Royale club, no doubt regaling them with stories of toothless hags and unmentionable odours.

  He would almost certainly not have admitted that, somehow, he had also got a thrill from seeing these worn-out, dangerous prostitutes who would have had sex with him for the price of a dirty glass of watered-down hooch. Though as Bertie entered his forties, he may have been in need of some extra stimulation.

  VI

  Bertie’s biographers can be an unsporting lot. Overall, he gives great entertainment, and throughout his time as Prince of Wales, he can usually be relied upon to alternate between serious intent and absurd gaffe, between family crisis and private merrymaking. So it seems hardly fair, albeit historically justified, for several of his biographers to start casting doubts upon Bertie’s virility as soon as he hits his vulnerable middle age (and in the portly Prince’s case ‘middle’ was certainly the operative word). But from the time of Lillie Langtry onwards, there is frequent speculation about whether or not Bertie was actually having sex with such-and-such a female favourite, and if so, how often.