Eugénie was tall and slim, with tiny feet ‘smaller than those of a twelve year old child’, according to one lady-in-waiting, with a graceful walk, a perfect complexion, tawny hair and sparkling violet-blue eyes. Her love of fashion and elegance made her court the centre of all that was glamorous and exciting in Europe.
Her first-floor apartments at the Tuileries reflected this. The salon vert had green friezes on a green background, with green parrots and woodpeckers over the doors, and an enormous mirror reflecting the gardens. The waiting room was hung with rose silk; all the rooms were lit by wax candles in rock-crystal chandeliers and filled with clocks, bronzes and Sèvres porcelain. The four outfits she would wear that day descended on a lift through a trapdoor in the ceiling. Winter and summer, orchids, roses, carnations, geraniums and ivy, for which she had a passion, filled the many vases.
Her favourite colour was mauve, her court was relaxed and gay, her ladies-in-waiting wore scarlet jackets and cloaks, the gentlemen of her household her uniform of pale blue coat and white silk breeches. She gave endless balls and fêtes, at which ladies wore gowns of tulle, velvet or gauze, trimmed with lace and embroidery, with trains, between three and four metres long, depending from their bare shoulders.
She insisted on glamour, ruling that no woman was to appear at court functions wearing the same dress twice. In 1869 the wife of an American banker fell foul of these demands and was ‘notified by the master of ceremonies of the Empress Eugénie that the permission formerly granted [to her] to appear at the Monday evening receptions of the Empress has been withdrawn’. The cause: ‘unbecoming dress at the last soirée in the Tuileries’. She also hated women to dress too young: when a countess of seventy-two appeared dressed in white tulle with red bows, and a crown of white roses in her hair, ‘the Empress was greatly annoyed and avoided speaking to her the whole evening’.
Sometimes Eugénie would drive down the Champs-Elysées in an open carriage drawn by four high-stepping horses, a postilion on one of the leaders and two tall footmen standing behind her, as she leant back in her flounced dress of bronze taffeta, a tiny black lace bonnet perched on her auburn hair and a tea rose above one ear.
After marriage, it did not take long for her husband to stray, as Eugénie found sex with him ‘disgusting’. It is doubtful that she allowed further approaches from him once she had given him an heir, as he subsequently resumed his petites distractions with other women. From then on she focused on being an Empress.
Her influence was pervasive. Everywhere there was velvet, marble and gilding, bright flowers, opulence, rooms scented with vetiver and patchouli. This limitless extravagance extended to another feature of the age, the great courtesans, some of whom even dyed their hair red (with ammonia and brick dust) in tribute to Eugénie, and almost all of them, like her, went to Worth for their clothes.
Sexual undertones were everywhere; the music heard at court was by Offenbach, whose operettas were popular, gay and often satirised goings-on at court or the regime. In Orphée aux Enfers the life led by the gods on Mount Olympus, with its intrigues and sexual liaisons, was clearly supposed to reflect that of the court: the lustful Jove wore a beard and waxed moustaches just like the Emperor, a notorious philanderer.
It was not surprising that American girls who came to France, like the Jerome sisters, learnt that affairs were normal, in contrast to the strict morality of their own country; and no doubt became aware of the demi-monde, since its stars, beauties like La Belle Otero and Liane de Pougy, were seen wherever fashionable people gathered – at the opera, driving in the Bois, at the races, where their wonderful toilettes and their jewels made them the cynosure of all eyes.
Naturally, there was an etiquette even in relationships with a courtesan. Passing a stylish equipage in which was seated one of these gorgeous creatures, it was not done to recognise either her or the man who was escorting her, even if he was one of your greatest friends and had dined at your house the previous night. In the early days of the century, if a man was driving with his wife, or some other lady of spotless reputation, she always sat on his right; if he was with a mistress she sat on his left so that friends and acquaintances knew when to ignore the couple. Similarly, if he was in a carriage with his courtesan-mistress, it was a social solecism for him to acknowledge any other woman; when a Danish diplomat bowed to the Empress when with his mistress, the Empress complained formally to his embassy of his behaviour and he was severely reprimanded and temporarily suspended from his duties.
In contrast to the puritan ethic of their own country, where in polite circles sexual matters were never mentioned or alluded to in front of a young girl, young American girls in France who witnessed the courtship rituals, the glittering lives of the successful demi-mondaines and the endless discreet love affairs in French court circles must have absorbed the idea that sex was something agreeable to be enjoyed by both men and women.
And for girls who moved on to England, as did the Jerome sisters, the ideal of perfect monogamy must have grown ever more shadowy and the goings-on in Edwardian high society a sport in which they, too, might one day join.
Between January and Lent the royal couple held four grand, official balls to which four or five thousand people were invited. They were gorgeous, sumptuous affairs: the Emperor’s chamberlains were in scarlet swallow-tail coats with broad gold embroidery, the equerries in green and gold, the prefects of the palace in amethyst and gold and officers in white breeches danced with bejewelled women in silks and velvets.
At nine o’clock precisely, the Emperor and Empress made their entrance, slowly progressing towards their chairs, nodding and smiling. Dancing began at 10.30 but the Empress would remain standing the whole time, going from group to group to talk. She would take leave of her guests by shaking hands with those nearest to her and then, when she reached the door, turn and sweep everyone a curtsey. American women, good-looking, wealthy and always superbly dressed, were warmly welcomed. If presented at court, they could then be invited to private receptions and to the Château de Compiègne, in Picardy.
Here those who hunted in its huge forests wore the royal colours, the men green coats and the gold hunt button, the ladies flowing green habits and tricorne hats. Every night from sixty to one hundred guests sat down to dinner, which the Emperor never permitted to last more than three-quarters of an hour. Sometimes magnificent gold plate adorned the table, sometimes precious biscuit de Sèvres. After dinner came dancing. At the close of the visit there was a grand lottery, in which all tickets won prizes. The Emperor stood near two great urns, from which the numbers were drawn, and as each guest received one he wished him ‘Bonne chance’. Here seventeen-year-old Clarita, the eldest of the three Jerome sisters, got an inkstand shaped like a handkerchief, filled with gold napoléons.
But with the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 this glamorous life came to an end. Mrs Jerome, well aware that her daughters would stand better matrimonial chances in Europe than in the closed circle of American society, began to think of England, and there their father took them, renting a house at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. As the yacht-racing capital of the world, it was an excellent choice as all fashionable London flocked there for the Regatta, in the train of the Prince of Wales.1
The Jerome girls were well prepared. They were good-looking, extremely well educated, trailing the glamorous, sophisticated aura of the French court and infinitely better dressed – a point that cannot be over-stressed. For American husband-hunters, whether mother or daughter, clothes were not simply a matter of covering their bodies decently and reasonably attractively, but a lethal weapon and a walking advertisement of status and of husband or father’s wealth and success.
Choosing, fitting, putting on and wearing their clothes was virtually a full-time occupation, and vital if they wished to rise to the top – or marry someone who could elevate them. Dressing badly, or worse still, shabbily, was not an option. It was not so much that wearing elegant clothes helped you rise, more t
hat ‘bad’ ones (especially ones that denoted a drop in income) facilitated descent down the ladder. With enough money, if a woman had no taste, she simply left it to her dressmaker.
No other dresses equalled those of Charles Frederick Worth, couturier supreme to the Gilded Age. His base was Paris, regarded as the centre of all things luxurious, fashionable and elegant, but his reach stretched over almost the whole of the western world. He was an unlikely person to have taken Paris, the centre of fashion, by storm. Born in 1825 to a family of Lincolnshire solicitors, he served as a shop assistant at Swan & Edgar in London from the age of twelve until he was nineteen, sleeping under the counter when he was not working (shops opened from 8.00 a.m. to 8.00 p.m., six days a week). At twenty, with £5 in his pocket to keep him while he looked for a job, he left for Paris. For two years he nearly starved; for the next eleven he sold fabrics. Gradually he rose, until at thirty-three he set up on his own.
One morning, a desperate woman, invited to a royal reception that evening and hating the dress produced by her dressmaker the evening before, arrived at the Worths’ house at dawn. She was ushered in, greeted by Worth in his dressing gown and taken to discuss her problem with Worth and his wife – still in bed and enveloped in layers of lace. Worth, leaning against one of the bedposts, described the dress he would like to make for her: a gown of lilac silk covered by puffed-out lilac tulle caught by knots of lily of the valley. She was delighted; and by evening it was ready.
At the palace reception the Empress Eugénie stopped in front of her and, after complimenting her on her toilette, asked the name of her couturière – all dressmakers then were women. But when she heard it was a man Eugénie moved on: to have a man supervise fittings of an evening dress would have been considered highly indecent for an empress or her circle – so the Worths were still no nearer to finding the necessary glittering patroness.
One morning they took a bold step. Madame Worth nervously approached the Princess von Metternich, the daring, avant-garde wife of the Austrian Ambassador and the Empress’s great friend. The Princess decided to give the new House a try and ordered two dresses. When they came she was delighted with them and wore the evening gown – white tulle spangled with silver and garnished with daisies that had pink hearts – to a State Ball. The Empress, fascinated, stifled her objections and demanded that Worth call on her the following morning. He was launched.
That a man should see women in their underwear, that he should touch their bodies in the course of fitting a dress, seemed outrageous to the more prudish, whose disapproval was profound and frequently voiced. It was an era when no lady showed an inch of flesh – except for face and hands – in the daytime, yet was happy to wear a plunging décolletage at night.
But no moral indignation could stop Worth’s meteoric rise. By 1860 he was famous in all the capitals of Europe and his dresses were even being ordered from New York. The Empress Eugénie was still his best client, because she never wore a dress more than once and needed new ones for any official occasion, and soon this was also a rule for all her court (their discarded clothes were given to their servants, who sold them). No evening toilette could ever be too elaborate for Eugénie – once she had the French crown jewels worked into the border of a ballgown, so that it glittered with rubies, emeralds, sapphires, turquoises, topazes and innumerable diamonds.
Worth was a true innovator – the first to introduce the concept of shop as house and showroom. Visitors were greeted at the door by polite young men in frock coats, led up a grand, red-carpeted staircase and shown into, first, a room containing only white and black silks. In the next salon were silks of all colours, and in the third velvets, wools and plush. In a mirrored showroom were his latest creations, with house models ready to display them. The last room, the Salon de Lumières, was lit artificially, so that the client could see what a dress might look like at an evening party.
He also impartially dressed all the top cocottes. Well aware of the value of publicity, he allowed actresses like Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse and Nellie Melba to order his clothes at a special prix d’artiste.
What marked a Worth gown were the exquisite, luscious fabrics in wonderful subtle colours, and the beautiful embroidery and decoration. Everything, he believed, had to be of the best and with his background in the textile trade he was able to handpick superb fabrics for his clients.
With the number of different outfits needed every day and the requirement for these to be new and fresh, keeping up with court circles was an expensive business. Lillie Moulton, a young married American woman living in Paris, invited to the Château de Compiègne in 1866, noted in her memoirs that an invitation received twelve days earlier ‘gave me plenty of time to order all my dresses, wraps and everything else I needed for this visit of a week to royalty’.
As no one was allowed to wear a dress more than once, what Lillie was ‘obliged’ to have were about twenty dresses, eight day costumes (1,600 francs), the green cloth hunt dress, seven ball dresses (each costing 2,500 francs) and five tea gowns. Her morning clothes were black velvet with sable hat and muff, brown cloth with sealskin, grey velvet with chinchilla hat, muff and trim, dark blue and purple. As the number of guests invited was around a hundred, fifty ladies would arrive at the imperial château with about a hundred trunks.
Because dresses were so expensive, women – or rather, their ladies’ maids – did what they could to protect them. Keeping clothes clean was an endless preoccupation, although dresses themselves suffered very little from what one can politely call ‘body dirt’, largely because so many underclothes were worn beneath them – chemise, camisole, petticoats – and often had removable collars and cuffs that could easily be washed. In Paris scented flannel, said to keep its perfume for six months, was sold by the yard for women to lay in their underclothes drawers.
Dresses too tight for a camisole often had shields, known as dress preservers, sewn lightly into the underarms of the bodices, which could be removed later and washed; similarly, ruffles were sewn onto the hem, inside the skirt – falling a fraction below the hem, they picked up most of the mud and dirt in the street and could be unpicked and washed or replaced.
Large houses had their own laundry, but all lady’s maids were supposed to know cleaning techniques. Velvet, for instance, could be cleaned with turpentine rubbed on gently with a piece of clean flannel; a silk dress might be sponged over with a strong infusion of black tea, or a mixture of gin, water, honey and soft soap or gin mixed with egg white to remove stains. Lace, meant to be creamy rather than white, was dipped in cold coffee or tea after washing. There were also recipes for fireproofing silks, satins and muslins – at balls there were both fires and candles and a too-vigorous valse might risk incineration.
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With the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the fall of the Second Empire and in 1871 the surrender of Paris to the Prussians, Worth was initially ruined. However, shrewdly judging that the appetite for luxury in the New World could only increase, he reopened in June 1871. With the establishing of the Third Republic, trade began to pick up. Soon he was as busy as before, but with much more foreign custom: now, in swept the wives and daughters of American millionaires, each anxious to outdo the other. As Felix Whitehurst of the Daily Telegraph pointed out: ‘The men believe in the Bourse and the women in Worth.’
As new money poured into New York and the houses of the rich filled with everything that could be considered indicative both of wealth and of good taste so clothes, too, vastly increased in importance. As the New York Times noted (on 28 June 1875), ‘a man is rated by his money, a woman by her dress’. (Edith Wharton realised this early on. When asked as a child by an aunt: ‘What would you like to be when you grow up?’ Edith replied: ‘The best-dressed woman in New York.’)
As no dresses were more stylish or expensive than those by Worth, possessing a Worth gown showed you were a woman of fashion, taste, discrimination and, of course, wealth. American women went in spring and autumn to choose their dresse
s and those of their daughters, have them fitted and enjoy Paris, paying as much as $20,000 dollars annually for a Worth wardrobe, plus another $10,000 in the regulation 50 per cent tax when the clothes arrived. Others, when their measurements were known, chose from photographs. The dresses came over in trunks swathed in tissue paper, and were held above the dress below by tapes stretched across the trunk so that creasing was minimal.
It was all a great contrast to the English attitude, particularly to the clothes of a jeune fille. ‘They still seem to be struggling with Barbara’s clothes; she has as yet not one cotton frock against the hot weather,’ wrote Lucy Graham Smith the day after her niece Barbara Lister (the eldest daughter of Lord and Lady Ribblesdale) was presented at court.
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The importance of dressing well was a lesson the Jerome women learnt early; and whatever her financial circumstances later, never did Jennie compromise on her clothes. To her sister Clara they were so important that she would write long descriptions home of the outfits she had seen at parties and of her own (‘I wore the blue chosen by Leonie and Jennie her black gauze’).
Their beautiful clothes, often contrasting unhappily with those worn by English girls, made these young Americans stand out. It was while she was dancing at a ball at Cowes that Jennie, by now a stunning beauty with the dark hair, lustrous eyes and strong colouring so admired then, was noticed by Lord Randolph Churchill, the third son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, who asked to be introduced to her. The spark between them was instant: the two fell in love so quickly that a mere three days after their first meeting Lord Randolph proposed to Jennie and was accepted.
After a battle with both their families, Lord Randolph’s charm offensive won Mrs Jerome over, while the promise of a substantial dowry mollified the Duke of Marlborough and, with the proviso that Randolph enter Parliament, the two were allowed to marry in April 1874.
The Husband Hunters Page 6