I don’t know how many people I heard gasping when they saw photos of the fabulous buildings created for the 1900 Exposition Universelle
marvels
Stephen Clarke as he discusses "the fascinating exhibition at the Petit Palais" –
Paris 1900
– of which the Petit Palais and Grand Palais are just two – and
wondering aloud why the others weren’t preserved too. The river bank
down to the Eiffel Tower was a façade of palaces instead of a busy road
and a line of rather dull apartments, and the whole neighbourhood around
the Tower was a patchwork of pavilions designed by the world’s most
famous architects.
The author of
Dirty Bertie: an English King Made in France goes on to reveal that he
was on a personal mission at the Petit Palais – I wanted to see
how the city acknowledged the presence of one of its most influential
people, the Prince of Wales, alias Dirty Bertie, the future King Edward
VII. He was, after all, friendly (or more than friendly) with almost
every French actress in the posters decorating the exhibition’s walls.
He was the man who introduced Sarah Bernhardt to London (and took her
along to high-society dinners to shock the snobs). And more seriously,
he was the Englishman who was lobbying for closer ties with his friends
across the Channel, at a time when most British politicians were
spitting with rage over France’s support for the Boers. He was also
calming his nephew the Kaiser, who was prone to outbursts of anti-French
aggression (while cruising the Med, he “invaded” Morocco, just himself
on a horse basically, to make a speech supporting Moroccan independence
from France). By [maintaining] his close contacts with all of Europe’s
leaders, Bertie was in fact protecting Europe’s balance of power, and in
a way making France’s carefree 1900 lifestyle possible. So how was he
acknowledged in the exhibition?
In a room dedicated to brothels. There – rather magnificently, I
have to admit – was his love seat, the extraordinary piece of furniture
he had built by a Parisian chairmaker, a cross between a gynecologist’s
examination table and an art nouveau toboggan,
with footplates to keep everyone in place and gilded woodwork to give the fornicatory proceedings a royal feel.
The chair was kept in Bertie’s private room at a luxury brothel
called Le Chabanais, along with a bathtub that the exhibition, like
everyone else, claims to have been filled with Champagne, which is
almost certainly a lazy fantasy. Apart from the fact that you would need
dozens of bottles to fill a bath, would anyone want to sit in the
stuff, either chilled or (yuk) warm? You’d emerge smelling like a bar
after closing time. No, much more likely, it was filled with
conventional hot soapy water and used for frolicking, or to wash off the
perfume and other liquids that might have come into contact with the
royal skin. Après l’amour, the Prince had to go on to other
appointments. He couldn’t step out reeking of brothel. And incidentally,
the women would probably have made use of the bathwater too, their
backstage living quarters being considerably less luxurious than the
settings that the customers saw.
Anyway, the love seat, and a strangely-named engraving by Félix Vallotton – l’Étranger,
ie the stranger or foreigner – were the only signs of Bertie’s presence
in Paris. Vallotton’s engraving underlined the impression that Paris
seemed to be almost ashamed of Bertie. We see a plump, top-hatted figure
from the back as he chats up two smirking ladies of obviously ill
repute, while a man in front bows reverently. It’s generally assumed
that Bertie is the subject – he is the foreigner, the outsider, when he
was in fact an integral, and vitally important, part of Parisian
society. At the time, his presence at a theatre show could almost
guarantee its success. He featured in novels by Proust and Zola, and
Offenbach more or less wrote him into an operetta. His style, and that
of his long-suffering wife Alexandra, were huge influences on Parisian
fashion. Yet all he is in the exhibition is a buyer of brothel furniture
and chatter-up of street girls. Not even a hint (as far as I could see)
that three years later, against all expectations, the Entente Cordiale would be signed, largely thanks to Bertie.
Like I said, it’s a sumptuous exhibition, but it seems to be suffering from another case of France re-writing its own history.
