The Book of the Dead

of jewelry worth more than a million francs.

This darling of the French nobility was actually English, formerly Eliza Crouch of Plymouth. Daughter of the cellist and conductor Frederick Nicholls Crouch and Lydia Pearson, singer, when Eliza was ten her father deserted the family and emigrated to the United States, where he reputedly fathered another twenty offspring. Eliza never saw him again. Lydia remarried and moved to Guernsey, and Eliza was sent to a convent school in Boulogne, afterward returning to London to live with her grandmother. She was just nineteen when a man in the street accosted her, gave her gin, and took advantage of her. Too ashamed to go home, and completely distrustful of men, she began to earn her living as a prostitute. She befriended Robert Bignel, owner of the Argyle Dancing Rooms, where she plied her trade. He took her to France on holiday as his mistress, but she refused to return to England, throwing her passport on the fire so that he had no choice but to leave her behind. Adopting the name Cora Pearl (because she liked the sound of it), she set about acquiring a circle of wealthy admirers. There was no better place for that than Paris during the Second Empire. The city was the center of the civilized world, a nonstop succession of balls and parties where, as Alexandre Dumas fils described it, “Women were luxuries for public consumption like hounds, horses and carriages.”

Cora, the Devon girl who spoke “Cockney French,” quickly turned herself into the most desirable woman in Paris. She wasn’t classically beautiful; one critic writing in the London Truth said she had “a round face, carroty hair, an unamiable temper, and a laugh which if bereft of jollity stretched her coarse mouth from ear to ear. That mouth was visibly formed to eat and drink, to talk slang and to swear.” But Cora’s red hair quickly became legendary, earning her the nickname “La Lune Rousse” (the Red Moon).[3] Plus she had an unblemished complexion and a body that was a “marvel of nature”: her breasts were accounted so perfect that plaster casts were taken of them to make bronze sculptures. She also gained a reputation for being life-changingly adventurous in bed; one of her (anonymous) admirers described her “as a specimen of another race, a bizarre and astonishing phenomenon.” It was rare to find a courtesan who loved sex as much as Cora did, and this added greatly to her mystique. If the appeal of undreamed-of sensuality wasn’t enough to ensnare a potential lover, Cora was also a consummate hostess.

Her parties were like no others in the city, a combination of lascivious cabaret and fine cuisine. As many as fifteen lucky gentlemen at a time would be invited to see her immersed in a bath of champagne, dancing naked on a bed of orchids, or served up for dinner on a silver platter, wearing nothing but a few sprigs of parsley. She wore shimmering body paint, covering herself in silver, stars, and pearls. She dyed her hair red, black, and blond, and transformed her eyes with brilliantly colored eye shadow and mascara. Once, she even dyed her dog blue to match an outfit (it died shortly afterward). She was bright, witty, outrageous, and reassuringly expensive. At her peak during the 1860s, she was burning through an income of 50,000 francs a month (equivalent to about $130,000 today), all of it provided by her “protectors,” most of them members of the French royal family. When the emperor’s half brother, the Duke of Morny, died, she took up with his cousin “Plon-Plon,” Prince Joseph Charles Bonaparte (1822–91), Napoleon’s nephew. In return for her exclusive attention, he gave her a mansion and the money to buy a large collection of racehorses, which she ran with English jockeys. As her reputation grew, women copied her style. At a dinner one night, she boasted that whatever she wore in public would be in the shops the next day. To prove her point, she took one of the gentlemen’s hats, crushed the brim, stuck an ostrich feather in the peak, and walked down the Bois de Boulogne. Sure enough, the next day, a copy of the ludicrous headgear was for sale in a fashionable boutique. Cora usually preferred something classier, and she helped establish the reputation of the English couturier Charles Worth, whose wincingly expensive dresses she bought by the armful. Through her patronage, he became one of Paris’s most celebrated designers and was the first one ever to sew a named label into an item of clothing.

In 1870 the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war brought all partying to an abrupt halt. The defeat of Napoleon III sent him and most of his family into exile, depriving Cora of her protectors. She went to London but her reputation got there first: She was snubbed by polite society and refused a room at the Grosvenor House Hotel. She returned to a very different Paris. To starve the city into submission, Prussian troops blockaded it for four months. Conditions deteriorated rapidly and the citizens were forced to eat rats, dogs, and horses. Even the animals at the city’s zoo weren’t spared: Restaurant menus survive that feature dishes made from elephants, camels, wolves, and bears. On January 25, 1871, Bismarck ordered the bombardment of Paris with heavy artillery, and three days later, it surrendered. Since the siege began, more than forty-seven thousand civilians had been killed or seriously wounded. By the end of May 1871 another thirty thousand had fallen in the street battles of the Paris Commune. The pleasure-seeking days of the Second Empire seemed a very distant memory.

Cora responded to this change in her fortunes in a surprisingly practical way, turning her large house into an impromptu hospital, tearing up bed linen to make bandages and making sure her patients were given the best possible care. This made a serious dent in her finances, but by early 1872 she had found a new admirer. Handsome, wealthy, and deeply unstable, Alexandre Duval was the son of a successful restaurateur. He fell in love with Cora, squandering the several million francs of his inheritance on her to prove his devotion. When bankrupt, and thus of limited value to Cora, he continued to stalk her, alternating between jealous rages and proposals of marriage. It all came to a head one afternoon when Duval arrived at Cora’s apartments on the rue Chaillot and begged to be allowed to stay. She ignored him and tucked herself up in bed. In the meantime, he shot himself in the chest on her doorstep.

Somehow he survived, but the story circulated that Cora had left him bleeding in the street and wouldn’t call for help. She countered that she had had no idea he’d used the gun on himself, protesting that he was always prone to exaggeration and melodramatic gesture, but the damage to her reputation was done. She was portrayed as cruel and heartless, and overnight she found herself persona non grata in Parisian society. She lay low in Monte Carlo, where she stayed with a friend until the scandal died down, but it quickly became clear that her career as a courtesan was over. Without a protector or an income, pursued by her creditors, she was forced to sell her houses and possessions and for the last ten years of her life lived as an itinerant gambler, drifting around the racetracks and casinos of Europe, rather like Casanova.

Unlike him, she didn’t have much luck, and by the time the French journalist Henri Rochford bumped into her in the early 1880s, she was an “ugly old wreck” who accosted him for racing tips. The woman whose beauty and wit had once brought in more than $1.5 million a year was reduced to playing roulette at the Monte Carlo casino—on the cheap tables where only 5-franc bets were allowed. One night, her former lover Alexandre Duval (now recovered and married to someone sensible chosen by his mother) was spotted at the next table, where the minimum bet was 100 francs. He did not even acknowledge her.

Just before her death from cancer in 1886, she published her memoirs in an attempt to make some money. They attracted disappointing reviews, largely because she refused to dish the dirt on her former lovers. The New York Times was typical: “One has only to read her book to see she has no wit at all. The volume makes no appeal to unhealthy curiosity. It is dull. The woman is not even malicious.” In fact, her memoirs, while not remotely in the league of those written by Casanova or Catherine the Great, have a warmth and honesty that is genuinely moving. The French novelist Zola portrayed her sympathetically in his novel Nana (1880).

Cora Pearl was only fifty-one when she died. She went peacefully and without bitterness.

I have had a happy life; I have squandered money enormously. I am far from posing as a victim; it would be ungrateful of me to do so. I ought to have saved, but saving is not easy in such a whirl of excitement as that in which I have lived. Between what one ought to do and what one does there is always a difference.

Cora would have got on well with the novelist and social commentator H. G. Wells (1866–1946). Wells liked to call himself “the Don Juan of the intelligentsia”: Even at the age of seventy-four, having lost all his teeth, he was proud that he could still enjoy the company of prostitutes. He once said that “to make love periodically, with some grace and pride and freshness, seems to be, for most of us, a necessary condition to efficient working.” If Cora turned sex into work, Wells turned to sex in order to work.

Wells inherited infidelity from his father, Joe, a nonchalant ladies’ man who supplemented the modest income he made in his china shop as a fast bowler for Kent: He had once taken four wickets in four balls against Sussex. His sporting career was permanently interrupted when he fell off a ladder and broke his thigh. The accident happened while he was helping a girlfriend climb over a wall one Sunday morning while his wife was at church. The