The Heir Apparent (21 page)

One new piece of evidence suggests a different diagnosis. Dr. Sieveking noted in his diary that, shortly after the birth of Eddy, at the urgent request of both Bertie and himself, Alix agreed to see Joseph Toynbee, who was the leading ear specialist of the day.
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Toynbee pronounced that her deafness was “essentially nervous,” and the treatment was rest; no operation was needed.
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In his scientific work, Toynbee was one of the first to describe otosclerosis, yet he did not diagnose this condition in Alix. By “nervous” deafness, he meant what is today known as sensorineural hearing loss, due to changes in the acoustic nerves, which act as microphones in the inner ear. “If he diagnosed that Alix had a ‘nervous’ deafness,” one specialist has written, “then it would be difficult to refute his finding, and this, in turn, would seem to rule out otosclerosis as the cause of Alix’s progressive hearing loss.”
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Whatever its cause, deafness was a crippling handicap for a woman like Alix, whose work depended on social contact.

Alix was photographed that spring, her dark-rimmed eyes and loose hair a vision of Pre-Raphaelite beauty. For Bertie, however, the horrid cage around her leg symbolized her unavailability. Mermaid-like, she could not be a real wife.

Bertie’s order page in the ledger of Poole the tailor includes the following:

which was delivered personally by the great Mr. Poole himself. Bertie also ordered:

The ledger shows the tailor cleaning and pressing thirty-four white vests (waistcoats) and altering a dress coat and fancy trousers to fit the prince’s expanding waistline: by June the tailor’s bill came to £283:8s.6d.
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Bertie’s destination was Paris, where he visited the International Exhibition staged by Napoléon III, reassuring the Queen that Alix, who had at last managed to sleep through a whole night, “says she don’t mind it at all.”
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Before he left, he attended the baby’s christening. She was named Louise; this annoyed the Queen, who made it plain that she expected a girl to be called after her. Bertie was even angrier than he had been over Victoria’s interference with George’s name: He declared it was a wish she “had no right to indulge or expect to be gratified,” as Alix was anxious to name the baby after her own mother.
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The child was given the second name of Victoria, but the Queen was not present at the christening—very few people were, as it took place in the sitting room at Marlborough House. Alix was wheeled in on her bed, looking “quite lovely” with a “white lace jacket trimmed with pink and a pink bow in her hair, the bed being covered with a blue silk coverlet.”
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The Paris Exhibition was the sort of junket that Bertie most enjoyed: rubbing shoulders with crowned heads, attending a ball for two thousand guests at the British Embassy and calling on the emperor
Napoléon, whom he found “ill and worn but as kind and cordial in manner as he always has been to me.”
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In Paris, Bertie was able to pursue his own version of foreign affairs. The court of Napoléon III was notoriously depraved, and he eagerly devoured publications such as
Les Amours de Napoléon III
or
La Femme de César,
which detailed the many mistresses of the emperor.
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The sensation of the season was Jacques Offenbach’s light opera
The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein,
at the Théâtre des Variétés, which poked fun at the toy armies of the minor German states, and starred the voluptuous prima donna Hortense Schneider.

Bertie’s visit to the Variétés was dramatized by Émile Zola in
Nana,
the novel about the demimonde that he wrote twelve years later, in which Bertie is thinly disguised as the Prince of Scots. Zola’s research included a visit to the dressing room backstage at the Variétés, where Hortense Schneider had received the prince dressed in her costume as the Duchess of Gerolstein. Zola described the bearded, pink-complexioned prince as having “the sort of distinction peculiar to a man of pleasure, his square shoulders clearly indicated beneath the impeccably cut frock coat,” and imagined him in the dressing room of the seminaked singer: “The Prince, his eyes half-closed, followed the swelling lines of her bosom with the eyes of a connoisseur.” But for Zola, the prince is neither seedy nor undignified. Far from being tarnished, he transposes the demimonde into a make-believe world of kings and queens. When he drinks a toast in the actors’ cheap champagne, it’s as if they are at court, and the actors start to play new roles:

General Knollys noted that the reports of Bertie’s visit were “very unsatisfactory”: “suppers after the Opera with some of the female
Paris notorieties etc etc.”
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Bertie’s supposed infatuation with Hortense Schneider—she was known as Le Passage des Princes after the Paris arcade—was widely publicized.
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Another of his Paris ladies was the courtesan Giulia Beneni, nicknamed La Barucci. She owned a luxurious house at 124 Avenue des Champs-Élysées, complete with liveried footmen, a grand white-carpeted staircase with velvet-covered banisters, and a tall cabinet stuffed with jewels. When Bertie met her, she arrived forty-five minutes late, having been strictly instructed by the Duc de Gramont to be punctual. “Your Royal Highness, may I present the most unpunctual woman in France?” said the duke. Whereupon La Barucci lifted her skirts to reveal nothing but “the white rotundities of her callipygian charms.”

“Did I not tell you to behave properly to HRH?” Gramont rebuked her afterward.

“I showed him the best I have and it was free,” was the reply.
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News of Bertie’s adventures reached Vicky, who later blamed wicked Paris for corrupting him. “What mischief that very court and still more that very attractive Paris has done to English society,” she wrote. “What harm to our two eldest brothers!”
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Victoria agreed. “Your two elder brothers unfortunately were carried away by that horrid Paris, beautiful though you may think it, and that frivolous and immoral court did frightful harm to English Society … and was very bad for Bertie and Affie.”
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Aged twenty-five, Bertie was too young and too spoiled to come to terms with the fact that his beautiful wife was now a deaf cripple. In denial, he threw himself headlong into the frenzied pursuit of pleasure and late nights. Victoria, for her part, was convinced that Alix was an invalid for life. “I fear very much that she will never be what she was.” As for Bertie, she wrote, “Poor Boy, it is very sad to think of his whole existence changed and altered and
dérangé
by this lamentable illness.”
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Bertie was blamed for his apparent lack of concern. Lady Macclesfield complained that “the Prince (childish as ever) does not see anything serious about it.”
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Bertie was certainly immature, but perhaps his behavior had deeper roots. In spite of his outward forbearance toward Victoria, he seethed with rage. He had grown to be genuinely
fond of his wife, but he resented the way his mother and sister Vicky had conspired together to trap him into an arranged marriage. People commented on his ill looks. He spent much time away from home. He was driven by the impulse to revenge himself against his mother, but the person who suffered most from this behavior was his vulnerable wife, Alix.

At Ascot in June, Bertie received a “flat reception” from the crowd when he appeared at the races without Alix, but he insisted on inviting the “fashionable female celebrities of the day” to luncheon, a party that Knollys thought in questionable taste.
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Some of these were harmless flirtations. He was spotted “spooning with Lady Filmer.”
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She was the wife of his friend Sir Edmund Filmer and a dancing partner of Bertie’s; shooting deer at Invercauld in 1865, he wrote that “I had the good fortune to have Lady Filmer with me (who also had a small Whit-worth rifle) and I enjoyed a very pleasant tête à tête with her.”
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In his diary, Lord Stanley reported, “Much talk in society about the P[rince] 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.”
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Bertie insisted on going to Paris again in July, in spite of the opposition of General Knollys, who saw the prime minister, Lord Derby, and stated his anxiety about the visit “after the scenes I had been led to believe had taken place at the former one” and with “the Princess in such a state.”
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For Bertie, the summer of 1867 was a tipping point. He was unfaithful to Alix, not just with the “lowest class” of women, but with women in society. Perhaps to him it seemed the natural thing to do. Among the men of his set, debauchery was seen as a healthy amusement, which Bertie indulged in the same way that he drank and smoked. Alix’s illness seemed to sanction his return to bachelor ways.
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But if he expected that he could use women for sex and then discard them, he was to be disillusioned. Many of the women with
whom he began relationships that summer refused to go quietly. Blackmail, pregnancy, even a court case were to return to haunt him. There was no such thing as a relationship without consequences.

Alix was not prepared to sink gracefully into social death as a sofa-bound invalid. While Bertie was in Paris, she drove out for the first time in the garden at Marlborough House. Accompanied by Princess Louise, her friend among Bertie’s sisters, she had herself carried in a wheeled chair over a platform level with the carriage, and the chair placed where the carriage seat had been removed. Defying doctor’s orders, she was determined to appear at a military review on Bertie’s return; General Knollys was mightily relieved when the review was canceled, believing that if Alix had appeared alongside Victoria, “the Princess would have received an ovation but it would have been at the expense of the Q[ueen].”
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By mid-August, Alix was sufficiently recovered to travel with Bertie to Germany, to Wiesbaden, the capital of Dessau, the spa town recommended by the doctors. Accompanied by their three tiny children, twenty-five servants, and a retinue of courtiers and doctors, the Waleses steamed up the Rhine. Alix sat on the hot deck in her wheelchair in a specially constructed cabin and amused herself by drawing all day. The Prussian flag flying on the stern of the boat upset her, and she became agitated when a crowd gathered on shore to see her being carried out of the ship in a sedan chair and into a carriage: Knollys noted her extreme dislike of appearing in public as an invalid.
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At Wiesbaden, Alix took daily baths under the supervision of Paget, her doctor, and Bertie reported her progress to the Queen: “Every day she walks on crutches and can put her foot to the ground and swing it about.”
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Bertie itched to escape downriver to the fleshpots and gambling tables of Baden, a prospect that filled Knollys with horror, on account of the “disgraceful tone” of society there and especially Bertie’s friend Marie of Baden, the wicked Duchess of Hamilton, and her
scandalous son the duke, whose character was so “irretrievably lost” that there could only be “contamination” in associating with him.
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This was just the sort of company that Bertie most enjoyed and, ever the rebellious adolescent, he wrote to Victoria: “I know, dear Mama, so well what these German Baths are, and I think I know who to avoid and who not—and not to compromise myself in any way. I know that Vicky has written to you on the subject, but one would imagine that she thought me 10 or 12 years old and not nearly 26.”
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Wiesbaden was within driving distance of Rumpenheim, the white-fronted, green-shuttered schloss set in dull, flat countryside on the banks of the River Main near Frankfurt where Alix’s family spent their summer holidays. Here the relations greeted one another with affectionate kisses a dozen times over, astounding the prim, buttoned-up English; they spent long days out of doors, dined at five in an overcrowded dining room, and played rumbustious evening games.
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This noisy, boisterous family life was oxygen to Alix, the sort of world she herself tried to re-create at Sandringham. Victoria thought the family party there “the very worst society for Bertie possible which my Angel … said he must be kept out of”; but she needn’t have worried, as Bertie found the early dinners and healthy games deadly dull.
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The German royalty gathered at Rumpenheim inhabited a doomed world that was relentlessly hemorrhaging power to Prussia. Charles Carrington, who accompanied Bertie on a visit, found it a melancholy experience—“a huge building inhabited by Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses who are in short street.”
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Alix’s grandfather, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, had grievously miscalculated by supporting Austria in the 1866 war against Prussia, and Bismarck now took his revenge. That September, the elector
^a
was forced to sign an agreement whereby he surrendered political power over Hesse in exchange for keeping his personal fortune.
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Little wonder that when Alix and Bertie visited, the anti-Prussian feeling was “most rabid.”

“They all seemed to have been bit by some Prussian mad dog,” wrote Knollys, “the slightest allusion set the whole party[—]and we were 36 at dinner[—]into agitation, at which my friends the Russians seemed highly amused.”
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Nor was it surprising that Alix shared their feelings.