The Paris of Napoleon III was one big brothel – which is why the future Edward VII loved it

Stephen Clarke lives in Paris and writes book with titles such as 1,000 Years of Annoying the French. Dirty Bertie is a book in the same line — a comic history which manages to combine his brand of jaunty, bawdy humour (not mine, I confess) with being genuinely informative about French history.

Clarke claims that there is a gap in the biography of King Edward VII. Biographers have not said nearly enough about Bertie’s jaunts to Paris. He is absolutely right about this. To Bertie’s British biographers Paris is a collection of clichés about grandes horizontales and a few well-worn anecdotes. There’s a story about the courtesan La Barucci, for example, who, when introduced to Bertie, kept him waiting for 45 minutes and then turned round and lifted her skirts to reveal her bare bum. ‘I showed him the best I have and it was free,’ she said. Getting beyond this sort of stuff to the realities of Paris is extraordinarily hard — at any rate in English there just isn’t a literature.