QI The Book of the Dead

intellectually. She liked her boys beefy, but wit was much more important. Arriving in St Petersburg as a teenager, she had been horrified by the ignorance and lack of education she found in royal circles: almost half the courtiers were illiterate. In 1774 she was thrilled when the French philosopher Denis Diderot visited the city, feeding her mind with long discussions about science, art and politics. He was equally delighted, describing her as having ‘the soul of Caesar with all the seductions of Cleopatra’.
    Catherine’s active sex life was just one facet of her passionate and energetic personality. She could stay awake for twenty-four hours, working late into the night on state papers; she could ride a horse as well as most men; and she was both highly intelligent and creative, writing plays and corresponding with the great philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment such as Voltaire and d’Alembert, and incorporating their ideas into her Nakaz , or ‘Instruction’ of 1767. Designed as a template for an enlightened monarchy, it anticipated many of the themes of the American republican constitution by twenty years. Allmen were equal before the law and the death penalty and torture were discouraged.
    The same progressive attitude and openness to new ideasinformed her personal life. As a strong, intelligent woman she was far ahead of her time in the ultra-conservative backwater of Russian politics. In that chauvinistic world, a mere woman could not succeed on merit alone. Her enemies would destroy her reputation in any way they could, even if it meant claiming that she was so debauched that no man could fully satisfy her inhuman appetites.

     
    If Catherine the Great sought out sex because she enjoyed it, Cora Pearl (1835–86) turned her sexual expertise into a business. One of the great Parisian courtesans of the 1860s (known collectively as les Grandes Horizontales ), she called her succession of male friends ‘a golden chain’. They weren’t merely wealthy, they were prominent members of high society: Prince Wilhelm, heir to the Dutch throne; Prince Achille Murat, grandson of the king of Naples; the Duke of Rivoli; the Duke of Morny, half-brother of the Emperor Napoleon III; and the Emperor’s cousin ‘Plon-Plon’, better known as Prince Napoleon. Showered with gifts from these wealthy lovers, Cora was able to buy two houses in Paris, keep sixty horses and amass a collection of jewellery 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, afterwards returning to London to live with her grandmother. Shewas 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 centre of the civilised world, a non-stop 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). * Plus she had an unblemished complexion and a body that was a ‘marvel of nature’: her breasts were