QI The Book of the Dead

accounted so perfect that plaster casts were taken of them to make bronze sculptures. She also gained a reputation for being life-changinglyadventurous 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 undreamt-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 blonde, and transformed her eyes with brilliantly coloured eye-shadow and mascara. Once, she even dyed her dog blue to match an outfit (it died shortly afterwards). 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 £90,000 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. Sureenough, 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 25 January 1871, Bismarck ordered the bombardment of Paris with heavy artillery and, three days later, it surrendered. Since the siege began, over 47,000 civilians had been killed or seriously wounded. By the end of May 1871 another 30,000 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