QI The Book of the Dead

left him bleeding in the street and wouldn’t call for help. She countered that she 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 round 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 over a million pounds 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 (nowrecovered 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 disappointed 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, formost 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 service ended sooner than expected and Joe – pretending to prune a vine – was caught red-handed. Some years earlier, his son Bertie (never Herbert) had also broken his leg, aged seven. He always said this was the beginning of his love of books: his father brought him piles of them to read in bed while he recovered. When he was thirteen Wells wrote his first story, a comic-strip called ‘The Desert Daisy’, but his literary ambitions were put on hold after his father’s accident. Never particularly well off, the loss of Joe’s cricketing income meant Bertie could no longer be sent to school at the Bromley Academy. To bring in money he was apprenticed at a draper’s shop, but was sacked for being too common, an experience he was to chronicle in his novel Kipps (1905) about a draper who comes into money and tries to mingle with the upper classes. Wells himself was more interested in mingling with women – lots of them.
    During his two years as a draper, Wells showed extraordinary powers of self-discipline. He devoted every scrap of spare time to educating