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Cora Pearl (born Eliza Emma Crouch; December 1836 – 8 July 1886) was an English courtesan or cocotte of the French demimonde who became most well known during the period of the Second French Empire.
Her father was the cello and composer Frederick Nicholls Crouch, who married her mother, the contralto Lydia (née Pearson), at St Paul's Church, Covent Garden in 1832. By April 1841, Crouch had returned to London, leaving his wife and daughters in Plymouth. In 1843, he went through a Roman Catholic marriage ceremony with Elizabeth 'Bessie' George and had two more children. He left for the United States in 1849, leaving both wives and families behind. With several young children to care for, Crouch's mother Lydia brought Richard William Littley into the household, who was to be considered a "stepfather" by her children. With Littley, Lydia had two more children: Fanny (1847), and Henry (1849), Crouch's half-siblings.
Crouch was sent to a convent boarding school in Boulogne, France, but later returned to live with her paternal grandmother, Anna Maria (née Nicholls). Following the death of her husband, Crouch's paternal grandfather, Anna Maria married the former Secretary of the Royal Philharmonic Society, violinist, composer and arranger William Watts. In 1851, Crouch and her sister Hannah were living with their paternal grandparents in Jersey, an experience Crouch found confining, leading her to defy her grandmother's cautions regarding the dangers that a young woman faced out in the streets unchaperoned. Whilst out on her own one day, Crouch, approximately twenty years old at the time, accepted the advances of an older man who approached her on the street, allowing him to take her to a drinking den, where he bought her cakes to eat and alcohol to drink, ultimately leading to the man raping Crouch, a virgin at that time.
Upon awakening, Crouch found the man had left her a five-pound note—more money than she had ever seen. Crouch later said the encounter left her with "an instinctive horror of men". After her sexual assault, Crouch did not return to her grandmother's home or that of her mother's, but rented a room for herself in Covent Garden.
Studying the life around her, Crouch realised that the life of the common prostitute was a tragic one, with the best result being that a woman could end up "poor and degraded", and the worst being a future that held "disease and death". Crouch resolved to practise the trade with higher expectations, with the goal of becoming the kept woman of select dedicated lovers with the financial means to keep her in luxury.
Crouch's involvement with Bignell lasted for some time, with the two traveling to Paris, posing as a married couple. Crouch became so enamoured with the city of Paris that she insisted that Bignell return to London without her, determined to remain in the French capital. It was at this time that Crouch took on the name Cora Pearl, a pseudonym chosen to resonate with the new identity and future she hoped to craft for herself in Paris.
Her first lover of distinction was Victor Masséna, age 25, fifth Duke du Rivoli, and later fifth Prince of Essling. Masséna set Pearl up in opulence, giving her money, jewels, servants, and a private chef. He provided her with funds for gambling when she visited the casinos and racecourse in the fashionable resort of Baden, Germany, and bought her the first horse Pearl ever owned. During this time, Pearl became an accomplished horsewoman; it was said "she rode like an Amazon" and "was kinder to her horses than her lovers". Her liaison with Masséna lasted five years. While cultivating Masséna, she simultaneously was sharing her favours with Prince Achille Murat.
By 1860, Pearl was one of the more celebrated courtesans in Paris. She was the mistress of notable aristocrats, the Prince of Orange, heir to the throne of the Netherlands, Ludovic, Duc de Grammont-Caderousse, and more significantly Charles Duc de Morny, who was the half-brother of the Emperor Napoleon III. The Emperor's brother generously contributed to the life Pearl demanded.
In 1864, Pearl rented a chateau in the region of the Loiret. Known as the italic=no ("beautiful sojourn"), the château was a luxurious and expensively decorated residence with stained glass windows and immaculately maintained interiors and grounds. Her boudoir had a custom-made bronze bath monogrammed with her initials intertwined in gold. The château was conceived for gala entertainments, and there were rarely fewer than 15 guests at the dinner table, with the chef instructed to spare no cost on the expenditure for food. Pearl was known for devising entertainments of an unexpected and outrageous theatricality, of which she invariably was the star attraction. On one such evening, she dared the group assembled around the dinner table "to cut into the next dish" about to be served. The meal's next course was Cora Pearl herself, presented lying naked on a huge silver platter, garnished with parsley, and carried in by four large men.
Her most dedicated benefactor and enduring admirer was Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte, the emperor's cousin. She met the prince in 1868 when he was age 42, and their liaison lasted nine years, the longest relationship in Pearl's career. He bought her several homes, one a veritable palace, known as italic=no.
In 1860, Pearl made an appearance at a masquerade ball attended by the elite of Parisian society. She caused a sensation in appearing as a scantily costumed Eve, whose degree of nudity diverged little from the biblical original. Invariably enthusiastic about exhibiting her physical charms to an audience, she took the role of a singing Cupid in the Jacques Offenbach operetta Orphée aux Enfers, ( Orpheus in the Underworld) performed at the italic=no in 1867. It was written that "Cora Pearl made an appearance half-naked on the stage. That evening the Jockey Club in its entirety, graced the theatre. All the names...of French nobility were there...It was a success of a kind." The chronicle of the evening continued with "Apparently the beautiful Cora Pearl had already munched up a brochette ("skewer") of five or six historical fortunes with her pretty white teeth."
The highest point of Pearl's career as courtesan were the years 1865 to 1870. In his biography The Pearl from Plymouth (1950), W.H. Holden wrote that there was evidence that Pearl regularly sent money to both her mother in England and father in America. For Pearl, money was for spending, for accumulating the luxuries of life, and buying her way to a coveted perch in the upper echelons of society. Her jewel collection alone was valued at 1 million francs; at one point, she owned three homes, and her clothing was made for her by the renowned couturier Charles Frederick Worth. As her career prospered, the gifts from her suitors needed to be both costly and imaginative. She pitted her admirers against one another, raising the price for her favours as the games among competitors escalated. In her heyday, she was able to command as high a price as 10,000 francs for an evening's entertainment.
Pearl also used makeup in a manner heavier than most women of the time, using makeup to accentuate her eyes and eyelashes, and wearing face powder tinted with silver or pearls to give her skin a shimmering appearance. Jean-Philippe Worth, the son of the couturier Worth, pronounced her "shockingly overdone" in this aspect. In 1867, a drink came into vogue, inspired by Pearl, dubbed the "Tears of Cora Pearl". Alfred Delvau wrote a tribute to Pearl in Les Plaisirs de Paris in 1867, declaring that: "You are today, Madame, the renown, the preoccupation, the scandal and the toast of Paris. Everywhere they talk only of you."
On 19 December 1872, Duval went to her home, it is believed, with the intention of killing her. The gun he brought accidentally discharged, wounding him near fatally; initially near death, he eventually recovered, but the consequences of the event proved disastrous for Pearl's reputation. Publicized as l'affaire Duval, the scandal caused the authorities to order Pearl to leave the country, leading to her expulsion from Paris to first London and later Monaco and Nice. The contents of her Paris home were sold.
Pearl was slowly forced to liquidate the fortune she had accumulated. While not destitute, her financial situation had become dire by 1880. In 1873, she sold her italic=no home, and by 1883, she had returned to common prostitution, taking an apartment above the shop of a coachbuilder on the avenue italic=no, where she received clients. In July 1885, she was forced to sell her château in the italic=no.
Pearl's reduced finances, however, did not abate her passion for gambling. Habitually committed to playing for large stakes, she was restricted to betting modest amounts. Julian Arnold, an old acquaintance, encountered Pearl outside a casino in Monte Carlo. He later wrote in his memoirs: "I found a woman seated on the kerbstone and weeping pitifully. She appeared to be about fifty years of age, handsome...but much bedraggled." She told him that she had been turned out of her apartment, her few belongings seized by the landlord in lieu of rent. She had no place to go, and was hungry and in misery.
In the early 1980s, William Blatchford claimed to have located the Memoirs of Cora Pearl, which he said had been published in 1890, after Pearl's death. Supposedly an earlier version of the book published in 1886, this volume purported to date back to an earlier date, perhaps even as early 1873. Decidedly more frank and sexually explicit than the 1886 memoirs, their idiomatic English – expressive of a provincial, unsophisticated use of the language – convinced many of the work's authenticity when the memoirs were published by Granada under the title Grand Horizontal, The Erotic Memoirs of a Passionate Lady. However, Blatchford turned out to be a pseudonym adopted by the real author of the 'memoirs', Derek Parker, a former chairman of the Society of Authors, who later admitted that he had hoaxed Granada.PHS. "The Times Diary." London Times, 5 April 1983: 10PHS. "The Times Diary." London Times, 7 March 1984: 12
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