MARGUERITE ALIBERT - SEX WORKER, COURTESAN, MISTRESS, WIFE - HER MEN and the PRINCE OF WALES : HIS LOVE LETTERS MAY HAVE SHIELDED HER FROM THE LAW

MARGUERITE ALIBERT

1890 - 1971

Two decades before he met Wallis Simpson, the Prince of Wales had a mistress he met in Paris, a famous courtesan who had started out as a 16 year old sex worker, Marguerite Alibert.  Years later when she was tried for the murder of her third husband, it was the letters she had from the Prince that provided her protection from the law. Or so it is thought.  Andrew Rose's book details the events in Paris, in England, in Egypt, and in the seasons in which the high living set traveled and enjoyed their many pleasures.

The future King Edward VIII, who would give up his throne for the woman he would marry, Wallis Simpson, was just 17 in 1912 and considered to be immature, effeminate, even suffering from arrested development, when he first went to France where he was supposed to learn to speak the language. On this trip he would also learn to drive and smoke. But it was during the war a few years later when he was introduced to Marguerite, who was then working at one of the most expensive brothels in Paris.

Marguerite was never in her early years one to trust her fate  to be with just one man. She may have, at times in her life, been a sex worker, courtesan, mistress, and wife, all at the same time. We will never know all her machinations but there is reason to believe that she managed to marry and make her husbands wild with jealousy because they suspected or knew that they would never be her one and only.

In 1915, when Europe was at War (World War I), the Prince was still considered an innocent abroad. But there were those in his entourage who wanted him to experience sex with high class prostitutes since the women he was most likely to marry of his class were chaperoned and thought of as wives or breeding stock. The Prince wanted to see action in the battlefields but was kept to visiting the front or administrative duties. He made good use of his days on leave. By May of 1916, the near 22 year old Prince had matured by changes in the world and in his personal life and had visited a brothel in Calais, assuring those who thought otherwise that he was heterosexual. But perhaps he started to develop a need for women with powerful personalities, unusual voices, and perhaps a tendency towards wanting to be dominated in the bedroom too.

Marguerite Alibert, who was born Marie Marguerite Alibert, called herself Maggie Meller after she became the seen-around-town mistress of a rich Jewish man, Andre Meller.  He was married and forty, a player who owned racing stables. She was 16. She would become known for having a hot temper and demanding and mercurial ways. With Meller and all her serious relationships there was a pattern of frequent and arguments that included public displays.

She would also later go by Mme Laurent, Mme Fahmy, and even Princess Fahmy bey - though the husband she shot and killed the bey.  Ali Kamel Famy bey was not actually an Egyptian Prince.  

Our Mistress of the Month was born in 1890 as the daughter of a cab driver and a charwoman.  Like CoCo Chanel, who would design evening dress for her, she was put into a nunnery to be raised. She went into servitude. As was also not unusual, she became pregnant. Marguerite was only 16 when she was delivered of her only child, daughter Raymonde, who she did not see for the first seven years of the girl's life. Put out of the home she'd lived and worked in, what could she do to support herself? Who got her pregnant, be it a member of the family she served, or someone else, is not known, but she alluded to a problem with not having a dowry as the reason for being husbandless and having an illegitimate daughter. She was probably saving face.

She may have started her career as a sex worker by becoming what was called a "polite" prostitute, singing in eateries and bars, and extending her entertaining to after hours. CoCo Chanel had also had to sing for her supper.

Mme Denart, who ran a high class brothel called a maison de rendezvous took her on as a protege, sending her for elocution lessons and teaching her upper class manners.
(page 36)  By 1907 she was "une dame a cinq heaves" (a five o'clock lady) or a "une cinq a sept"  (a five to seven); these terms indicative of the busy time at the brothel. Such brothels were was as far up as a sex worker could go being paid for sex - and sometimes included specialties such as lesbian acts or S and M.  

Since she became involved with Meller in 1907, not long after she'd had a child and become a sex worker, clearly Marguerite was able to move up from sex work into being a Courtesan and a "keep." (I can't help but think of an early film of actress Julia Roberts called "Pretty Woman" in which a young beginning prostitute finds true love with a rich man instead. The story commonly thought of as a fantasy.) Seven years after they met, she and Meller, who were seen around town together, split.  He had become pathologically jealous of her.  Still, besides living the rich life with him, he gave her a settlement of 200,000 franks.  (And so began the notion of PALIMONY!)  She then moved into a grander apartment, employed servants, kept her own horses, and went back to competing with other courtesans for men.

Because Marguerite Alibert's story is lengthy and complicated, this post will only be a start of her story here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO BLOGSPOT. So continue to read, please, as we learn more about her and the Prince of Wales, and then the husband she shot three times and killed, which she immediately admitted to!

Missy
C 2019 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot

Also mentioned in this book are Cora Pearl, La Belle Otero, Liane de Pougy, Lina Cavalieri, and the Folies Bergere - the place for a courtesan to be seen!  Cora Pearl was our Mistress of the Month for July 2012 and the Duchess of Windsor - Wallis Simpson was January 2010.  Search the archives to read!