* Eugénie’s mother Manuela was an Irish wine merchant’s daughter who had married a Spanish grandee and then become mistress of an array of European luminaries, including the British foreign secretary, Lord Clarendon. Her friend Prosper Mérimée based his novel
* Lionel de Rothschild, head of the British bank, visiting his uncle James, was impressed: ‘I wish we had a man like the emperor to make a few alterations in old London.’ Twenty years earlier, Lionel had succeeded his father NM, who at his death in the 1830s was probably the richest private individual in the world: ‘his personal fortune’, estimates Niall Ferguson, ‘equivalent to 0.62 per cent of British national income’. Now, Lionel was close friends with the man who commissioned a ‘few alterations in London’: Benjamin Disraeli. Five years later, in the summer of 1858, London, also suffering frequent cholera epidemics, emulated Paris after a faecal stench – the Great Stink – had overwhelmed the city. The Conservative chancellor, Disraeli, denounced the ‘Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors’, and launched the construction of London’s magnificent sewers by a visionary engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, who created 82 miles of brick-lined sewers and 1,100 miles of street sewers with pumping stations as splendid as palaces. It took twenty years but it ended the stink and reduced cholera too. Cholera had probably originated in India centuries before it was identified on its arrival in Britain in 1831. Known as the Blue Death – lack of oxygen in its last stages turned patients blue – it was caused by a bacterium in the drinking water of industrial cities contaminated by human faeces. At exactly this time, late 1854, John Snow, a doctor who had anaesthetized Queen Victoria with chloroform during the delivery of her eighth child, was tracking a cholera outbreak that killed 127 in Soho, London, when he realized that a street pump was the key contaminator. Closing the pump ended the epidemic, proving that cholera was passed by water.
* To keep up with steam, the telegraph was developed, and in 1851 a line was laid between Britain and France. In July 1858, an American tycoon, Cyrus West Field, who had made a fortune supplying paper to newspapers, orchestrated the laying of a transatlantic telegraph cable, 2,000 miles long, that allowed President Buchanan and Queen Victoria to exchange greetings. Field’s achievement contributed to the link between Britain and America and accelerated the globalization of the world. By 1865, a message from London to Bombay took thirty-five minutes. The smaller world made news more urgent: after Charles-Louis Havas, a Jewish writer from Rouen, had founded the first press agency, one of his employees, Israel Josaphat, a rabbi’s son from Kassel, defected to start his own agency, first using pigeons, then paying steamships to throw canisters with American news off ships at the first Irish port and finally, after moving to London and changing his name to Reuter, his new company used telegraphy to become a global news agency.
* Cora became a courtesan by accident, starting out with a ‘horror of men’, but became the lover of Morny and a series of high-born young men including Tsar Alexander II, the Prince of Orange, Napoleon, Plon-Plon and later the British prince of Wales. She held court in a Paris mansion nicknamed Les Petites Tuileries and a country chateau, her bedrooms and bathrooms fitted in gold. Once she had herself borne by four giants into a dinner party on a silver salver which was then opened to reveal Cora, inviting the guests to ‘cut into the next dish’. Typically, the story ended tragically: a young man, ruined by Cora, shot himself in her mansion. Her luck turned, her chateaux and jewels were sold and she died in poverty.
* Alexandre Dumas, son of the author of
