The World полностью

* Bertie’s erotic adventures had shocked his prim father Albert, who had died, probably of colitis, in 1861. Queen Victoria blamed Bertie: ‘I’ll never look at him without a shudder.’ She orchestrated Bertie’s marriage to a beautiful and long-suffering Danish princess, Alexandra. But this trip to Paris changed his life. He visited Schneider and Sarah Bernhardt and fell for the Italian courtesan Giulia Barucci, who, told to curtsey on meeting him, instead just shook off her dress: ‘What, didn’t you tell me to behave properly to His Royal Highness? I showed him the best I have!’ Bertie sent her love letters that his courtiers later had to buy back from her. As his spree of sex and gambling scandals shamed his mother, he became an honorary Parisian, designing his own fauteuil d’amour (love chair) for his favourite brothel, Le Chabanais, where he felt at home since it was run by the Irish-born Madame Kelly. Much later, as an admirable king, he turned his Francophilia into a political alliance.

* Mehmed Ali died in 1848, and his favourite son Ibrahim the Red died soon afterwards, leaving the throne to a vicious grandson, Abbas, who so adored his horses that he once punished his groom by shoeing him with red-hot horseshoes. Unsurprisingly, a servant assassinated him.

* Ismail flirted clumsily with Eugénie, presenting her with a golden chamber pot with an emerald at its centre. ‘My eye is always on you,’ the khedive told the unamused empress.

* Leopold did not become Spanish king, but his second son Ferdinand became king of Romania. Ironically this branch of the Hohenzollerns was descended from the Beauharnais and its members were friendly with Napoleon, who had in 1866 joined the Russian tsar Alexander II in promoting Leopold’s elder brother Karl to domnitor (prince) of a new country made up of Wallachia and Moldavia, now called the Romanian United Principalities – the future Romania. Karl, who became King Carol of Romania, had no sons and was succeeded by his nephew, Ferdinand.

* Obsessed with history, Moltke had spent ten years planning a war against France, but he had also long been obsessed with railways, making a fortune from investing in them, joining the board of the Berlin–Hamburg line and advising on the laying of Prussian railways with military use in mind. Later he added to the general staff a railway section plus a historical one too. Now he had just completed instructions for Prussian officers: ‘No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength,’ he ruled. ‘Strategy is a system of expedients’ in which officers must use their initiative. ‘A favourable situation will never be exploited if commanders wait for orders.’

* Madama Lynch’s estates were confiscated, but she was allowed to sail for Europe. She later returned to Paraguay to reclaim her property after she had been promised safety but was tried and expelled, dying in Paris in 1886 still only fifty-two. Bizarrely Madama later became a national hero: the vicious dictator and friend of Nazis General Stroessner brought her body back to Paraguay and entombed her in the national cemetery.

* The French minister in Brazil was the racist ideologue Arthur de Gobineau, inventor of the term ‘master race’, who was disgusted by Brazilian society: ‘a population totally mixed, vitiated in its blood and spirit, fearfully ugly … Not a single Brazilian has pure blood because the pattern of marriages among whites, Indians and Negroes is so widespread,’ leading to what he called ‘genetic degeneracy’. Yet he regarded the blue-eyed Pedro as a perfect Aryan. Pedro befriended Gobineau until, after the diplomat disgraced himself in a brawl, he requested his recall.

* Quanah settled on the Kiowa–Comanche–Apache Reservation in Oklahoma where, leaving his traditional lodge, he built his European-style Star House, took the surname Parker, embraced his own adaptation of Christianity, combined with imbibing the hallucinogenic peyote, and became a successful rancher.

* Twain was himself one of the ornaments of the Gilded Age, a self-invented boy named Samuel Clemens from Hannibal, Missouri, who had worked the steamboats of the Mississippi, toiled in silver mines and then in 1876 published his Adventures of Tom Sawyer, based on his exploits and taking his nom de plume from the cry ‘mark twain’ of the leadsmen who measured the depth of the river. An abolitionist and liberal, he travelled the world to file travelogues, and later produced his other great novel Huckleberry Finn, also starring Tom Sawyer. Twain became rich and famous, usually sporting a trademark white suit, but constantly lost his money, though never his wisdom or wit.