page_title: Cora Pearl
section_title: Life as a courtesan
hierarchical_section_title: Cora Pearl / Life as a courtesan
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Sous le Second Empire, le prince Achille Murat (1847-1895), fils du prince Lucien Murat est épris de la courtisane Cora Pearl (1835-1886). Il lui aurait promis un acte de donation de deux cent mille francs pour le jour de son mariage.
context_page_description: Cora Pearl was a nineteenth-century courtesan of the French demimonde who enjoyed her greatest celebrity during the period of the Second French Empire.
context_section_description: Again on her own in a major metropolis, she adopted the name Cora Pearl and worked as a prostitute. She made a connection with a procurer, a "Monsieur Roubisse," who set her up in more suitable quarters, taught her the business rudiments of her new trade and tutored her in refining and broadening her repertoire of professional skills. She worked for him for six years.
  Her first lover of distinction was the twenty-five-year-old Victor Masséna, third Duke du Rivoli, and later fifth Prince of Essling. He set her 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. He bought her the first horse she ever owned, and she 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 was simultaneously sharing her favours with Prince Achille Murat, a man eleven years younger than Masséna.
  By 1860, Pearl was one of the most 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 Château de Beauséjour ("beautiful sojourn"), it was a luxurious residence with stained glass windows, expensively decorated 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. There were rarely fewer than fifteen guests at the dinner table, and the chef was 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 Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte, the Emperor's cousin. She met the prince in 1868 when he was forty-two years old. Their liaison lasted nine years, the longest relationship in Pearl's career. He bought her several homes, one a veritable palace: "les Petites Tuileries."
  In 1860, Pearl made an appearance at a masquerade ball attended by the elite of Parisian society. She caused a sensation 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 Theatre Bouffes-Parisien 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, "Apparently the beautiful Cora Pearl had already munched up a brochette ("skewer") of five or six historical fortunes with her pretty white teeth."
  The high point of Pearl’s career as courtesan were the years 1865-1870. In his biography of Pearl, 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 Cora 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 some one million francs; at one point, she 
caption: Cora Pearl and Prince Achille Murat (1865)
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