15. A Royal With His Own Dedicated Brothel Room
Queen Victoria failed to get her eldest son removed from the line of succession. However, she often remarked that her longevity and long reign were due to her determination to outlive Bertie and prevent him from ever becoming king. She tried hard and did her best, but after a reign that lasted for sixty-four years, Victoria finally died in 1901. After a long wait that he thought would never end, Bertie became King Edward VII at age sixty. In those long decades, Bertie became notorious for his relentless quest to gratify his intimate appetites. Whether cheap hookers, top-notch French aristocratic ladies and courtesans, discrete liaisons, well-publicized affairs with famous actresses, swinger-wife swap orgies, Bertie was insatiable and down for it all.
He was a big fan of Paris’ elite brothels, especially its most exclusive house of night, La Chabanais. There, he had his own room, decorated with his coat of arms and furnished to his specific tastes. Said tastes included a specially designed chair, named siege d’amour, which he had installed in his private brothel room. By the 1890s, Bertie was an obese, middle-aged, and out-of-shape man. So he had the heavy-duty love chair custom made to bear much of his weight, and enable him to do the deed without crushing his partners. It also positioned his partners just right for royal access, with minimal exertion and contortions on his part.