“How old do you think my daughter?” once inquired the arch-impostor of a man from whom I had it direct. He having replied “Seventeen,” she turned to the siren with, “Tell this gentleman, my child, what you saw during the French Revolution, and how I took you to see the execution of Marie Antoinette.”
And then “Alma,” coached to perfection, turned her bewitching eyes as if peering into eternity, and began a string of twaddle that ought not to have deceived a Bluecoat boy.
Everybody consulted Madame Rachel. If a youth got a black eye at young Reed’s sparring rooms (at the “Rising Sun” in Whitehall) it was in Bond Street he was made presentable for any fashionable function in the evening, and in every conceivable walk of life one met evidence of the universal sway of enamel; whilst nightly at the Opera, Rachel and her daughter occupied a box on the grand tier and surveyed the battalions of old men and old women, youths and maidens, who had passed through their hands.
But despite Alma’s charms, she had a narrow squeak of being implicated with her mother in the prosecution that followed later on—instead, however, she was taken in hand by Lady Cardigan, and made a success in Grand Opera. But her troubles were not yet over, and aspirants to her heart and hand (enamelled and otherwise) were in considerable evidence nightly at the Opera house in Paris.
It was at the hands of one of these she met her fate. Carried away by jealousy or scorn, he shot her from the stalls, though, happily, not fatally. After this she disappeared, but not before displaying a magnanimity that was refreshing in the reputed daughter of the flint-hearted Rachel, for she refused to prosecute her assailant, who escaped with a nominal imprisonment.
A controversy afterwards ensued in the daily Press as to the becoming height of female dress; some advocated up to the shoulder, others below, some a tape, some nothing; but the important question has not yet been set at rest, and never will be, despite County Council edicts in the name of propriety, or the hypocrisy and flunkeydom that stalk over the land.
Alma in all her glory had her own ideas, and appeared invariably and literally in “semi-nude.”
Years after she was recognised by a former adorer at the Concordia Music Hall in Constantinople, but all the beauté du diable had vanished; the cast still remained, but failed to ravish—Nature had worked through the enamel with which her skin had been saturated, and Alma pure and simple remained—a living example of how “Time turns the old days to derision.”
Madame Rachel’s experiences were of a more prosy description, and, prosecuted a few years later by a Mrs. Pearce—said to have been a daughter of Mario’s—whose jewels she had annexed in addition to a considerable sum, she was relegated to five years’ penal servitude.
But the most amusing incident has yet to be told, although it seems incredible that even so foolish a woman should court publicity by joining in the prosecution. The report of the trial in any old paper of the period will convince the most sceptical of the absence of exaggeration in this ungarnished recital.