At 2:30 in the morning on July 1, 1923, the Egyptian aristocrat Ali Famy Bay collapsed to the floor of his room at London’s Savoy Hotel. He had been shot at point-blank range in the head, neck, and back. Standing behind the Browning pistol was his wife of just seven months, the 32-year-old Marguerite Alibert. By the time her trial opened in September, the dead man was cast as Marguerite’s tormentor, his character utterly denounced and his ethnicity vilified.
But Marguerite’s own past was kept a complete secret. The court could not risk any mention of Prince Edward, the heir to the British throne. According to historian Andrew Rose, the authorities wanted Marguerite to be acquitted. A murder conviction would have been catastrophic for the crown.
Marguerite Marie Alibert was born in Paris on December 9, 1890. Her mother worked as a housekeeper and her father as a coach driver. In 1905, tragedy struck when Marguerite’s four-year-old brother was struck and killed by a lorry while she was looking after him outside the family home. Utterly distraught, her parents blamed their daughter for the accident.
At 15, Marguerite was sent away to a Catholic boarding school. She was soon made to work as a domestic servant for the family of the Parisian lawyer Henri Jules Langlois. When she fell pregnant the following year, Marguerite was expelled from the position and sent back home, where she gave birth to her daughter Raymonde at just 16. With no means to support her newborn, the child was sent to be raised by a family in the countryside.
Marguerite spent the next decade in near obscurity, possibly, according to historian Andrew Rose, getting by as a street prostitute. That was until she met the infamous brothel keeper Madame Dinard. Licensed brothels had been legal in France since 1804. By law, they had to be operated by a woman, and the building’s exterior had to be kept discreet.
Only a lit red lantern at the entryway would hint that the establishment was open for business. By 1810, there were 180 officially sanctioned brothels in Paris alone. One of Paris’s most opulent and best-known brothels was regularly frequented by Britain’s future king Edward VII. One of its rooms even carried Edward’s coat of arms.
The copper bathtub that Edward typically bathed in, filled with both courtesans and champagne, was later bought by the Spanish artist Salvador Dalí when the brothel closed in 1946. Under Madame Dinard’s guidance, Marguerite was primed for success among the brothel’s aristocratic clientele. According to Dinard, Marguerite soon became “the mistress of nearly all my best clients, gentlemen of wealth and position in France, England, America, and other countries. It was me that made a sort of lady of her.
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It would not be long until the heir to the British throne took notice as well. Prince Edward was born on June 23, 1894, during the last years of his great-grandmother Queen Victoria’s reign. At 16, he was made Prince of Wales after the death of his grandfather Edward VII and the ascension of his father, George V. At the outbreak of the First World War, Edward joined the Grenadier Guards in June 1914.
Although he insisted on serving on the front lines, Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, forbade it, fearing the damage that could come from the enemy capture of the British heir. Edward had to settle for regular visits to the front lines, for which he was awarded the Military Cross in 1916. In April 1917, now an officer on leave in Paris, Edward arranged to meet the dazzling courtesan Marguerite Alibert. Marguerite had become separated from the wealthy businessman André Méler, a married older man who had been living openly with her until his intense jealousy and their constant arguments caused the relationship to crumble.
Marguerite received 200,000 francs from Méler once the affair ended, but she later admitted to being furious at herself for agreeing to what she considered such a meager sum. Marguerite and Edward were first introduced at a formal lunch with his aristocratic friends. Over the next 18 months, Edward and Marguerite met up whenever they could. They would drive around Paris in Edward’s Rolls-Royce and drink champagne.
Throughout their relationship, the Prince of Wales sent more than 20 letters to the French courtesan. These letters not only exposed Edward’s romantic feelings but also contained classified information about the progress of the war and derogatory remarks about the British monarchy, especially about his father, George V. It was a risky move to reveal such sensitive information, and a move that would haunt the British establishment for years to come, much to the benefit of Marguerite. It seemed Edward would naively believe that Marguerite would destroy the letters whenever he asked.
By the time Edward set his sights on a new English lover, Marguerite assured the prince she would do what she liked with his damning letters. Edward wrote to his adviser in November 1918: “Oh, those bloody letters, and what a fool I was not to take your advice over a year ago. I’m afraid she’s the 100,000 or nothing type. Though I’m disappointed and didn’t think she’d turn nasty.
The whole trouble is my letters, and she’s not burnt one. ”
To Marguerite, the priceless letters symbolized immunity, a kind of protection she would draw on years later to save her reputation and her freedom. Once her affair with the prince ended, Marguerite quickly married the wealthy young Air Force officer Charles Laurent. However, and possibly by design, the marriage was over almost as quickly as it had begun.
Thanks to a massive divorce settlement, Marguerite had amassed a fortune. At just 30, she could now afford housekeepers, ten horses, two limousines, and an apartment on the fashionable Avenue Henri Martin. It is also said that around that time, Marguerite paid for her daughter Raymonde to attend one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the country. Still working as an escort, Marguerite spent a business trip across the Mediterranean with an Egyptian businessman when she was spotted by the young aristocrat Ali Famy Bay.
Famy was well known among the Parisian elite and received an annual income of £40,000, something like £2 million today. His family had earned their fortune from the Egyptian cotton trade. By 1922, Famy became Marguerite’s next target. Like Prince Edward, Famy asked a friend to introduce him to the French courtesan.
Despite Marguerite’s complete lack of royal blood, Famy was intent on marriage, defying the expectations of his family. The couple were married in an Islamic ceremony in January 1923. But it soon became clear that the fairly strict and conservative expectations Famy had for his wife would be at complete odds with Marguerite’s independent and headstrong nature. For Famy, this proved to be a fatal miscalculation.
The couple argued almost constantly. On July 1, 1923, seven months into their chaotic marriage, Famy and Marguerite were having another furious row. They had just returned to the Savoy Hotel after watching The Merry Widow, an astonishingly popular operetta that ran for 778 performances in London alone. Soon, the operetta’s name would seem almost prophetic.
When Famy turned to face the hotel window, Marguerite pulled out her pistol and shot her husband three times at point-blank range. Famy was immediately taken to a nearby hospital, but he died an hour afterwards. Two months later, Marguerite was on trial for murder, but she played her trump card. According to Andrew Rose, she threatened to release the letters that Prince Edward had written to her if she were not protected.
By the early 1920s, Prince Edward had become the archetypal new royal. During a visit to the US, the magazine Men’s Wear wrote that “the average young man in America is more interested in the clothes of the Prince of Wales than in any other individual on Earth. ” The British establishment knew it was crucial for Edward’s name to be kept out of the trial at all costs. London’s Old Bailey was packed on September 10, 1923.
Although Marguerite was on trial for murder in that courtroom, she was cast as the victim. She was defended by the notorious English barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall. Marguerite was said to have been tormented by a violent, controlling, and sexually depraved husband, and that shooting Famy was purely an act of justifiable self-defense. The defense said Famy had locked Marguerite in his yacht and on one occasion had dislocated her jaw.
When Marguerite, who only spoke French, took the stand the next day, the jury could only hear her testimony through a translator. In his concluding statement, Marshall Hall told the jury: “Eastern men, as I have said, are courteous and elegant, but underneath lies an eastern temperament. Members of the jury, I want you to open the gates where the western woman can go out, not into the dark night of the desert, but back to her friends who love her in spite of her weaknesses. You will open the gate and let this western woman go back into the light of God’s great western sun.
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Marshall Hall was directly playing on the tropes of the wildly popular and overtly racist romance novels of the time. The desert romance generally followed a beautiful European damsel in distress as she fell passionately in love with a non-European man. For Marshall Hall, the strategy worked exactly as he had hoped. On September 15, 1923, the jury took just a little over an hour to find Marguerite not guilty, and she was acquitted of all charges.
Even after the trial, Marguerite attempted to sue Famy’s family, claiming she was now pregnant. Although her claim was eventually dismissed, Marguerite remained a wildly wealthy woman in her own right. She lived in a Parisian apartment overlooking the Ritz for the rest of her life and died in January 1971 at 80 years old. Although the Prince of Wales’s name was successfully kept out of the trial, he was soon involved in another secret relationship that would lead to constitutional crisis.
When the now King Edward VIII decided to marry the two-time divorcée and American socialite Wallis Simpson, he also decided to abdicate the British throne. Edward’s father, George V, had presciently said of his son in 1935: “After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within 12 months. I pray to God my elder son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne.
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