Marguerite Alibert rose from a troubled childhood in France to become a courtesan, a mistress of royalty, an Egyptian bey's wife, and finally a defendant in one of the most sensational murder trials of the 1920s. Her life was defined less by romance than by survival, and she treated love as a means to wealth and security.
She was born in the winter of 1890, the daughter of a taxi coach driver and a maid. The family belonged to France's middle class rather than to dire poverty, but her parents were, by any measure, failures.
When Marguerite's four-year-old brother was run over by a lorry, her parents did not pursue the driver or even carry the boy to a cemetery. Instead, they sent their daughter to the Sisters of Mary, where the nuns told her that her sins had caused her brother's death.
That guilt-ridden childhood was spent cleaning other people's houses. At sixteen, an unplanned pregnancy ended both her childhood and her place in the household. Her family threw her into the streets to starve.
Her baby was sent to live on a farm, as was common at the time. Marguerite became a sex worker and was soon scouted by Madame Denard, a keeper of courtesans who trained her to use her charm and beauty to make money.
Madame Denard later boasted that Marguerite had been the mistress of nearly all her best clients, gentlemen of wealth and position in France, England, America, and other countries. The madam took credit for turning her into a sort of lady.
Marguerite had already learned from the Sisters of Mary that she could count only on herself. She had also learned to sing there, a mezzo-soprano skill that proved useful in her career.
She adopted several aliases, including Maggie Meller, taken from Andre Meller, a wealthy forty-year-old stable owner. Meller was already married, and the seventeen-year-old Marguerite was never legally his wife, but she liked his name and his money enough to take both.
Six years later, Andre Meller ended the arrangement because Maggie could not or would not stay faithful. By then she had escaped poverty and possessed about 200,000 British pounds from him.
With that money, she retrieved her daughter Raymonde from the farm and later sent her to school in London. It was the only really decent thing she is known to have done.
Prince Edward VIII, then the Prince of Wales and heir to the British throne, became one of her many moneyed men. He had recently borrowed a prostitute from a friend to deal with his virginity, and he was twenty-three, royal, and freshly deflowered when he met her.
Maggie was in her late twenties and an experienced Parisian courtesan. Edward fell head over heels for about a year before he grew bored, long enough to write what he later called "those bloody letters."
The letters contained every foolish thing a young man might say to a lady love. Edward later lamented them to his advisor, saying he had been a fool not to take advice more than a year earlier.
He worried that Maggie was the "100,000 pound or nothing type" and was disappointed that she had turned nasty. He noted that if the trouble was his letters, she had not burned a single one.
About twenty letters were believed to exist, and they were wildly indiscreet. Edward had written things about the conduct of the war that might have been misinterpreted, made rude remarks about his father, and included sexual content.
In 1919, after a year of sending Prince Edward regular reminders that she still had the letters, Maggie Meller married Charles Laurent. He was handsome and boring, and the marriage saved the prince a great deal of trouble.
The couple divorced six months later, netting Maggie a settlement, an apartment, ten horse stables, cars, servants, and a new name to use when the mood took her.
She then married Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey, a hilariously wealthy Egyptian who held the title of bey, or lord, not prince. Certain circles nonetheless called her Princess Fahmy when she settled with him in Cairo.
The strictly upright life of a bey's wife did not appeal to the established hedonist Maggie Meller. She agreed to the marriage on two conditions: that she be allowed to wear western clothing, and that she be allowed to divorce him.
Fahmy was not fond of the divorce condition, but he was willing to pretend to accept it if she would convert. Just before the wedding, he removed the divorce clause and replaced it with an edict allowing him to take more wives.
The bey apparently believed that this devilishly sexy, twice-divorced Parisian prostitute, whom he had met while she escorted another rich man around an exotic country a year earlier, would become a proper Islamic wife.
The couple fought more or less constantly, sometimes arguing in broad daylight in front of other people. Fahmy complained that her independence, insatiable sexuality, and general personality were utterly humiliating, though this was exactly what he had signed up for.
Fahmy had a reputation around Egypt as a closeted homosexual. Maggie claimed to have been torn during unnatural intercourse, a coy claim to innocence that those who knew her suspected was part of an effort to collect another fat divorce settlement.
On the night of July 9, 1923, the couple returned from a showing of The Merry Widow and had a violent fight in their hotel room. The bey left after a lot of shouting and returned a few hours later.
Around two in the morning, three shots were heard. Princess Fahmy was arrested, and an hour later the bey was dead, shot in the back of the head with a .38 his wife had kept under her pillow.
The case was neatly packaged as far as homicides go. The murder weapon, the perpetrator, and the victim were all accounted for, with no extra threads to untangle and witnesses before and after the shooting.
Then came the power of blackmail. The letters were wildly indiscreet, and putting them together with Edward's position gave Maggie the keys to a royal get-out-of-jail-free card.
Strings were pulled to protect the prince and his family's reputation. Maggie's life as a lady of the night was never admitted into evidence, so it could not be examined, and the letters stayed hidden.
Combined with the racism of the roaring twenties, the defense painted the late bey as a wife-beating, buying, swapping, subhuman monster and Marguerite as a hapless white woman trapped in his savage brown clutches.
In September 1923, Bey Fahmy was convicted in the public mind of being an evil, depraved, racially inferior, perverted little monster. Marguerite Alibert was acquitted of all charges.
People lined up around the building to see the action or sent their servants to buy and save seats. Aside from the vicious slander of the victim, there was not much actual action in the courtroom.
Maggie returned to her native Paris to live a long, comfortable life of luxury. She continued her exciting lifestyle but eventually withdrew from the limelight, supported by at least five different ex-husbands, until her death at age eighty in 1971.
Prince Edward's mistake stands as a cautionary tale in the age of the internet. As for Maggie, her story suggests that a little extortion, a little imagination, and a lot of blackmail can make a very merry widow indeed.