Beautiful For Ever: The Lures of Madame Rachel

"Illustrated Police News," March 9, 1878, via Newspapers.com

Few emotions cause the human brain cells to malfunction like personal vanity. Naturally, for centuries, many people have noted this fact, and profited accordingly.

One of my favorite examples of this particular breed of charlatan was the legendary Madame Rachel, who, during the 1860s and 70s, sold a widely-publicized line of cosmetics and other beauty aids that were at best ineffective, and at worst dangerous to body, reputation, and bank account. Not content with making mid-Victorian London’s more insecure females “Beautiful For Ever,” with the aid of her “Magnetic Rock Dew Water of Sahara,” bought straight from the Sultan of Morocco, or the “Royal Arabian Toilet of Beauty,” Sarah Rachel Russell Leverson had even more profitable, if less publicized, ventures into blackmail and pimping. At her peak, this former debtor’s prison inmate lived like an aristocrat, complete with an elegant mansion in the center of town and a box at the Opera.

Her methods were crude, but highly effective. A barrister who had the honor of prosecuting her on two different occasions recalled in his memoirs of the time when the wife of an Admiral innocently entered Madame’s booby-trap establishment in Bond Street for “some trifling article."  Madame, who had the true criminal’s eye for the gullible, lured the woman into buying item after item. The proprietress sent in an exorbitant bill, which the client paid, and thereafter “discontinued her patronage.” Rachel’s reaction was to send another, entirely fraudulent, bill for a thousand pounds, along with sinister hints that if it was not paid, she would let it be known that she had had to “cure” the woman of some extremely scandalous afflictions. The barrister recorded that the bill was refused “with disgust and indignation,” but that did not discourage Madame from applying such techniques to more pliable customers. Most of her victims preferred the private humiliation of being robbed to the public shame that would inevitably arise from resorting to a court of law.

Madame’s most famous escapade was her expert fleecing of a particularly appalling lamb named Mary Tucker Borradaile. The aging widow was exceedingly anxious to regain her long-lost beauty, comfortably well-to-do, and staggeringly stupid. When she eagerly responded to one of Madame Rachel’s newspaper ads extolling her “world-renowned fame for preserving and enhancing youth, beauty, grace, and loveliness,” the proprietress immediately sensed the two of them were made for each other.

Madame’s first words to her new client were to ask how much money she had to spend. That question settled to her satisfaction, the two went to work. For the next two years, Borradaile spent hundreds of pounds on cosmetics, soaps, and powders, but not even the Sahara’s magnetic rock dew had any visible effect.

When the spider’s juicy fly expressed a wish to escape the web, Madame had a new lure. She suddenly announced that Lord Ranelagh, “a very good man, and very rich,” had long loved Borradaile from afar, and that, once her beautification treatments had performed their magic, he intended to marry her. The next day, Borradaile called at Rachel’s home, where her hostess announced, “I will now introduce you to the man who loves you.” She then, Borradaile later testified stubbornly in court, “introduced me to a man whom I believed, and still believe to be Lord Ranelagh.” Borradaile went on to see “Ranelagh” several more times at Madame’s mansion, Rachel telling her all the while what a good husband he will make her…once she complied with her fiance’s “express desire” that she continue her beauty treatments. Rachel calculated the initial outlay at a thousand pounds.
Borradaile obediently sold enough of her stocks to raise the sum, and her “courtship” was on. It was explained that Ranelagh’s wooing of her was to be done entirely through the mail, and when the time was right, they would be “married by proxy.” Rachel began hand-delivering to her a series of letters his lordship addressed from “William,” to “my only dearly beloved Mary,” expressing his eternal love and earnestly advising his beloved to obey “Granny” [Madame Rachel] in all things. In return, “Granny” dictated to “beloved Mary,” letters to “William,” that Rachel had carefully crafted to make Borradaile sound like an “immoral” woman who was carrying on a highly improper relationship with him. Rachel, of course, carefully stored away not only the letters she had Borradaile write, but insisted on retaining the letters written by “William.” It’s always prudent to keep a little blackmail material handy.

“Ranelagh” told his bride-to-be to turn all her jewels over to “Granny,” explaining that once they were wed, he would buy her gems much more suitable to a nobleman’s wife. However, since, as “Granny” explained, Borradaile needed diamonds for her wedding day, she had her client buy a coronet and necklace worth over twelve hundred pounds. Madame, behind Borradaile’s back, returned the diamonds to the jeweler’s, but, of course, kept the money Borradaile had given her to pay for them. In a similar fashion, “Granny” acquired sums to buy the future Lady Ranelagh dresses, laces, and other costly ornaments. While taking Borradaile’s money to buy a new carriage for the wedding and the down payment on a townhouse for the newlyweds, she also gained possession of virtually everything her victim possessed, all with the same explanation that they were inappropriate for her new station in life.

When Borradaile had finally been stripped clean of all her worldly goods, Madame administered the coup de grace. She lured her client into executing a bond for sixteen hundred pounds, and had her arrested for this debt. Unless Borradaile wished to spend the rest of her days in debtor’s prison, Madame announced, she would have to make over to Rachel an annual pension.

It was only at this point that Borradaile’s family learned just how thoroughly this human pigeon had been plucked. A suit was brought against Madame for obtaining money by false pretenses and conspiracy to defraud.

Perhaps the most shocking part of this story is that the jury was unable to reach a verdict. Apparently the “silly, giggling, half-hysterical” Mrs. Borradaile, with her dyed yellow hair, and “face ruddled with paint,” made such a poor impression that at least some of them were inclined to think that the (to quote the “Times”) “self-confessed idiot” got what she deserved.

One month later, the prosecution pursued the charges against Rachel a second time. The defense argument was that, to put it succinctly, Madame Rachel was a procuress who obtained money in an open, aboveboard fashion, from “a woman of loose habits, who was willing to prostitute herself.” They submitted the letters Borradaile had written at Rachel’s dictation as proof. All Borradaile could say in reply was that her intentions, however deluded, were honorable. She had never paid money to carry on an “intrigue” with the mysterious “William,” but believed every word Madame told her about Lord Ranelagh’s desire to marry her. She so trusted Rachel that she was willing to write out anything the woman dictated, without giving any thought to their implications. She was, in short, a self-confessed idiot. In defense of her morals, she finally snapped petulantly at Madame’s attorney, “She [Rachel] is a wicked and vile woman, and you are bad too!”

The authentic Lord Ranelagh—whose first name, incidentally, was “Thomas”—took the stand. He admitted having visited Madame Rachel’s shop on several occasions, simply out of curiosity to see this notorious figure who “had been able to get a large sum of money out of a lady,” on some earlier occasion. (“You don’t suppose I went there to get enameled,” he grumbled.) He remembered being introduced to Mrs. Borradaile on one or two occasions, but he certainly never dreamed of marrying her, and had no idea who “William” might be.

This time around, the jury had no trouble bringing in a conviction, and Madame was sentenced to five years.

You can never keep a good crook down, however. After her release, with a truly awe-inspiring effrontery, she set herself up as “Arabian Perfumer to the Queen” in another part of London, and carried on exactly where she left off. Even more astonishingly, she continued to find customers ready to give her every cent they possessed in pursuit of her alluring dreams of eternal loveliness. To anyone with memories of her earlier legal skirmishes, she explained blithely that she had been “the victim of a vile conspiracy,” but the Home Secretary himself had cleared her name.

Before long, she encountered a client nearly as vain, but, unfortunately for Madame, rather more intelligent than Mrs. Borradaile. After Cecilia Pearse turned over large amounts of money—not to mention her jewels—to Rachel, only to get a painful skin rash as a reward, she confessed her folly to her husband. When Mr. Pearse demanded the return of the jewelry, Rachel purred that she knew all about his wife’s “private affairs,” and “would make the city ring” with the scandal. The Pearses responded by obtaining a warrant for Rachel’s arrest on the charge of intent to defraud.

This 1878 trial provided an interesting insight into Madame’s remarkable beauty preparations. The skin wash that Mrs. Pearse had bankrupted herself to obtain featured starch, lead and hydrochloric acid as key ingredients. It was also revealed that Mrs. Pearse once asked Madame why she herself did not benefit from her own arts (Rachel resembled, in the words of crime historian William Roughead, “a dissipated Queen Victoria.”) Madame blandly answered that as she was now eighty-five, you couldn’t expect to see the same results that would be shown by someone under sixty.

After all was over at the Old Bailey, it took the jury only ten minutes to find the defendant guilty, and she was given another five years in jail. Even after this latest conviction, women continued to write her, begging for the promised magic formulas that would make them young and comely. Madame Rachel died in prison only two years into her sentence, and the ladies of London had to find new ways to make themselves “Beautiful For Ever.”

"Illustrated Police News," October 23, 1880