Snapshot · Empire: World History
Maharaja Duleep Singh died alone on the floor of his Paris hotel suite in October 1893, aged just 55, with the last time Irene had seen him being when she was 3 and Pauline when she was 5.
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With Bamba's death clearing the way, Duleep Singh and Ada married in a small civil ceremony in April 1889, making Irene technically legitimate where Pauline was not. Irene Helen Beryl — the names are notably stripped of any royal or Punjabi resonance, suggesting a man who no longer believed in leverage or flattery. William reads the psychology of the names as a map of the Maharaja's declining aspirations. The couple drifted on, living separately for stretches, while Pauline and Irene were eventually baptised in a colonial hotel chapel in Algiers in the winter of 1892 — a far cry from Sophia's christening at Windsor with Queen Victoria as godmother. By this point, Ada had moved out of the hotel suite and into an expensive villa on the outskirts of Paris with a mysterious companion, Madame Paraton, whom British intelligence recorded as a suspected Russian agent.
Maharaja Duleep Singh spent a year in a run-down Moscow boarding house waiting in vain for Tsar Alexander III to champion his cause. That Boxing Day, Ada gave birth to Pauline there. The name Alexandrina — a hedge, perhaps for the Tsar, perhaps for Victoria — said everything about a man who had run out of options.
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