"Cléopold" by the media. Because the King had had two children with a woman reputed to be a prostitute, de Mérode's reputation suffered, and she was labeled a "courtesan" or "demimondaine", both of which she is still referred to as today. In an attempt to settle the rumors, de Mérode's mother wrote a letter to the editor of Le Figaro, which was published and then subsequently mocked due to poor spelling. The French agent, Xavier Paoli, recorded in his 1911 book Their Majesties as I Knew Them that the King had never met nor seen de Mérode perform and was unsure of how the rumors began. When he finally met de Mérode after the rumors were already rife, he apologized to her: "Allow me to express my regrets," he told her, "if the good fortune people attribute to me has offended you at all. Alas, we no longer live in an age when a king's favor was not looked upon as compromising! Besides, I am only a little king." de Mérode wrote in her autobiography of the rumor, "I was completely bewildered by the dimensions that this story took on. The tale of my liaison with Léopold sped along, across France, throughout Europe, and around the world. Caricatures, gossip columns, songs, skits, showed the king and me, snuggling, sharing a restaurant table, cracking open champagne at Maxim's, on a cruise, in a Pullman, and so on....I did not know what to make of such inordinate publicity; it stunned me." Michael Garval, de Mérode's biographer, claims that the rumors began after the King accosted de Mérode in the Foyer de la Danse at the Paris Opéra, and that the King may have staged the affair to conceal his actual relations with Émilienne d'Alençon. Garval has also said that although de Mérode posed as a courtesan to increase her fame, she never worked as one. In the spring of 1896, a second scandal erupted due to the exhibition of the sculpture La Danseuse by Alexandre Falguière at the Salon des Artistes Française. The sculpture was a life-size nude in white marble that was carved from a plaster cast of de Mérode's body. Despite the grain of skin visible on the plaster, proving a live cast, de Mérode accused Falguière of having fabricated a scandalous work by molding the body of the statue on another female model, whereas she posed only for the