Liane de Pougy

Liane de Pougy  (2 July 1869 – 26 December 1950), was a Folies Bergères dancer renowned as one of Paris's most beautiful and notorious courtesans.

Anne Marie Chassaigne was born in La Flèche, Sarthe, France, the daughter of Pierre Blaise Eugène Chassaigne and his wife Aimée Lopez, and raised in a nunnery. At the age of 16, she ran off with Armand Pourpe, a naval officer, marrying because she was pregnant. The baby was named Marco Pourpe, and his mother was, in her own opinion 'a terrible mother'. ‘My son was like a living doll given to a little girl’. She would have preferred the baby to be a girl ‘because of the dresses and the curly hair’.(Marco grew up to volunteer as an airman in WWI and was killed the 2nd December 1914 near Villers-Brettoneux.)

The marriage was not a happy one. Anne-Marie later wrote in her memoirs that her new husband took her violently on their wedding night, an event which left her emotionally scarred. It is said that the groom was a brute and abused her – she wore the scar of his beatings on her breast for the rest of her life. When Armand Pourpe's naval career led him to a billet in Marseilles, Anne-Marie took a lover (the Marquis Charles de MacMahon. When her husband found them in bed together he shot her with a revolver, wounding her on the wrist. Deciding to leave her husband, Anne Marie sold the rosewood piano to a young man who paid 400 francs cash for the instrument. Within an hour, Anne Marie was on her way to Paris, leaving her infant son with his father, who in turn sent his son to live with the boy's grandparents, in Suez.

With the failure of her marriage, Anne Marie began dabbling in acting and prostitution and it is now known that she was heavy user of both cocaine and opium. 

She began her career as a courtesan with the Countess Valtesse de la Bigne, who taught Anne-Marie the profession and whose monumental bed was made of varnished bronze. Describing herself as vain but not a fool, Anne-Marie cultivated an interest in paintings, books and poetry, but avoided intellectual depth, which she considered dull. She preferred café-concerts and popular songs to Shakespeare or Wagner, and made minor appearances in the chorus of Folies-Bergere in Paris in St. Petersburg and cabaret clubs in Rome and the French Riviera. She was a conscientious bookkeeper.

After moving to Paris, from her position at the Folies she became a noted demimondaine, rival of "La Belle Otero". She took her last name from one of her paramours, a Comte or Vicomte de Pougy. Actress Sarah Bernhardt, faced with the task of teaching Liane to act, advised her that when she was on stage, it would be best to keep her "pretty mouth shut". Her lesbian affair with writer Natalie Clifford Barney is recorded in her novel Idylle Saphique, published around 1901. In 1899, after seeing de Pougy at a dance hall in Paris, Barney presented herself at de Pougy's residence in a page costume and announced that she was a "page of love" sent by Sappho. Although de Pougy was one of the most famous women in France at the time, constantly sought after by wealthy and titled men, Barney's audacity charmed and seduced her. The two were said to have had deep feelings for one another for the remainder of their lives.

Upon her marriage to Prince Georges Ghika in 1920 she became Princess Ghika; this marriage ended in separation, though not divorce. Her son's death as an aviator in World War I turned her towards religion and she became a tertiary of the Order of Saint Dominic as Sister Anne-Mary. She became involved in the Asylum of Saint Agnes, devoted to the care of children with birth defects. Late in life she published a couple of light tales (L'Insaisissable and La Mauvaise part-Myrrhille). She died at Lausanne, Switzerland.

Text Source Wikipedia

Catherine Walters The Last Victorian Courtesan

Catherine "Skittles" Walters (13 June 1839 – 4 August 1920) was a fashion trendsetter and, along with Alice Keppel, was one of the last of the great courtesans of Victorian London.

Walters was rumoured to have had leaders of political parties and a member of the British royal family amongst her benefactors. She was born the third of five children at 1 Henderson Street, Toxteth, Liverpool and moved to London before her twentieth birthday. Her father was Edward Walters, a customs official, who died in 1864. Her mother was Mary Ann Fowler.

Her nickname is thought to have originated from her working at a bowling alley in Chesterfield Street near Park Lane. (Skittles is the game which evolved into bowling.)

Her classical beauty was matched by her skill as a horsewoman, for which she was almost equally renowned. In the 1860s the fascinating sight of Catherine riding on Rotten Row in Hyde Park drew huge crowds of sightseers. Aristocratic ladies copied the cut of her perfectly fitting "Princess" riding habit, and she was well known as a trendsetter. She was depicted in Sir Edwin Landseer's 1861 painting The Shrew Tamed, as a young woman in supine relaxation with a horse.

A letter written to the The Times in July 1861 described in detail the fever of anticipation caused by Catherine's waiting admirers:

 The Shrew Tamed, Edwin Landseer

"Expectation is raised to its highest pitch: a handsome woman drives rapidly by in a carriage drawn by thoroughbred ponies. The driver is attired in the pork pie hat and the Poole paletot introduced by 'Catherine', but alas!, she caused no effect at all, for she is not 'Catherine'; she is only the Duchess of A–, the Marchioness of B–, the Countess of C–, or some other of 'Catherine’'s many imitators." At last their patience was satisfied and Catherine herself appeared; she threaded her way through the throng, "commented upon by the hundreds who admire her and the hundreds who envy her", speaking to a chosen few along the way. This done, "she turns, and drives back again towards Apsley House, and then away into the unknown world, nobody knows whither".

 

She counted among her lovers Spencer Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington (later the eighth Duke of Devonshire), whom she pursued to New York during the American Civil War; Napoléon III; and Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII}. She was also the first love of the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who remained infatuated with her for the rest of his life.

During her life as a courtesan, her discretion and loyalty to her benefactors became the focal point of her career. There were many rumours about her being involved with certain wealthy men of the time, but she never confirmed nor denied these. This gave her great weight in the courtesan lifestyle, and made her a sought after commodity. This also gave long life to her career, and helped her to retire a wealthy woman of society around 1890.

She died of cerebral haemorrhage at her home at 15 South Street, Mayfair, and was buried in the graveyard of the Franciscan Monastery at Crawley.

Text for Catherine Walters from Wikipedia.

Virginia Oldoini, Countess di Castiglione

Louis Pierson

Apologies to none history lovers for bringing you another demi-mondaine post so soon after Lady Emma, on my internet wanderings I came across some photographs of The Countess di Castiglione and I knew I had to do a post about her.

Virginia Oldoini, Countess di Castiglione (22 March 1837 – 28 November 1899), better known as La Castiglione, was an Italian courtesan and secret agent who achieved notoriety as a mistress of Emperor Napoleon III of France. She was an advocate for Italian unification through the influence she had upon the Emperor. She was also a significant figure in the early history of photography as a collaborator of photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson.

 

Born Virginia Elisabetta Luisa Carlotta Antonietta Teresa Maria Oldoïni, (French: Virginie Élisabeth Louise Charlotte Antoinette Thérèse Marie Oldoïni) on 22 March 1837 in Florence, Tuscany to Marquis Filippo Oldoini and Marquise Isabella Lamporecchi, members of the minor Tuscan nobility, she was often known by her nickname of "Nicchia". Virginia married Francesco Verasis, conte di Castiglione, at the age of 17. He was twelve years her senior, they had a son, Georgio.

 

 Portrait of the Countess di Castiglione painted in Paris, 1862 by Michele Gordigiani

Her cousin, Camillo, conte di Cavour, was a minister to Victor Emmanuel II, king of Sardinia, Piedmont and Savoy. When the Castigliones traveled to Paris in 1855, the Countess was under her cousin's instructions to plead the cause of Italian unity with Napoleon III of France. She achieved notoriety by becoming Napoleon III's mistress, a scandal that led her husband to demand a marital separation. During her two years' relationship with the French emperor (1856-1857), she was permitted to enter the very exclusive circle of European royalty. Among others she met Augusta of Saxe-Weimar, Otto von Bismarck and Adolphe Thiers.

 Queen Of Hearts

 The Countess was known for her "divine beauty" and flamboyant entrances in elaborate dress at the imperial court. One of her most infamous outfits was a "Queen of Hearts" costume. A portrait of the Countess was painted by George Frederic Watts in 1857. In 1856 she began sitting for Mayer and Pierson, the favoured photographers of the imperial court. She was described as having long, wavy blonde hair, pale skin, a delicate oval face, and eyes which changed colour constantly from green to an extraordinary blue-violet Over the next four decades she would direct Pierre-Louis Pierson to help her create 700 different photographs in which she re-created the signature moments of her life for the camera. Her part in the creation of these art works is often overlooked due to other aspects in her life but she was in fact fully in control and used Pierre-Louis Pierson as a instrument in the realisation of her own personal fantasies.

 Louis Pierson

 She paid a large amount of her own personal fortune for the right to do this, often getting into debt as a result. Most of the photographs depicted the Countess in her theatrical outfits, such as the Queen of Hearts dress. A number of photographs depicted the Countess in ways that were undoubtedly risqué for the era, notably, images that expose her bare legs or feet. In these photos, her head has been cropped out.

The Legs of the Countess de Castiglione (c. 1861/67)

By 1857 the brief affair with Napoleon III was over, inducing her to return to Italy. Four years later, the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, conceivably in part due to the influence that the Countess had exerted on Napoleon III. That same year, she returned to France and settled in Passy.

Just after the defeat of France during the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, she was called to meet, in secret, Otto von Bismarck to explain to him how the German occupation of Paris could be fatal. She may have succeeded, as Paris stayed free of Prussian occupation.

^{Louis Pierson}

Virginia spent her declining years in an apartment in the Place Vendôme, where she had the rooms decorated in funereal black, the blinds kept drawn, and mirrors banished—apparently so she would not have to confront her advancing age and loss of beauty. She would only leave the apartment at night. In the 1890s she began a brief collaboration with Pierson again, though her later photographs clearly show her loss of any critical judgement, possible due to her growing mental instability. She wished to set up an exhibit of her photographs at the Exposition Universelle (1900), though this did not happen. On November 28, 1899, she died at age sixty-two, and was buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

 Robert de Montesquiou, a Symbolist poet, dandy and avid art collector, was fascinated by the Countess di Castiglione. He spent thirteen years writing her biography, La Divine Comtesse, published in 1913. After her death, he collected 433 of her photographs, all now preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Countess's life was depicted in a 1955 French film, La Contessa di Castiglione, that starred Yvonne de Carlo.

Some of the Photographs are so contemporary it is hard to believe they were taken in the nineteenth century.
I wonder what she would have become had she been born in our times?

Text Source for Countess di Castiglione from Wikipedia