Veronica Franco was born into the citteeini class of sixteenth-century Venice, most likely in 1546, at the height of the city’s Renaissance glory. Her mother, Paola Fracassa, was a cortigiana onesta, an honored courtesan—one of the highly cultured women who entertained the republic’s politicians, magistrates, and prosperous merchants. These women stood apart from the common prostitutes who worked near the Rialto Bridge, for they were literate, well-read, and capable of discussing poetry, literature, and art with their clients. Franco learned this trade from her mother while still a teenager, though she briefly experimented with marriage in the early 1560s, wedding a doctor named Paolo Paniza in an arranged union she evidently disliked.
She composed her first will in 1564, requesting that her husband return her diary. She never remarried, though she bore at least six children, only three of whom survived infancy. By the late 1560s, Franco had risen through the ranks of Venice’s honored courtesans. In 1565, shortly after her marriage ended, she was listed in the catalog of the principal and most honored courtesans of Venice, a practical guide for the merchants and officials who visited a city believed to have housed some eleven thousand prostitutes and courtesans during the century.
Her prominence became unmistakable in 1570, when she drafted a new will naming executors drawn from the elite of Venetian society, including Lorenzo Moresini, a member of the Council of Ten that effectively ran the merchant republic alongside the doge. Another executor was Ludovico Ramberti, a member of one of the city’s most powerful merchant families, who generously bequeathed a house near Venice to one of Franco’s children. In her mid-twenties, Franco was moving in the circles of Venice’s most powerful people and had established herself as the lady of a prominent household. In May 1574, she briefly acquired her most famous client.
King Charles IX of France died, and his brother Henry succeeded him as Henry III. Henry, far away in Poland-Lithuania where he had recently been made king, journeyed home through Venice and engaged in a short, tender liaison with Franco. Years later, in 1580, she would compose a sonnet recalling the affair. The following year, the bubonic plague struck much of northern Italy.
Venice was hit particularly hard, and between 1575 and 1578, more than one hundred thousand people—between a quarter and a third of the city’s population—died. With quarantine the only defense against the disease, Franco fled the city and stayed away until 1577. When she returned, she discovered her home had been looted during the epidemic. She lost her household silver, jewels, books, and money—a staggering financial setback.
Further robberies followed in the late 1570s, and she began to suspect her own household staff were complicit. In 1577, likely owing to her own losses, she wrote to the Venetian government proposing a charitable home for impoverished former courtesans and prostitutes. Such an establishment was founded in the late 1570s, though the state did not ask her to administer it. Franco’s literary reputation had been growing for years.
In the early 1570s, she entered the renowned literary salon of Domenico Venier, a scion of a powerful Venetian oligarch family, where she became a literary adviser and began composing her own poetry. She published an extensive volume titled Terze Rime in 1575, just before the plague struck, containing seventeen poems she had written herself, many discussing her life as a courtesan and addressing her male customers. In 1580, she published a further work, the Familiar Letters, a compendium of correspondence with some of her lovers and correspondents over the years, including the first letter, written to King Henry III of France. It remains unclear how much of this correspondence was genuine and how much was literary invention.
That same year, 1580, Franco was accused of witchcraft by her son’s tutor, a man named Ridolfo Vannitelli, who claimed she had practiced magical incantations in her home. Such charges were regularly brought against courtesans in the early modern period, and Europe was entering the most brutal phase of the witch craze, a period of intense hunts in which some forty thousand alleged witches were executed between 1580 and 1620. Vannitelli called her a public prostitute and a witch who invoked the devil, warning that if she were not punished, many others would do the same against the holy Catholic faith. Italy did not have a strong tradition of convicting witches on such accusations, and with the help of her powerful connections, Franco was acquitted.
But her reputation was damaged. Combined with her financial losses, she faced growing difficulties. When her patron Domenico Venier died in 1582, she largely disappeared from the historical record, publishing no further known work. Her tax declaration that year showed her living in a section of Venice where many poverty-stricken former prostitutes spent their final years.
She died in 1591 in her mid-forties, leaving behind a legacy as one of the foremost female poets and courtesans of the Italian Renaissance. Nearly two centuries later, another woman would follow a similar path from obscurity to fame and ruin. Emma Lyon was born on April 26, 1765, near Neston in Cheshire, England, the daughter of a blacksmith who died within seven weeks of her birth. Poverty forced her into the workforce in her early teens.
By age twelve, she was working as a maid, and shortly afterward she moved to London, changing her name to Emma Hart. In her teenage years, she began a four-year relationship with Charles Greville, a British antiquarian and member of Parliament. In 1785, Greville ended the relationship by sending her to his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, the British plenipotentiary at the Court of Naples, where she arrived in 1786. Emma married Hamilton in 1791, and as a woman in her mid-twenties at the Neapolitan court, she became a celebrated hostess, meeting many of Europe’s leading literary figures and becoming the subject of portraits by artists such as Gavin Hamilton, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Angelica Kauffman, who depicted her in the style of classical and mythological figures.
Emma’s life was unfolding against the backdrop of enormous political change. The French Revolution of 1789 overthrew the monarchy of Louis XVI, who was executed in 1793, and France soon found itself at war with virtually all of Europe’s great powers, above all Britain. This was the context in which Horatio Nelson arrived at the Neapolitan court in 1793. Nelson was a leading admiral of the British Royal Navy, blind in one eye from an engagement near Corsica, tasked with gathering reinforcements for the renewed conflict with France.
He was invited to stay with the Hamiltons, and an attraction was quickly evident between him and Emma. When he left several days later, a lasting impression had clearly been made on both of them. Five years passed before Nelson returned to Naples in September 1798, traveling back across the Mediterranean after his monumental victory over the French at the Battle of the Nile. Emma might have been shocked by his changed appearance; he had lost his right arm and was prematurely aged.
The Hamiltons again made him their guest, and soon a full-blown affair was underway between the thirty-three-year-old Emma and the forty-year-old admiral. Lord Hamilton, for reasons that remain unclear, turned a blind eye to his wife’s infidelity, possibly because he was sterile and felt guilt at being unable to give her children. By November 1798, British newspapers had caught wind of the affair, and Lady Emma and her famous lover became the subject of sustained media scrutiny. When the trio returned to England in November 1800, tensions immediately arose between Nelson and his wife Fanny on one side, and the Hamiltons on the other.
Fanny quickly realized Emma was pregnant with Nelson’s child, and she delivered an ultimatum, demanding he choose between her and Lady Emma. Nelson chose Emma, commencing formal separation proceedings in early 1801, an unusual step in the early nineteenth century. In late January 1801, Emma gave birth to their daughter, Horatia. That autumn, on Emma’s advice, Nelson purchased Merton Place in Wimbledon, where they lived openly together.
Lord Hamilton died in April 1803, but Nelson outlived him by only two years. When Napoleon renewed the war with Britain in May 1803, Nelson was tasked with preventing a French invasion. On October 21, 1805, he led the British Royal Navy to victory over a combined Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar off the coast of southwestern Spain, a triumph that ended any immediate threat of French invasion. But it was his last battle.
Nelson was seriously wounded and died three hours later. Emma was devastated, taking to bed with grief for weeks. The British state, however, was determined to exclude her from the admiral’s estate. Nelson’s wish that his wealth be divided fairly between Emma and his legitimate family was ignored.
She received a £2,000 payment, the house at Merton, and a £500 annual payment. The cost of maintaining Merton far exceeded that annuity, and a legal struggle with Nelson’s family over the payments followed. By 1808, she was more than £15,000 in debt, and efforts to sell Merton failed. In 1812, Lady Hamilton was briefly imprisoned for failing to meet her debts.
Her health deteriorated, and she increasingly succumbed to alcoholism and obesity. Friends eventually raised enough money for her and Horatia to escape to Calais, France, where she died a year later at the age of forty-nine. It was a tragic end for a woman once famed throughout Europe for her beauty. Another woman whose life mixed glamour with ruin was born on February 17, 1821, in County Sligo, Ireland.
Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, who would become known as Lola Montez, was the daughter of a British officer and the daughter of a wealthy Irish politician. Her father died of cholera shortly after the family arrived in India, leaving her nineteen-year-old mother to remarry another officer, Patrick Craigie, who cared for young Eliza but grew concerned by her spoiled and mischievous behavior. She was sent back to Britain for her education, first to Scotland, where her dress and mannerisms, unusual for a young middle-class girl, made her an object of curiosity. One teacher recalled that she was a beautiful young girl spoiled by stubbornness.
Her behavior remained questionable, and at ten she was sent to boarding school, then another in Bath, where her parents hoped she would be turned into a lady. But when her mother attempted to marry her off to a sixty-four-year-old adjutant general, the fourteen-year-old Eliza ran away to Ireland with a captain on leave named Thomas James. They married in 1837 when she was sixteen and made their way to India, but colonial life did not suit her, and the marriage collapsed after James became involved with another woman. She later remarked that runaway matches, like runaway horses, are almost sure to end in a smash-up.
Returning to England, Eliza took up dancing lessons and reinvented herself as a Spanish dancer under the stage name Lola Montez, making her debut at the Haymarket on June 3, 1843. She claimed her debut was successful, but it was not. She was recognized as Mrs. James and booed off stage for being a phony Spanish dancer.
Hampered in England, she moved to the continent, where she began accepting favors from wealthy men and was soon widely regarded as a courtesan. In Germany, she allegedly assaulted a police officer with a horse whip, and from then on she always carried a whip and frequently used it. She made the acquaintance of the composer Franz Liszt, who used his contacts to secure her a dancing debut in Paris, but her performance was publicly mocked. One newspaper wrote that her beauty gave her an initial advantage, but she had no talent to go with it.
In Paris, she had affairs with Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, and with Alexandre Dujarrier, a drama critic and newspaper owner. In 1845, after a night of drinking, Dujarrier quarreled with an officer and was challenged to a duel. Lola, skilled with a gun, offered to take his place, but he refused and died. After the trial, Lola pursued Liszt and, for reasons unexplained, demanded entrance to a male-only banquet, dancing on a table and shocking all present.
She made her way to Munich in September 1846, where she caught the attention of King Ludwig of Bavaria, who had a love for all things Spanish and female. When they first met, the king reportedly asked if her bosom was real, asking, natural or art? She responded by cutting open the front of her dress. It did not take long for her to become his mistress, and sources from the time say she exercised great control over the king, using her influence to support liberal political and social causes and to limit the power of conservatives and the Catholic clergy.
Her influence became so great that Ludwig dismissed a minister who opposed making her a countess. Her petition for nobility, when made public, deepened her unpopularity. Despite the resentment, Ludwig made her Countess of Landsfeld in 1847, granting her a large pension and a home. In 1848, riots broke out in Bavaria, including a faction at the University of Munich that rose against the king.
Following his mistress’s advice, he closed the university, but by March the revolutionary movement had gained such momentum that he had to reopen it. The hostility toward Lola left him no choice but to expel her from the country, and a few days later he abdicated the throne. His relationship with Lola had played a large part in his downfall. Lola fled to Switzerland, hoping Ludwig would join her, but he never did.
In late 1848, she returned to England and quickly married George Trafford Heald, a young army cornet who had come into an inheritance. But the terms of her first divorce stated that neither party could remarry while the other still lived, and she was arrested on a charge of bigamy, released on bail, and forced to escape England. The marriage soured within two years, and Heald mysteriously disappeared, reportedly by drowning. In 1851, Lola set off for America, hoping to reinvent herself as a performer.
She carried a whip and a pistol, became involved in numerous assaults and scandals, and used her whip to beat men who offended her. In May 1853, she arrived in San Francisco, where she performed her notorious spider dance for the first time. She married Patrick Hull, owner of a newspaper, but the marriage soon failed, and he sued for divorce, naming a German doctor as co-respondent. A few days later, the doctor’s corpse was found shot dead in nearby hills.
Lola spent nearly two years in Grass Valley, California, before sailing for Australia, where she arrived in Sydney in August 1855. Performing her spider dance at the Theatre Royal in Melbourne, she raised her skirt so high the audience could see she wore no underclothes at all. The performance was widely condemned as against public morality, and many called for her arrest. She continued to tour Australia, publicly horsewhipping the editor of the Ballarat Times over a negative article.
In May 1856, she sailed back to San Francisco with her manager, Noel Follin, who was lost overboard one night under unclear circumstances. Back in the United States, her career stalled, and in her mid-thirties she reinvented herself as a lecturer, speaking on her life and the heroines of history, and delivered a series of moral lectures in Britain and America. In 1859, she moved to New York, where she lived quietly until her death on January 7, 1861, from complications of syphilis in its tertiary stage. She is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
The last of these women was born Alonsine Plessis on January 15, 1824, in the village of Nonant-le-Pin in Normandy. Her father was the illegitimate son of a prostitute and a priest, a man brutalized by his own life and abusive to Alonsine’s mother, who eventually abandoned the family to work as a maid elsewhere. She intended to send for her daughters later, but she died when Alonsine was only six. After her mother’s death, Alonsine was separated from her older sister and sent to live on a farm with one of her mother’s cousins, where, according to several biographies, she was abused by farm workers beginning around the age of eleven.
She was eventually rescued when her father sent her to be apprenticed as a laundress, hard physical work with little reward, but removal from the farm. Even this relief did not last. Her father abandoned her in her early teens and appears to have sold her to an elderly bachelor in Paris. She escaped and found work as a maid in the capital, and later as an apprentice to a dressmaker.
In her late teens, she began working as a courtesan. One day in 1839, when Alonsine was fifteen, she stood on a Paris street gazing longingly at a food shop selling fried potatoes. A well-regarded writer and journalist named Louis Népomucène Nestor Roqueplan passed by and, understanding her hunger, offered to buy her some food. She devoured the dish.
It was a chance meeting that changed her life. Over the following months, she developed a relationship with Roqueplan, who introduced her to many literary and artistic figures in Paris. She entered into a string of relationships with wealthy men, beginning with a restaurant owner who rented her an apartment and gave her three thousand francs. Soon she realized there were wealthier clients, and she adopted the name Marie Duplessis, taking her mother’s name and altering her surname to give it an aristocratic slant.
A wealthy young lover arranged for her to receive dance and piano lessons, and she learned to read and write. Duplessis became the toast of Parisian parties in the 1840s, famed for her wit and beauty, though those who knew her well saw a contradictory sadness, a product of her traumatic childhood. She donated to foundations that helped abused women and abandoned girls, a cause close to her own past. Her lovers during these years included the romantic novelist Roger de Beauvoir, the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, and above all Alexandre Dumas fils, the son of the author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.
In 1844, Dumas fils was under twenty when he met Marie, who was the same age, and they entered into a relationship within weeks. But Dumas, infatuated with her, was tormented by her ongoing relationships with other men. He tried to distance himself in 1846, though she made clear she wished to continue their relationship, even if it would never be monogamous on her part. Marie also briefly married one of her lovers, the French aristocrat Édouard de Perrégaux, in London in 1846.
But she was already ill. Marie was suffering from tuberculosis, a devastating disease that had become increasingly virulent in the cramped cities of industrial Europe. Within months of her marriage, she died in Paris on February 3, 1847, at the age of just twenty-three. Her husband and another lover, Count Gustav von Stackelberg, were at her bedside.
Her funeral at Montmartre Cemetery was attended by hundreds of people, many from Paris’s artistic and literary world. Marie was immortalized shortly after her death by Dumas fils in his most acclaimed novel, The Lady of the Camellias, a thinly disguised account of her life. The novel was remarkable for its sympathetic portrait of a courtesan, showing how her life was shaped by the circumstances of her early years. It became a bestseller.
Dumas adapted it into a stage version in 1852, which was initially banned by the censors, unwilling to accept its depiction of prostitution and tuberculosis, though they soon relented in light of his father’s reputation. The play was banned in London for years. Just a few years later, the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, who had seen the play while visiting Paris, composed one of his most acclaimed operas based on it. La Traviata, meaning the fallen woman, was first performed at La Fenice in Venice on March 6, 1853.
Its main character, Violetta, is clearly based on Marie Duplessis, and her story ends exactly as Marie’s did, with her death from tuberculosis. Despite the novel remaining censored in Britain, the opera was performed in London within months, justified on the grounds that an English audience would not understand the Italian. La Traviata quickly became one of the most popular operas of the nineteenth century and has remained one of Verdi’s most acclaimed works.
Thus, Marie Duplessis’s story has been retold in thousands of performances, from the stages of Paris to Broadway, and a museum dedicated to her memory still exists in her native Normandy.
