Eighteenth-century London had no shortage of scandalous women, but few captured the public imagination quite like Fanny Murray. Born in Bath in 1729 to a musician father and a mother about whom almost nothing is known, Fanny was orphaned by the age of twelve. Left alone and impoverished, she sold flowers on the streets of Bath, where she watched wealthy old men parade beautiful women on their arms and heard gossip about their extravagant lives. She was pretty, and it was not long before she caught the attention of John Spencer, a thirty-four-year-old rake and grandson of one of England’s greatest generals.
Spencer charmed her with kind words and unfulfilled promises, took what he wanted, and left. Fanny might have been ruined had it not been for Beau Nash, an old acquaintance of her father who took her into his home and gave her a taste for the finer things in life. By 1743 Fanny had moved to London, where she acquired a position as a dress lodger, a situation in which a wealthy patron paid the initial costs to allow a young woman to set herself up as a courtesan. Her first patron appears to have been Nash, though by the late 1740s she was managed by Jack Harris, a prominent London pimp who likely inspired Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a directory of the city’s sex workers.
Before meeting Harris, Fanny had fallen on hard times and worked as a common street walker. With his help, by the end of the 1740s she was famed throughout London as a high-end courtesan, counting some of Britain’s leading aristocrats among her clients. Her popularity was so great that she reportedly hired a lookalike and rented a second room so she could serve twice as many gentlemen. Everyone in England knew who she was.
One contemporary diary recorded that it was a vice not to be acquainted with Fanny and a crime not to toast her at every meal. Her influence on fashion was so strong that women copied even the slightest change in her style, while their husbands secretly bought miniature portraits of her to hide in their pocket watches. Her fame spread through woodcuts and pamphlets, including a publication titled The Careless Maid, which purported to offer her advice on sexual matters, though the authors had likely used her name simply to boost sales. It is generally believed that Fanny was part of the inspiration for one of Georgian England’s most notorious publications, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known as Fanny Hill, written by John Cleland in 1748 while he was in debtors’ prison.
With its narrative of an orphaned teenager who becomes a prostitute in London, the novel clearly overlapped with Fanny’s own life. It was quickly banned and remained so until the late twentieth century, though illegal copies circulated and raised her profile further. In the early 1750s Fanny’s reputation expanded again when news emerged that she attended London’s notorious Hellfire and Divan clubs. The Hellfire Club, a secret fraternity for high-society rakes whose gatherings consisted largely of heavy drinking and behavior that defied social and moral norms, employed Fanny to appear on occasion dressed as a nun and participate in obscene drunken revelry.
The Divan Club, a less sinister social group founded by the Earl of Sandwich, a sometime lover of Fanny’s, was a members-only dining club for men who had visited the Ottoman Empire. Fanny attended as part of the harem, a gathering with sexual overtones, though her exact role there remains unclear. The club folded in the second half of the 1740s when several members left to join the Hellfire Club. During the early 1750s Fanny married Sir Richard Atkins, a minor English noble roughly her own age who had squandered much of the family wealth hiring the services of London’s most established courtesans, including Kitty Fisher.
Their marriage was volatile and neither remained entirely monogamous. A famous anecdote tells that when Fanny complained she needed spending money, Atkins gave her a twenty-pound note. Deeply insulted, Fanny snatched it from his hand, placed it between two slices of bread, and ate it. The union was short-lived; Atkins died in the summer of 1756, leaving Fanny only debt.
Her looks were fading, her admirers deserted her, and she was sent to a sponging house for debtors. In her hour of need, she wrote a begging letter to John Spencer, the son of the man who had first seduced her. The younger Spencer proved generous and honorable. After reading her account of his father’s unruly deeds, he settled a two-hundred-pound yearly allowance on her.
He also introduced her to David Ross, an English actor and theater owner. They fell in love and married within the year. Fanny abandoned her work as a courtesan in 1757 and remained loyal to Ross, who later stated that whatever her former indiscretions had been, she had conducted herself as a wife with exemplary prudence and discretion. Despite her retirement, Fanny found herself embroiled in one of eighteenth-century England’s most notorious political and literary scandals in 1763, when a work titled An Essay on Woman appeared in print.
Written by John Wilkes, a radical journalist and politician, in possible collaboration with Thomas Potter, it was an obscene parody of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man. It referred to Fanny by name and became more scandalous with nearly every sentence, eventually comparing her to the Virgin Mary. The poem was quickly accused of lewdness and blasphemy. Fanny had not collaborated in any way with Wilkes or Potter, but the work upset her and caused considerable tension in her marriage.
Late in 1763 the Earl of Sandwich, one of Fanny’s former lovers who held a grudge against Wilkes, read the poem out in the House of Lords. Wilkes was convicted of obscene libel in January 1764, though he had already fled to France. No charges were ever made against Fanny. She died in London on 2 April 1778, aged around forty-eight.
Through her fictional counterpart, Fanny Hill, her story has lived on in numerous film and television adaptations. Fanny’s contemporary Kitty Fisher became even more renowned. Believed to have been born in London’s Soho district in 1741, Kitty came from humble circumstances, possibly from a family of German Lutherans who had settled in England in the seventeenth century. She began working as a courtesan around 1757, when she was only fifteen or sixteen, having come to the attention of several British aristocrats, most likely beginning with Augustus Keppel, a son of one of King George II’s closest confidants.
From there she began a string of affairs with prominent individuals at the Georgian court. In the late 1750s and early 1760s she became well known throughout England and emerged as one of the first modern celebrity icons. The rise of cheap pamphlets, newspapers, and portrait engravings allowed Kitty to become famous while accomplishing very little beyond being beautiful, socially graceful, and sexually alluring. In one infamous episode, she fell from her horse in St James’s Park and her dress split, but rather than being embarrassed, she advertised the incident as part of the growing scandal surrounding her.
She maintained a lavish household on Carrington Street in Mayfair, funded by wealthy lovers who had profited from Britain’s expanding empire. She employed her own liveried servants, a custom usually reserved for the English nobility, and appeared at high-society events dressed in the latest fashions and valuable jewelry. Women wanted to look like her and men wanted her. She could converse fluently in French and hold her own in the aristocratic salons of Georgian England.
The Venetian adventurer Giacomo Casanova recorded meeting her during his 1763 visit to London, noting that she was magnificently dressed and wore diamonds worth five hundred thousand francs. His account also repeated the famous story that Kitty had eaten a banknote for a thousand guineas on a slice of bread and butter, a literary trope of the time that testified to the fascination with paper money. Kitty’s fame was further enhanced by her associations with prominent artists. She sat for Nathaniel Hone and was likely painted by several others, but she is most closely associated with Joshua Reynolds, one of the foremost portrait painters of eighteenth-century Europe.
Reynolds painted numerous portraits of her in the late 1750s and into the 1760s. The most famous, Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra Dissolving the Pearl, painted in 1759 and now hanging in Kenwood House, depicts her dropping a pearl into a goblet, alluding to the tale of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. Woodcuts and engravings of these portraits flew out of print shops, and thousands were sold around England. She even had her own bonnet, a must-have fashion accessory in the late 1750s.
Kitty finally settled down in 1766 when she married Sir John Norris, a member of a prominent Oxfordshire family. The marriage was short-lived and produced no children. She died on 10 March 1767 at just twenty-five years of age, four months after her wedding. The cause of her death remains uncertain.
One theory suggests the excessive application of cosmetics containing harmful substances such as lead, arsenic, and mercury, though these were unlikely to have killed her at such a young age. Other theories propose smallpox or consumption. She was buried in the churchyard at Benenden in Kent. Today she is probably best remembered through a nursery rhyme: Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher found it.
In nineteenth-century France, the woman who would become known as Marie Duplessis was born Alphonsine Plessis on 15 January 1824 in the village of Nonant-le-Pin in Normandy. Her background was one of extreme poverty. Her father was the illegitimate son of a prostitute and a priest, a man brutalized by his life experiences who became abusive toward her mother. Her mother abandoned the family and died when Alphonsine was just six.
Alphonsine was sent to live with relatives, and according to several biographies she was abused on a farm by some of the workers from about the age of eleven. She was eventually rescued when her father had her apprenticed as a laundress, a tough occupation with little financial reward that at least removed her from the farm. But her father soon abandoned her during her early teenage years and appears to have sold her to an elderly bachelor in Paris. She escaped and found work as a maid, and later as an apprentice to a dressmaker.
In 1839, when she was fifteen, Alphonsine was standing on a Paris street gazing longingly at a shop selling fried potatoes. Nestor Roqueplan, a well-regarded writer, journalist, and theater director, spotted her, understood the hunger on her face, and bought her a dish. It was a chance meeting that changed her life. Over the next months she was introduced to many literary and artistic figures in Paris, above all men with money.
By the early 1840s she had entered a string of relationships with wealthy individuals, beginning with an affluent restaurant owner who rented an apartment for her and gave her three thousand francs. She soon realized there were wealthier clients and began looking elsewhere. Around this time she adopted the name Marie Duplessis, taking her mother’s name and adding an aristocratic slant to her surname. Marie became the toast of Parisian parties in the 1840s, famed for her wit and beauty.
To those who knew her well, there was also a contradictory sadness to her, a product of her traumatic childhood. She made charitable donations to foundations that helped abused women and abandoned girls. Her lovers included a wealthy young man who arranged for her to receive dance and piano lessons, the Romantic novelist Édouard de Piego, a German aristocrat named Count Gustav von Stackelberg, and the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, for whom she likely felt the most affection. But her love life is most remembered for her affair with Alexandre Dumas fils, the son of the author of The Three Musketeers.
They met in 1844 when both were twenty and entered into a relationship within weeks. Dumas, infatuated with Marie, was tormented by her ongoing relationships with other men and tried to distance himself from her in 1846, though she made clear she wished to continue the relationship even if it would never be monogamous. Marie traveled to London briefly in 1846 and married one of her lovers, the French aristocrat Édouard de Perregaux. But she was increasingly ill, suffering from tuberculosis, a devastating wasting disease that had become virulent in the cramped urban squalor of industrial Europe.
Little was known about how it was transmitted or how to stop it. Within a few short months of her marriage, Marie died in Paris on 3 February 1847, aged just twenty-three. Her husband and Count Stackelberg were at her bedside. Her funeral at Montmartre Cemetery was attended by hundreds of people, many from Paris’s artistic and literary world, a statement of how high she had risen in just a few short years.
Marie was immortalized shortly after her death by Dumas in his most acclaimed work, La Dame aux Camélias. The novel was a thinly disguised account of Marie’s life, with the main character Marguerite Gautier effectively being Marie and the male lead being Dumas himself. The novel was remarkable for its sympathetic portrait of a courtesan and how her life was shaped by the circumstances of her early years. It became a bestseller in France.
Dumas followed it in 1852 with a stage version, which was briefly banned by Parisian censors before being allowed to be performed, though it remained banned in London for many years. Just a few years later, the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, who had seen the play in Paris, composed La Traviata, which told Marie’s story. It was first performed in Venice on 6 March 1853. The main character was called Violetta, but she was clearly based on Marie Duplessis, and her story ends exactly as Marie’s life did, with her time as a prostitute and her death from tuberculosis.
La Traviata was noteworthy for featuring the first character to die of tuberculosis in an opera, and it remains one of Verdi’s most acclaimed works, still widely performed today. For the final story, we stay in France. The woman known to history as Marguerite Steinheil was born Marguerite Jeanne Japy on 16 April 1869 in the Bâle region of northeastern France. Called Meg by those close to her, she came from a prosperous middle-class family.
Her father had become a successful industrialist, and Meg received a good education. When she was seventeen, she became involved with a friend of her brothers, and when things went too far, her father stepped in. Meg was devastated when her father died of a heart attack in 1888. In the coming years she gravitated toward Paris, where she would involve herself in various scandals.
Around the age of twenty, while visiting her sister in Bayonne in the south of France, she met Adolphe Steinheil, a French artist nearly twice her age. They married in 1890, and Meg acquired the name by which she is better known. The couple went to live in Paris during the Belle Époque, a period of immense artistic achievement when the city became the cultural capital of the world. They frequented the Moulin Rouge and other cabarets and rubbed shoulders with leading literary figures.
About a year later they had a child, but they soon fell out and lived apart, though they never divorced. Meg now became what was known as a demi-mondaine, a woman of the demimonde, in other words a courtesan. In the course of the 1890s Marguerite became celebrated for her beauty and her discreet love affairs. She had many notable suitors, none more so than Félix Faure, a prominent French politician who had risen from humble origins to become president of the Republic in 1895.
Marguerite met and began an amorous relationship with Faure in 1897, more than two years into his term. The relationship continued intermittently for the next two years. According to a newspaper report at the time, on 16 February 1899 Faure was in the Élysée Palace when he emerged from his office and told his secretary he did not feel well. Doctors attended, but the president died later that evening.
Most agree that at the time he became ill, Faure had been in his office with Marguerite Steinheil, engaged in sexual activities of one kind or another on his office desk. Whatever she was doing appears to have triggered a heart attack or stroke in a man already in his late fifties and in increasingly poor health. The exact circumstances remain a matter of debate. Not all media reported on this.
One prominent international newspaper made no mention of Steinheil and simply stated that Faure had died suddenly of an apoplectic seizure, noting his heart had been affected for months. In the immediate aftermath there was no controversy. But Marguerite and her relationship with the deceased president eventually became a source of scrutiny and have remained so ever since. Some studies conclude she was partially responsible for his stroke; others that she was not even present.
Among some men in French society, the scandal actually enhanced her reputation, as they were fascinated that a woman could provoke a president to a fit of passion so intense that it killed him. Her salon continued to be frequented by many notable men. Her husband knew of her affairs but tolerated them, as many of her lovers commissioned paintings from him, allowing Adolphe to make a good living. In the months that followed, speculation arose that Faure’s death was connected to the Dreyfus Affair, which had consumed French society since 1894.
Reports emerged that Marguerite had secretly received documents concerning Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer accused of passing secrets to Germany, and that this was somehow tied to the president’s death. The anti-Dreyfus opposition accused her of poisoning Faure on behalf of a so-called Jewish syndicate. There is not a single piece of concrete evidence to support this; it was a late nineteenth-century conspiracy theory. Further controversy surrounded Marguerite within a decade of the Faure affair.
On 31 May 1908, police found her in her Paris residence bound and gagged but otherwise unharmed. Her husband and her mother, however, were found dead elsewhere in the apartment, strangled. The revelation of what had happened at the Steinheil residence, involving the woman at the center of the Faure affair, caused a press frenzy. Marguerite claimed that four individuals dressed in black robes had entered the home, tied her up, and killed her husband and mother.
Police were suspicious that she herself had been responsible and had tied herself up to appear as a victim. They could not find strong supporting evidence, but they were suspicious as to why she had been spared and why nothing substantial had been stolen. When she tried to direct them toward a servant of the Steinheils, they arrested her on suspicion of evidence tampering. In late November, half a year after the murders, Marguerite was sent to Saint-Lazare prison to be held while her case was processed.
Her trial began in the summer of 1909 and became a source of national scandal. The papers called the case the Impassionnée crime and commented on Marguerite’s apparently unconcerned attitude. Some suspected she had ordered the murders so she could later remarry, though it was a weak motive. Conspiracy theories abounded, with the pronounced anti-Semitism of the time reemerging alongside claims about her alleged role in the Dreyfus Affair.
The judge, clearly against her, called her stories tissues of lies and went through a list of her affairs. Despite all this, Marguerite handled the situation skillfully, lying when necessary, admitting mistakes if needed, blaming inconsistencies on police incompetence, and staying true to her story that four robbers dressed in black had committed the crimes. With no real evidence to substantiate any alternative theory, in November 1909 she was found not guilty. The truth of what actually occurred in her home in the early summer of 1908 has never been fully known.
After the scandal, Marguerite elected to leave France and settle in England in the early 1910s. Her daughter, who had gone to live with her deceased father’s extended family and was forbidden from contacting her mother, eventually reconciled with her in 1911. In England, Marguerite composed her memoirs, defending her actions in the 1890s and 1900s, and published them in 1912. They were only partly successful in clearing her name.
The rest of her life was comparatively less colorful. She married again in 1917, this time to an English lawyer and minor peer, Robert Scarlett, the sixth Baron Abinger. The marriage lasted until his death a decade later. Marguerite lived out a quiet life in southern England for over a quarter of a century, dying on 17 July 1954 at the age of eighty-five in the seaside town of Hove.
Her story has been popularized on several occasions in recent years, though considerable debate remains over what exactly happened in both 1899 and 1908.