Gladys Deacon was born in Paris on February 7, 1881, into a wealthy family with American roots. Her father, Edward Parker Deacon, came from a distinguished Boston family, while her mother, Florence, was the daughter of Rear Admiral Charles Henry Baldwin. But the marriage was unhappy, and infidelity tore it apart in spectacular fashion. In the spring of 1892, shortly after Gladys’s eleventh birthday, her father shot and killed Emma Bay, his wife’s lover, in an apartment in the French Riviera.
Money and influence proved powerful shields: the murder charge was reduced to manslaughter, and Edward received just one year in prison before being pardoned by the French government. The scandal upended the young girl’s life. Her mother briefly kidnapped her from a convent to prevent her from returning to her father’s custody, and the couple divorced. Gladys was sent to America to live with her father in New England, where she attended the Howard Seminary in Massachusetts.
Her father’s mental health declined sharply, and in 1899 he was committed to a mental hospital in New England. He died two years later, leaving Gladys and her three surviving siblings a quarter of his sizable estate each. By then, Gladys had returned to Europe to live with her mother in France. She blossomed into a celebrated beauty of the Belle Époque, drawn and painted by acclaimed artists and praised by the writer Marcel Proust, who declared he had never seen such beauty, intelligence, goodness, and charm.
She was linked romantically with nobles across Western Europe, including the Crown Prince of Prussia, but one relationship would become the defining attachment of her life. In 1897, at the age of sixteen, Gladys was invited to Blenheim Palace, the seat of the Spencer-Churchill family. Its head, Charles Spencer-Churchill, the 9th Duke of Marlborough, had married Consuelo Vanderbilt in 1895, a marriage that rescued the family from financial ruin but brought no happiness. Soon Gladys became the Duke’s mistress, an affair that would continue for more than two decades before the Duke and his wife divorced.
The early 1900s brought another turning point. In 1903, at just twenty-two, Gladys underwent an early form of cosmetic surgery, having paraffin injected into her nose and jawline to sharpen her features. The procedure failed disastrously. The paraffin in her jaw collected around her chin, forming permanent lumps that remained with her for the rest of her life.
Despite this disfigurement, she remained a magnetic figure in high society, known for her intelligence, her elusiveness, and her portraits by artists such as Giovanni Boldini and John Singer Sargent. Her relationship with the Duke continued throughout the 1900s and 1910s. His marriage to Consuelo had become an open arrangement, and she conducted her own affair with the French aviation pioneer Jacques Balsan. In 1921, Consuelo and the Duke divorced, and later that year, on June 25, Gladys and the Duke married in Paris.
The marriage, after a two-decade courtship, proved disastrous. By her forties, Gladys, approaching the age at which her father’s psychological state had begun to unravel, developed serious mental health issues. Her grandmother had also suffered from instability in her later years, and the lifelong disfigurement from her botched surgery and the couple’s childlessness compounded her distress. Life at Blenheim Palace grew tense.
She insisted on having large paintings of her eyes placed over the doorways and porticos. She developed an obsession with breeding Blenheim spaniels. By the late 1920s, she kept a revolver by her bedside and once set it on the dinner table in front of guests, saying she might just shoot the Duke. She spoke of her husband in emasculating terms, claiming she had married a house rather than a man.
In 1931, the Duke briefly moved out, long enough to plan her removal. In 1933, he dismissed her staff and ordered her to leave. Their marriage was effectively over when the Duke died prematurely in 1934, before divorce proceedings were completed. Gladys moved with her dogs to residences in North Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire, but her behavior spiraled further.
When a journalist approached her during the split, she tipped a bucket of water over his head. By the mid-1930s, she had become a recluse, wealthy enough to shut out the world and surround herself with little more than her pets. Biographers suggest she lost herself in the memories of her earlier life among the artists and high society of Paris, London, and Rome, where she had known figures like Proust, Claude Monet, and Auguste Rodin. By the 1950s, her behavior could no longer be ignored.
She rang people she had not seen in decades, and strangers, in the middle of the night. She threatened to shoot local children who tried to take apples from her orchard, and the community grew seriously concerned. In 1962, she was committed to St. Andrew’s Psychiatric Hospital, where she remained a curious patient, lucid enough to follow politics and keep a diary, yet capable of turning difficult in an instant.
Gladys Deacon died there on October 13, 1977, at the age of ninety-six, and was buried in the churchyard at Chacombe in Northamptonshire. Visitors to Blenheim Palace can still see her painted eyes peering down from above the doorways, and the stone sphinxes in the courtyard commissioned to mark her arrival as the Duke’s second wife. In the summer of 1904, New York City was gripped by scandal. Millionaire John R.
Platt accused Hannah Elias, a reclusive Black woman with a shadowy past, of blackmailing him out of $685,000, a sum equivalent to roughly $30 million today. The case made Elias one of the most infamous and wealthiest Black women in America. Hannah Elias was born in Philadelphia in 1865, the daughter of Charles Elias, a cook and caterer of mixed African-American and Native American heritage. Her light skin would play a significant role in her later life.
She grew up in a large household, one of nine children, in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city for African Americans. Beyond that, little is known of her upbringing until the spring of 1884, when her sister Hattie was married. Before the wedding, Hannah had “borrowed” an expensive dress from the wardrobe of her wealthy employer. At the wedding, the dress drew admiring comments, but days later, police arrived at the Elias home and arrested her.
That same evening, she was found guilty of theft and sentenced to four months in Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia, where she was confined with about forty other women while the rest of the prison held men convicted of violent crimes. When she completed her sentence, her father refused to let her return home. Penniless, she drifted north to New York and became a prostitute in the Tenderloin district. In 1886, she gave birth to a daughter, whom she put up for adoption.
Shortly afterward, she was imprisoned for a month on Roosevelt Island for prostitution. She grew savvier after that, claiming to be Cuban to explain her lighter skin. She earned enough to buy properties, many of them in uptown Manhattan, north of Central Park, on the edge of what would become Harlem. By the early 1900s, she lived in luxury, attended by a maid, a butler, and a full household staff, and kept a lavish beach house in Far Rockaway on Long Island.
Soon after her arrival in New York in 1885, she had been visited by John R. Platt, a well-to-do businessman in his mid-sixties who had made his money selling plate glass. In 1887, they met again in Manhattan, and their acquaintance became a secret affair. Since she was a woman in the Tenderloin, often moving to avoid police raids, they kept in touch through coded personal ads in a New York newspaper, using the names Bessie and Papa.
Platt was married and a prominent figure in the city, and he valued her discretion. He began giving her money, between $2,000 and $6,000 a month, and advised her on buying properties and stocks. Within a few years, she had become wealthy, perhaps the single richest Black woman in the United States. One of Hannah’s early investments was a house near Platt’s family home, where she rented rooms.
In 1895, Platt came to visit, and a tenant, Cornelius Williams, answered the door, irritated. When Platt, using the name Mr. Green, asked if the people of the house were in, Williams slammed the door in his face. Weeks later, Elias evicted Williams, who had become obsessed with her.
Convinced the mysterious Mr. Green was to blame, he left furious, swearing revenge. Eight years later, on a cold November afternoon in 1903, Andrew Haswell Green, the man behind Central Park and the New York Public Library, was returning home after a family lunch. Cornelius Williams, paranoid and still obsessed, mistook Green for Platt, pulled out a revolver, and shot him dead.
Williams was later declared insane and spent the rest of his life in an asylum. Hannah’s own life took its fateful turn in the summer of 1904, when Platt brought charges against her, accusing her of blackmail. Platt claimed she had extorted over $685,000 from him over the years to keep quiet about their relationship. For months, New York’s newspapers reported every twist of the case.
Platt offered a colorful account of how the affair began, claiming he had merely wandered into a massage parlor she ran, looking for relief from rheumatism, and had later helped her financially to set up a boarding house, before she began blackmailing him with threats to expose their relationship to his family. The police took his claims seriously. When Hannah refused to come in for questioning, they raided her townhouse and seized anything they could find connected to the case. She was taken to the Tombs prison in lower Manhattan, notorious for its grim conditions, and spent several tense days there.
Then she was suddenly released. Investigators concluded there was no evidence to support the blackmail claim. Despite the staggering sums involved, Platt had handed over the money willingly year after year. It became clear that Platt had launched the case halfheartedly, under pressure from his family, who had discovered the fortune he had quietly given away and wanted someone to blame for their vanished inheritance.
After Platt withdrew the charges, his family dragged Hannah into civil court to reclaim the money, but they came up empty. By early 1905, the story had fizzled out, and Hannah was exonerated. The case revealed the racial politics of New York at the turn of the century. Newspapers seemed more interested in her racial background than the case itself, and some claimed she was a foreign-born woman, spreading sensationalist headlines about a foreign prostitute swindling a helpless old man.
Hannah remained in New York for many years, living off the rent from her properties in Harlem. Platt died in 1908, leaving an estate worth just $10,000, a meager fortune compared to what he had once given away. None of it was left to Hannah. In the 1910s, she was involved in land transactions as Harlem developed into a haven for well-to-do African Americans.
In 1923, exhausted by her lingering infamy and perhaps hoping to avoid lawsuits over her dubious financial past, she left New York with her Japanese butler, Kato, boarded a ship for Europe, and never returned. She settled in France. One story claims she died in Paris; another says she passed away in luxury on the French Riviera in the late 1920s. In 1900, an emissary of King Leopold II of the Belgians entered a brothel in Paris.
She was acting for her employer, a sixty-four-year-old monarch seeking a girl named Caroline Laqueur, just sixteen years old. The meeting began one of Europe’s most scandalous royal affairs, one that would make Laqueur Belgium’s most hated woman and a multimillionaire. She was born Blanche Zélia Joséphine Dequesne on May 13, 1883, in Bucharest, Romania. The details of her early life are limited and have taken on a mythical quality.
One story claims she was the thirteenth child of her parents; some say her father was a French diplomat posted to Bucharest, while others describe him as a janitor at the French legation. Whatever the truth, the family did not strike it rich. She worked as a barmaid in her youth, and by the end of the 1890s, still a teenager, she was working in a brothel under the name Caroline. By 1900, nearing her seventeenth birthday, Caroline had developed a reputation.
She was the mistress of Antoine Emmanuel Durieux, a former French military officer eighteen years her senior, who acted as her procurer. Durieux had a gambling problem, and despite her income, they were constantly behind on their bills. Leopold II, King of the Belgians since 1865, was visiting the French capital and heard about her. Intrigued, he sent an emissary to the Élysée Palace, who delivered a cautious message from a gentleman of very high position who could not reveal his name.
A meeting was arranged for the next day. According to Caroline’s memoir, published decades later, she immediately became Leopold’s mistress, and Durieux was paid off. News of the relationship soon leaked, and it became a public scandal. Leopold had taken mistresses before, earning a reputation as a man of many women, but this affair was different.
Caroline was a proud, sharp-tempered, ill-educated commoner who had worked as a prostitute, nearly half a century younger than the king. Leopold was still married to his long-suffering wife, Marie Henriette of Austria, with whom he had four children. Even before the queen’s death, Caroline’s role in his life was difficult to disguise. He brought her to the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901, scandalizing European courts.
When his own queen died in September 1902, the last restraints fell away, and Caroline’s position became openly acknowledged. The couple had two children together: a son, Lucien Philippe, born in February 1906, and a second son, Philippe Henri, in October 1907. The births complicated things further. Leopold’s only legitimate son had died in childhood, and since women could not succeed to the Belgian throne, he was tempted to recognize his sons from this relationship so that one might succeed him.
In the end, he never did. When he died in 1909, his nephew Albert succeeded him. Rumors circulated that Leopold had secretly married Caroline, a claim that would have made her his morganatic wife, a match between people of unequal social rank, considered a violation of dynastic convention. In 1906, newspapers around the world ran stories that the marriage had already taken place.
There is no evidence that it did. The rumors likely began when the king abruptly elevated Caroline to the title of Baroness Vaughan after the birth of their first son in February 1906, an act so extraordinary that many assumed it could only have been sealed by marriage. At the time, Leopold was one of the richest people on Earth, due to his private rule over the Congo. At the Berlin Conference of 1884, he had acquired control over the vast Congo region, not as a Belgian colony, but as his personally owned territory.
Over the next twenty-four years, he developed it intensely as a source of rubber and ivory. His private forces engaged in mass slavery and horrific acts to maximize his profits, making him immensely wealthy. Caroline became the most visible beneficiary of this plunder, rewarded with a grand Brussels mansion, a palatial retreat on the French Riviera, and an inexhaustible flow of cash. When she complained that her shopping trips in Brussels were being cut short by the train schedule, the king simply had the express service delayed by an hour.
She soon became known as the Queen of the Congo. Despite all her riches, Caroline continued to see her former procurer, Durieux, who had followed her to Brussels. Leopold’s jealousy grew, and after confronting her, he ordered every visual obstruction between her house and his nearby palace torn down so he could keep her under constant watch. In early December 1909, Leopold became severely ill.
On December 12, after years of refusing, he finally married Caroline. He died five days later, at the age of seventy-four, and was succeeded by his nephew Albert. Controversy erupted immediately. Leopold had arranged his will so that most of his fortune was bequeathed to Caroline or placed into trusts for their sons, an amount that certainly ran into the tens of millions at the time.
His daughters from his first marriage, with whom relations had been strained for years, were left with about six million francs between them, granted through the Belgian state rather than through his will. On his deathbed, Leopold had refused to see his daughters, but Caroline was with him when he died. Legal cases swirled after his death as his daughters tried to acquire more of the estate. King Albert requisitioned Caroline’s villa on the French Riviera back for the Belgian crown.
She became even more loathed by the Belgian public, and on at least one occasion her carriage was pelted with stones. Yet she appeared largely unmoved. She married Durieux, but the marriage quickly soured, and they divorced in 1913. Caroline inherited at least seven million dollars’ worth of Leopold’s estate and lived a lavish life.
Her younger son died in 1914, but her older son lived until 1984. Caroline’s later life was quiet by comparison. In the 1930s, she arranged for a memoir of her life, published in 1937 under the English title A Commoner Married a King, though historians have approached its contents cautiously. She lived through the Second World War and died in the southwest of France on February 12, 1948, at sixty-four years of age.
In the late 1780s, a Turkish-born courtesan named Zofia Potocka, who had gained fame throughout the courts of Europe some years earlier, entered into a relationship with Prince Gregory Potemkin, the most celebrated Russian military commander of his day and secretly the husband of Catherine the Great. Zofia was born Sophia Kleavone on January 11, 1760, in Bursa in northwestern Turkey, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Her father, Constantine, was a cattle merchant of Greek origin. In 1772, the family moved to Istanbul.
After her father died in 1775, and the family home was destroyed in a great fire the following year, her mother sold two of her daughters, including Sophia, to the Polish ambassador to the Sultan’s court, Karol Boskamp-Lasopolski. The ambassador had a reputation for procuring women for the court of King Stanisław II Augustus of Poland. Boskamp took Sophia and her sister under his wing, settled them near Istanbul, and provided them with an advanced education, including instruction in French, the language of European courts. While in his custody, Sophia met Joseph de Witt, a Polish noble of Dutch ancestry, who was infatuated with her.
They married in 1779 and settled near Kamianets in what is now western Ukraine. In 1781, the young couple set out on a grand tour of Europe, visiting the courts of Warsaw, Berlin, Vienna, Venice, Rome, and Paris. It was during this journey that Sophia first came to international attention. Despite her humble background, she acclimated well to aristocratic society, becoming famed for her charm and beauty and strangely well known for the phrase, “My eyes ache.
” She began sitting for portraits, a pattern that would continue for years, and entered into a series of sexual relationships with prominent men at the courts they visited, culminating in Paris, where she was rumored to have been involved with two of Louis XVI’s brothers, the future Louis XVIII and Charles X. While in Paris late in 1781, Sophia gave birth to a son of uncertain parentage, a question neither she nor her husband could resolve with certainty. The couple returned to Poland in 1782, and in 1785 Joseph succeeded his father as governor of the region. Sophia, the cattle merchant’s daughter from Turkey, had become the most prominent lady of the regional government on the Polish-Russian frontier.
In the second half of the 1780s, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth underwent a period of extensive modernization and reform, culminating in a new constitution in 1791, often described as Europe’s first modern written constitution. The Commonwealth’s international position was also pressing. Surrounded by Prussia, Austria, and Russia, it had already lost territory to them in the First Partition of 1772. In the late 1780s, the Commonwealth sought to ally with one or more of these powers, centering its efforts on Russia in 1787 and 1788.
As a significant political figure on the Polish-Russian border, Joseph de Witt was prominent in these negotiations, and through these events, Sophia came into contact with Prince Gregory Potemkin. Potemkin was a Russian statesman and military commander nearing his fiftieth year. He had risen to prominence in 1762 for his role in the coup that brought Catherine to the throne, and had become renowned for his role in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774. He became Catherine’s lover in the 1770s and was made a prince of the Russian Empire.
It seems almost certain that he and Catherine married in secret in the early or mid-1780s. He also governed the southern provinces stretching from the southwest toward Crimea, the Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea. The immediate cause of their meeting was the renewed Russo-Turkish War that broke out in 1787, instigated by the Ottomans, resentful of Russia’s victory fifteen years earlier and its annexation of Crimea in 1783. Much of the fighting focused on southern Ukraine, Moldavia, and the southeastern borders of Poland.
Given the proximity of Kamianets to the warfront, the de Witts were heavily involved in the Polish response. With her Turkish background, Sophia was unofficially responsible for handling much of the triangular diplomatic relations among Poland, Russia, and the Turks. Potemkin died on October 16, 1791, while on campaign in what is now northern Romania. Many theories have been proposed about the cause, including poison, but the most likely explanation is an illness brought on by bronchial pneumonia.
Sophia’s relationship with him was still in progress at the time of his death. Earlier in 1791, she had traveled with him to St. Petersburg, where she was openly introduced to Russian high society as his mistress. After his death, she retreated from Russian society and grounded herself in Poland.
In 1796, she divorced Joseph de Witt and married Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki, a senior Polish noble and military commander, from whom her most well-known surname derives. She gave birth to a son in 1798, indicating she had been pregnant before the marriage, which had been delayed while Potocki obtained a divorce. Two more sons and two daughters followed. Sophia continued to have extramarital affairs, and her husband became increasingly involved in conspiracies against the Polish state, leading to accusations of treason.
He fled Poland in 1804 and died the following year in exile, leaving Sophia a widow with five young children. She arranged for almost her entire deceased husband’s estate to pass to her. Zofia Potocka died on November 24, 1822, in Berlin, where she had traveled to seek more advanced medical care than was available in Poland. She was remembered for her beauty, attested by the several portraits that survive.
Her life is most interesting for demonstrating the extent of promiscuity even within high-profile marriages at the aristocratic courts of Europe at the end of the ancien regime, but it is her relationship with Potemkin that has largely secured her place in memory. Emma Lyon was born on April 26, 1765, at Swan Cottage near Neston in Cheshire, England. Her father, Henry Lyon, a blacksmith, died within seven weeks of her birth. Coming from an impoverished background, Emma entered the workforce in her early teens.
By age twelve, she was working as a maid, and shortly afterward moved to London. During her teenage years, she changed her name to Emma Hart and began a four-year relationship with Charles Greville, a British antiquarian and member of Parliament. In 1785, Greville ended the relationship by sending Emma to his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy to the Court of Naples, where she arrived in 1786. She 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 numerous portraits in the classical and mythological style, which began to establish her fame throughout Europe.
Her life at the Neapolitan court played out against great political change. The French Revolution of 1789 overthrew the monarchy, and the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 made France the political enemy of Europe’s great powers, above all Britain. It was in this context that Horatio Nelson arrived at the Bourbon court of Naples in 1793. Nelson was a leading admiral of the British Royal Navy, having held many senior commands in the Mediterranean.
He had been blinded in one eye during an engagement near Corsica. His task was to gather reinforcements for the renewed conflict with France. He was soon introduced to Lady Emma Hamilton, in her capacity as the wife of the British envoy. Both were married: Emma to Lord Hamilton, and Nelson to Fanny Nisbet, whom he had married in 1787.
An attraction was quickly evident between them. The Hamiltons invited Nelson to stay at their residence while he was in Naples, and when he left, a lasting impression had been made. Five years later, in 1798, Nelson returned to Naples after his monumental victory over the French at the Battle of the Nile. He had lost his right arm since his first visit and was prematurely aged.
The Hamiltons made him their guest, and soon a full-blown relationship developed between the thirty-three-year-old Emma and the forty-year-old admiral. Lord Hamilton, perhaps guilt-ridden at his inability to provide Emma with children, turned a blind eye. By November 1798, news of the affair had reached British newspapers, and the couple became the subject of sustained media scrutiny. In 1799, a popular revolt occurred in Naples, and many members of the British community made their way back to Britain.
When they reached London in November 1800, tensions immediately arose between Nelson, his mistress, and Lord Hamilton on one side, and Nelson’s wife and family on the other. Fanny quickly realized that Emma was pregnant with Nelson’s child. When she delivered an ultimatum to choose between her and Lady Emma, Nelson began formal separation proceedings in 1801, an unusual step for the early nineteenth century. In late January 1801, Emma gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Horatia.
That autumn, on Emma’s advice, Nelson purchased Merton Place, a house in Wimbledon, where the three of them lived openly together. Lord Hamilton died in April 1803, dampening some of the criticism of London society. But Nelson outlived him by only two years. Peace between Britain and France lasted only one year after the Treaty of Amiens of March 1802, and in May 1803 a new coalition war broke out.
One of Napoleon’s major strategies was to attempt an invasion of Britain, requiring the French Navy to pass through the Straits of Gibraltar and north into the English Channel. Nelson was tasked with preventing this. On October 21, 1805, the British Royal Navy under Nelson defeated a combined Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar off the coast of southwestern Spain. No French invasion force could now reach Britain.
But Nelson’s most glorious victory was his last. He was seriously wounded and died just three hours later. Emma was distraught when news reached England. The British state was determined to exclude her as much as possible from the admiral’s estate, and Nelson’s own wishes that his land and wealth be divided between Emma and his legitimate family were ignored.
She received a £2,000 payment, the house at Merton, and a £500 annual payment, but the cost of maintaining Merton far exceeded the annuity, and the payment became the subject of legal struggle with Nelson’s family. 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 debt repayments. She later moved to Calais in France with her daughter, where she died a year later, at forty-nine, having increasingly succumbed to alcoholism and obesity.
She had once been famed throughout Europe for the portraits depicting her beauty, and she is remembered today in books, films, and songs, most notably the 1973 film Bequest to the Nation and Susan Sontag’s 1992 novel The Volcano Lover.