In 1900, an emissary of King Leopold II of Belgium walked into a Paris brothel on a peculiar errand. He was searching for a 16-year-old sex worker named Caroline Laqua, and he was acting on behalf of his 64-year-old royal employer. That meeting marked the beginning of one of Europe’s most scandalous royal affairs, one that would turn Laqua into Belgium’s most hated woman and a multi-millionaire. Born Blanch Celia Josephine Dequoit on May 13, 1883, in Bucharest, Romania, her early life remains murky.
Some accounts claim her father Jules Dequoit worked as a janitor at the French Legation, while others describe him as a diplomat involved in business ventures. What is certain is that the family did not become wealthy, and by the late 1890s, still a teenager, Blanch was working in a brothel under the name Caroline. By 1900, Caroline had developed a reputation that reached the visiting Belgian king. At the time, she was the mistress of Antoine Emmanuel Durieux, a former French military officer 18 years her senior, who acted as her pimp.
Described as tall, full-figured, and graceful with chestnut hair, Caroline caught Leopold’s attention, and he sent a staff member to arrange a meeting. According to Caroline’s memoir, published decades later, she became Leopold’s mistress immediately. After their first encounter, he invited her to travel with him to Austria, and an arrangement was made to pay off Durieux. The affair quickly became a public scandal.
Leopold had taken mistresses before, earning the nickname “king of the Belgians and of beautiful women,” but Caroline was different. She was an ill-educated, sharp-tempered commoner who had worked as a prostitute, and she was nearly half a century younger than the king, who was still married to his long-suffering wife, Marie Henriette of Austria. Marie Henriette died in September 1902, but for the first two and a half years of the affair, Leopold was a married man. Even before his wife’s death, Leopold’s relationship with Caroline was difficult to hide.
In 1901, he scandalized European courts by bringing her to the funeral of Queen Victoria. After his own queen died the following year, the last restraints fell away, and Caroline’s position became openly acknowledged. The couple had two children together: a son named Lucien Philippe born in February 1906, and another son, Philippe Henri, born in October 1907. Because Leopold’s only legitimate son had died in childhood and Belgian law barred women from inheriting the throne, he was tempted to recognize his sons with Caroline so one could succeed him.
In the end, he never did, and when he died in 1909, his nephew Albert took the throne. Rumors persisted after his wife’s death that Leopold had secretly married Caroline, a scandalous prospect for a monarch of unequal social rank. Newspapers around the world ran stories in 1906 claiming the marriage had already taken place, though no evidence supported this. The rumors were fueled when Leopold elevated Caroline to the title of Baroness de Vaughan after the birth of their first son that February, a move so extraordinary that many assumed it could only have been sealed by marriage.
During the 1900s, Caroline lived in extraordinary luxury because Leopold was one of the richest people on Earth. His wealth came from the Congo, which he controlled not as a Belgian colony but as a private possession acquired at the Congress of Berlin in 1884. Over 24 years, he developed it as a source of rubber and ivory, using brutal methods that included mass slavery to maximize profits. In Belgium, Caroline became extremely unpopular once it became clear that the immense wealth extracted from the Congo was financing the king’s private life with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter.
She received a grand Brussels mansion staffed and furnished at royal expense, a palatial villa on the French Riviera, and an endless flow of cash. When she complained that her shopping trips were being cut short by the train schedule, the king had the express service delayed by an hour. She became known as “the queen of the Congo. ”
Despite her riches, Caroline continued seeing her former pimp, Antoine Emmanuel Durieux, who had followed her to Brussels.
Leopold’s jealousy grew when he noticed Durieux coming and going from her house. 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 age 74 and was succeeded by his nephew Albert. Controversy erupted immediately. Leopold arranged his finances so that most of his estate went to Caroline or into trusts for their two sons. The exact amount remains unclear, but it almost certainly ran into the tens of millions at the time, equivalent to roughly a billion dollars or more today.
Leopold’s daughters from his first marriage were left with about six million francs between them, granted through the Belgian state rather than his will. On his deathbed, he had refused to see his daughters, but Caroline was there when he died. Legal battles swelled after Leopold’s death as his daughters tried to gain more of the estate. King Albert also attempted to claw back some of what Leopold left his mistress.
Caroline was evicted from the villa on the French Riviera, which the new king requisitioned back into the Belgian crown. She became even more loathed by the Belgian public, and on at least one occasion her carriage was pelted with stones in the streets of Brussels. Yet Caroline appeared unmoved by the hostility. She married Durieux, the pimp who had been seeing her on and off during her nearly decade-long affair with Leopold.
The union quickly soured, and they divorced in 1913. Caroline lived lavishly after Leopold’s death, inheriting at least seven million dollars of his estate, potentially more. She had several prominent suitors among Western European nobles but never remarried. Her younger son, Philippe, died in 1914, while her older son lived until 1984 with the title of Duke de Tervuren.
In the 1930s, after the controversy had largely faded, Caroline decided to produce a memoir. It was published in 1937 in English under the title “I, a Commoner Married a King,” as told to Paul Faure. Historians have treated the memoir cautiously, as many elements might have been inaccurate or self-serving.
Caroline lived through the Second World War and died in southwestern France on February 12, 1948, at age 64.