At the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, on her very first day in London, a young woman in a fine dress set her sights on one of the most powerful men in England. Edward Henry Stanley, the 15th Earl of Derby, was an aristocrat and politician of considerable standing. He was also, as it happened, precisely the kind of wealthy, well-connected conquest she needed. The seduction was swift and successful, marking the first of many such triumphs in England.
It was a remarkable start for a woman who had arrived in the city with almost nothing, fleeing a life she refused to accept. She was born Esther Pauline Lachmann in Moscow, Russia, on the 7th of May 1819. Her parents, Martin Lachmann and Anna Amelie Klein, were German and Polish Jews, a background that made life in Russia unwelcome and difficult. Her father worked as a weaver, and the family had little money.
Details of her early life are scarce, but at the age of seventeen, on the 11th of August 1836, she married a tailor named Antoine François Hyacinthe Vignon. The relationship produced a son, also named Antoine, born in 1837, but it did not last. Esther left her husband and baby behind, traveling through several European cities before eventually arriving in Paris. In Paris, she adopted the name Thérèse.
She had no money, knew almost no one, and was still legally married, but she was determined to break into the glittering world of high society. Her first years were spent in a cheap hotel called the Maison de Passe, a known place of work for prostitutes, where men constantly came and went. Thérèse understood that if she wanted the life she craved, she had to move up the social ladder to places where wealthier men gathered. She relied on her intelligence and determination, and in 1841, an opportunity came while she was staying at the spa town of Bad Ems in Germany.
Borrowing fancy gowns and wearing fake jewelry to attract wealthy suitors, she met the wealthy pianist André Hertz. They began a relationship, and Thérèse was introduced into Europe’s artistic circles. Hertz gave her an apartment and precious jewels, and in social settings, he often introduced her as his wife, though they could not legally marry since she already had a husband. In 1847, Thérèse gave birth to a daughter, Henriette, who was raised by Hertz’s parents.
Around this time, Thérèse’s spending began to spiral out of control. Hertz was often away in the United States, playing concerts and pursuing business ventures, and with no one to curb her, her greed took a serious toll on his finances. His parents eventually threw her out. Left with little money and terrified of falling back into the life of a common prostitute, Thérèse received crucial advice from her dressmaker, who told her to try London, describing it as a fairytale land where noble strangers presented beautiful women with fortunes in pin money.
Using what little money she had left, she journeyed to London and quickly ensnared the Earl of Derby, becoming his mistress. This was followed by liaisons with other wealthy men, including Alfred Antoine Aguinald, the 10th Duke de Gramont. As her reputation grew, she raised her prices. She loved her jewels so much that she called them her children, while having abandoned her real ones to pursue her life as a courtesan.
One story tells of her seducing a banker and telling him she would be intimate with him for as long as it took her fireplace to burn ten thousand francs. The banker outsmarted her by burning counterfeit bills. In 1848, while Thérèse was living in London, revolution broke out in France. By 1851, the Second French Republic was replaced by the Second French Empire under Napoleon III.
The period was one of glitz and glamour, with increasing social interaction between the demi-monde and the upper classes. Paris was expanding, and new money was being created. Thérèse would thrive under this new empire. In the late 1840s, while at a spa in Baden, Germany, she met Albino Francisco de Araújo, an heir to two wholesale fortunes built on the opium trade.
He was occasionally called Marquis or Viscount, though he held no title, the confusion likely arising from sharing a name with the Portuguese ambassador to Paris. In 1849, Thérèse’s first husband, Vignon, passed away, finally freeing her from legal complications. On the 5th of June 1851, she married her wealthy Portuguese lover in a church in Passy, Paris. But it seems she was playing with him all along.
The very next day, she ended the relationship with a letter, stating that he had obtained his desire in making her his wife, while she had acquired his name. She declared that they were quits, that she had acted honestly, and that as for him, he was settled with a wife of the foulest repute whom no society would receive. She kept the house on Rue Rossini, with all its lavish furniture, and thanks to the marriage contract, she was left forty thousand pounds, roughly five and a half million in today’s money. Her husband returned to Portugal.
La Païva, as she was now known, was wealthier than ever, but her fortune would only continue to grow. In 1852, while attending a party in Paris, she met Count Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck, a twenty-two-year-old Prussian industrialist and mining magnate, one of Europe’s richest men. They seemed to stumble into each other at various social events across Europe, and some accounts suggest she was intentionally engineering these meetings, always acting as if she were not interested. Her efforts paid off when they met again at a social event in Berlin.
Despite being eleven years his senior, Henckel was very attracted to her. She became his mistress and shared his fortune. After settling down with him, she reportedly said that all her wishes had come to heel like tamed dogs. In 1857, Count Henckel bought her the Château de Pontchartrain near Paris.
The castle was restored by the architect Pierre Manguin, and La Païva redecorated the interior and renovated the park, creating new views and planting rare species. She was known to gallop around the park dressed as a man, shocking the locals. The count also gave her an annual pension of eighty thousand pounds and commissioned the construction of a beautiful mansion known as the Hôtel de La Païva. Completed in 1866, it featured a central staircase made of yellow onyx, a ceiling mural depicting her as a goddess, and a jewel-encrusted bathtub with three taps, one for milk, one for champagne, and one for water.
La Païva hosted hundreds of events at her lavish homes, with influential men such as writers, industrialists, and aristocrats attending. On one occasion, the menu for a formal dinner was so lavish that two guests wondered aloud how much she was worth. When one estimated around ten million francs, La Païva scoffed, saying that ten million would barely yield an income of five hundred thousand francs a year, and that her table alone cost more than that. With her immense wealth, she became a notable investor and patron of architecture, amassing a vast collection of jewels.
Still, she was different from other courtesans, who were usually charismatic and flamboyant. La Païva had a stubborn personality and was described as the one great courtesan who appeared to have no redeeming feature. As she aged, her physical charms began to fade. In 1857, Horace de Viel-Castel noted in his memoirs that she was at least forty, painted and powdered like an old tightrope walker, and that she had slept with everyone.
Yet he still called her the queen of kept women, the sovereign of her race. Around ten years later, when she was nearing fifty, the Goncourt brothers described her in immense detail, noting her white skin, good arms, and beautiful shoulders, but also a pear-shaped nose and wrinkles that showed through the rice powder, concluding that on the surface she was a courtesan who would not be too old for her profession at a hundred, but underneath was the terrible face of a painted corpse. On the 16th of August 1871, La Païva finally managed to annul her marriage to Albino Francisco de Araújo de Paiva. Just two months later, on the 28th of October, she married her longtime partner Count Henckel in the Lutheran church in Paris.
As a wedding gift, he gave her a triple-strand diamond necklace. In November 1872, however, he committed suicide in Paris after losing his fortune to bad investments, gambling, debts, and, of course, his ex-wife’s greed from years before. The Franco-Prussian War had changed everything. Attitudes toward La Païva and her husband became increasingly hostile.
When she entered the opera, the audience hissed at her. Courtesans were scapegoated for the French defeat, and La Païva was especially targeted because of her Jewish background. Suspicions of espionage grew, and in 1877, La Païva and her husband left Paris and moved to Count Henckel’s ancestral home of Schloss Neudeck in southern Poland. La Païva lived out her final days in the giant mansion, where Esther Lachmann, Countess Henckel von Donnersmarck, died on the 21st of January 1884, aged sixty-four.
Count Henckel mourned for months. Legend states that he was so grief-stricken that he could not bury her, instead preserving her body in embalming fluid and storing it in the mansion’s attic. He remarried in 1887, and it was apparently his new wife who discovered La Païva’s body.