In Paris in 1900, an emissary of King Leopold II of the Belgians entered a brothel with a message for a sixteen-year-old girl named Caroline Laqua. The king, then sixty-four years old, had heard of her reputation and wanted a meeting. She accepted, and by the following day she had become his mistress. It was the beginning of one of Europe’s most scandalous royal affairs, one that would turn Laqua into Belgium’s most hated woman and a multimillionaire.
She was born Blanche Céline Joséphine Dequoie on 13 May 1883 in Bucharest, in the Kingdom of Romania. Her father, Jules Dequoie, was described variously as a French diplomat posted to Bucharest, or more modestly as a janitor at the French Legation there, with some sources claiming he supplemented his income through opportunistic business ventures in Romania’s growing petroleum industry. Whatever the truth of her family background, she did not grow up wealthy. She worked as a barmaid in her youth, and by the late 1890s, still in her teens, she was working in a Paris brothel under the name Caroline.
By 1900, Caroline had built a reputation that reached the ears of the visiting Belgian king. At the time she was the mistress of Antoine Emmanuel Durieux, a former French military officer eighteen years her senior who effectively acted as her procurer, arranging meetings with wealthy clients. Durieux had a gambling problem, and despite Caroline’s earnings the couple was constantly short of money, staying at the upmarket Élysée Palace Hotel. When Leopold sent a member of his staff to summon her, the messenger introduced the king only as “a very high person” whose exalted position obliged her to keep his name concealed.
A meeting was arranged for the very next day. According to Caroline’s memoir, published decades later, she became Leopold’s mistress immediately. He invited her to travel with him to Austria after their first meeting, and an arrangement was reached whereby Durieux was paid off. Leopold had taken mistresses before and had earned the nickname “the king of the Belgians and of beautiful women.
” But this affair was different. Caroline was a proud, sharp-tempered, and poorly educated commoner who had worked as a prostitute, nearly half a century his junior. Worse still, Leopold was still married. His wife, Marie Henriette of Austria, had given him four children: three daughters who survived and a son who died in childhood.
For the first two and a half years of the affair, the king was a married man. Marie Henriette died in September 1902, but before that, Caroline’s presence in Leopold’s life was already becoming impossible to hide. He usually had her travel under an assumed name, yet in 1901 he took the extraordinary step of bringing her to the funeral of Queen Victoria, scandalizing the European courts and sending shock waves through Brussels. When his own queen died the following year, the last restraints fell away, and Caroline’s position became openly acknowledged.
Caroline bore Leopold two sons: Lucien Philippe, born in February 1906, and Philippe Henri, born in October 1907. The birth of two sons complicated matters further. Leopold’s only legitimate son had died in childhood, and Belgian law barred females from the throne. He was tempted to recognize his illegitimate sons so that one of them could succeed him, but in the end he never did.
When he died in 1909, he was succeeded by his nephew Albert. Persistent rumors circulated in the years after Marie Henriette’s death that Leopold had secretly married Caroline. Such a union would have been scandalous under any circumstances. She was a former courtesan nearly half a century younger than him, and a marriage between them would have been considered morganatic: a match between people of unequal social rank, a violation of dynastic convention.
The rumors reached a fever pitch in 1906, when newspapers around the world reported that Leopold had already married her. In December 1906, the Star newspaper in New Zealand ran a profile of her entitled “The Morganatic Wife of the Ruler of Belgium,” suggesting without offering proof that a wedding had taken place and that Caroline was plotting to have her children acknowledged in the line of succession. There is no evidence that any such marriage occurred in 1906. The rumor likely arose because Leopold abruptly elevated Caroline to the title of Baroness de Vaughan after the birth of their first son in February of that year, an act so extraordinary that many assumed it could only have been sealed by marriage.
During the 1900s, Caroline lived in extraordinary luxury. Leopold was one of the richest men on Earth, and his wealth came from the Congo. At the Congress of Berlin in 1884, he had acquired personal control over the vast Congo region. Unlike the colonies of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, the Congo did not become a Belgian colony.
It was a private territory owned by Leopold personally. Over the next twenty-four years, he developed it intensely as a source of raw materials like rubber and ivory. His private forces there engaged in mass slavery and horrific acts of violence to maximize his profits, and despite the brutality being well known in Europe, he became immensely wealthy. In Belgium, Caroline quickly became extremely unpopular once it became apparent that the immense wealth Leopold extracted from the Congo was not enriching the nation but financing his private life with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter.
She was rewarded with a grand Brussels mansion staffed and furnished at royal expense, a palatial refuge on the French Riviera called Villa Laïa, and a seemingly inexhaustible flow of cash. When she complained that her shopping trips in Brussels were being cut short because of the train schedule, the king simply had the express service delayed by an hour so she could depart later. All of it was blood money, raised on the back of Leopold’s crimes in the Congo, and Caroline soon became known as “the Queen of the Congo. ” By 1908, the crimes had become impossible to ignore, and the Belgian government took the colony from Leopold and placed it under direct state control.
Despite all the riches she acquired from her lover, Caroline continued to see her former pimp, Antoine Durieux. He had followed her to Brussels and was occasionally noticed going in and out of her house. Her attempts to pass him off as her brother only worked for so long. Leopold eventually realized what was going on, and his jealousy grew.
After confronting her, he ordered every visual obstruction between her house and his nearby palace torn down so he could look straight across the grounds and keep her, and anyone who visited her, under his constant watch. In early December 1909, Leopold fell severely ill. On 12 December, after years of refusing to do so, 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 and finances so that most of his estate was bequeathed to Caroline or placed into trusts and shell companies 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 in today’s money. Leopold’s relationship with his legitimate daughters had been strained for years, and they were left with about six million francs between them, a small proportion of his vast wealth.
On his deathbed, he had refused to see them, but Caroline was with him when he died. His daughters launched legal cases to acquire more of the estate, and King Albert also tried to claw back some of what Leopold had left his mistress. Caroline was evicted from the Villa Laïa on the French Riviera, which Albert requisitioned back into the possession of the Belgian crown. Caroline became even more loathed by the Belgian public.
On at least one occasion, her carriage was pelted with stones in the streets of Brussels. Yet she appeared largely unmoved by the hostility. She married Durieux, who had been seeing her on and off throughout her years with Leopold. Strangely, after nearly a decade of clandestine meetings, marriage proved the undoing of their relationship.
The union soured quickly, and they divorced in 1913. Caroline lived lavishly after Leopold’s death, despite the lawsuits. She inherited at least seven million US dollars’ worth of his estate, and potentially more, a fortune in modern terms. She had several prominent suitors among the nobles of Western Europe but never remarried.
Her younger son, Philippe, died in 1914; her older son lived until 1984 with the title of Duke de Tervuren. Caroline’s later life was relatively undramatic by comparison. She lived quietly and comfortably. In the 1930s, after the controversy had died down and Europe had largely forgotten her, she produced a memoir, published in 1937 under the English title A Commoner Married a King, as told by the Baroness de Vaughan to Paul Faure.
Historians have generally approached the memoir with caution, as many elements of her account may not have been accurate and were often self-serving. She lived through the Second World War and died in the southwest of France on 12 February 1948, at sixty-four years of age.