La Païva

Esther Lachmann (; better known as La Païva ; 7 May 181921 January 1884) was a French courtesan. She was also an investor, architecture patron and a jewel collector.

From modest circumstances in her native Russia, she gained fame in mid-19th-century France and married one of Europe's richest men. She maintained a literary salon out of Hôtel de la Païva, her mansion at 25 avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris. Completed in 1866, it was regarded as exemplifying the opulent taste of the Second Empire and, since 1904, it has been the headquarters of the Travellers Club of Paris.

Lachmann also inspired the character of the promiscuous, traitorous spy Césarine ("a strange, morbid, monstrous creature") in Alexandre Dumas, fils's 1873 play La Femme de Claude.

Early life Born in Moscow, Russia, Esther Lachmann was the daughter of Martin Lachmann, a weaver, and his wife, the former Anna Amalie Klein, who were Jewish and of Polish descent.

On 11 August 1836, age 17, Lachmann married Antoine François Hyacinthe Villoing, a tailor (died Paris, June 1849). They had one son, Antoine (1837-1862), who died while he was in medical school.

Career and personal life Mistress of Henri Herz Lachmann left Villoing shortly after her son's birth and, after travelling to Berlin, Vienna, and Istanbul,

Lachmann's avariciousness took a toll on Herz's finances, and in 1848, after their affair began, he travelled to America to pursue business opportunities, including playing concerts, where his performances were characterised by "tameness and torpidity." While he was abroad, Lachmann's spending continued, and Herz's family turned her out of the house in frustration.

Joining the demimonde When it became clear after Herz left for America that Lachmann was destitute, one of her friends, courtesan Esther Guimond, had a solution. She took Lachmann to a fashionable milliner named Camille, who advised the Russian émigré to seek her fortune in London, where she could take advantage of that "fairy-land in which noble strangers present beautiful women with £40,000 or £50,000 a year in pin-money." Dressed in borrowed finery, Lachmann "managed to get to...Covent Garden, where she made a profitable display of her other gifts". Her first British conquest was Edward Stanley, 2nd Baron Stanley of Alderley, and she became his mistress for a time.

Her affair with Lord Stanley was followed by other remunerative alliances with "other more or less well-known men of the day",

Marriage to Albino de Araújo de Païva In the late 1840s, at the spa at Baden, Lachmann met Albino Francisco de Araújo de Païva (1824-1873), an heir to two important Macao wholesale fortunes, each based, in part, on the opium trade. Although he was sometimes called a marquis or a viscount, Araújo was not an aristocrat and had no title, being the son of commoners, Albino Gonçalves de Araújo, a Portuguese Colonial merchant, and his wife, the former Mariana Vicência de Païva. It is possible that Araújo's spurious title came from a popular assumption that he was related to Viscount de Païva, the Portuguese ambassador to Paris in the 1850s; however, they were not related.

Two years after Lachmann's first husband died, "Pauline Thérèse Lachmann" (as the marriage banns read) and her rich Portuguese suitor were married on 5 June 1851 at a church in Passy; the writer Théophile Gautier was one of the witnesses. The day following the wedding, however, according to the memoirs of Count Horace de Viel-Castel, the new Madame de Païva gave her husband a letter ending the marriage. "You have obtained the object of your desire and have succeeded in making me your wife," she wrote. "I, on the other hand, have acquired your name, and we can cry quits. I have acted my part honestly and without disguise, and the position I aspired to I have gained; but as for you, Mons. de Païva, you are saddled with a wife of foulest repute, whom you can introduce to no society, for no one will receive her. Let us part; go back to your country; I have your name, and will stay where I am". and according to Count Viel-Castel, she pursued him across Europe, pretending not to be interested in him but always managing to be in the same city at the same time and at the same social events. The young Reichsgraf was smitten, and upon meeting her again in Berlin, he offered to make La Païva his mistress and declared that, if she agreed, she would share his fortune.

On 16 August 1871, La Païva obtained an annulment of her marriage to Albino Francisco de Araújo de Païva, and two months later, on 28 October, Thérèse Lachmann (the name she used on the marriage certificate) wed Henckel von Donnersmarck in the Lutheran Church in Paris. The groom's gift to the bride was a triple-strand diamond necklace formerly owned by the deposed French empress Eugénie.

Architecture patron and hostess In addition to purchasing Henckel von Donnersmarck financed and the couple commissioned architect Pierre Manguin fr. The house was completed in 1866 by architect Henri Lefeul, and among the artisans who participated in its creation was the young Auguste Rodin, then working for the sculptor Albert Carrier-Belleuse. Among the mansion's celebrated features is a central staircase made of Algerian yellow onyx (far more expensive than marble), which matched the Donnersmarck yellow diamonds, and a tub of the same North African stone; another tub, made of silver, had three taps, one being for either milk or Champagne.

Une Soirée chez La Païva by Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli, which depicts a party at Esther Lachmann's mansion in Paris.

La Païva reigned for years as a popular hostess known for her lavish open houses, teas, and dinners and salons frequented largely by well-known male writers, such as Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, Paul de Saint-Victor, Arsène Houssaye, and others, including the painter Eugène Delacroix. The bill of fare was so lavish that she overheard two guests discussing how much she could possibly be worth. One posited 10 million francs, at which comment La Païva scoffed "You must be mad. Ten millions? Why that would barely yield an income of 500,000 francs [per year]. Do you think I could give you peaches and ripe grapes in January on 500,000 francs a year? Why my table alone costs me more than that!"

In the wake of France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, La Païva's marriage to a wealthy Prussian count coupled with her ability to circulate among the wealthy elite fuelled suspicions that she was a German spy. These accusations, coupled with the hostile atmosphere in France after the war, ultimately forced her and her husband to leave the country for Silesia (present-day Poland) in 1877, where she lived for the remainder of her life.

Death Esther Lachmann, Countess Henckel von Donnersmarck, died on 21 January 1884, aged 64, at Schloss Neudeck.

According to legend, La Païva's husband preserved her body in embalming fluid but did not inter it, preferring to store it in an attic at Schloss Neudeck. It reportedly was discovered by his second wife Katharina Slepzow (1862-1929), whom he married in 1887, after she divorced Nikolay Muraviev.

Personality Lachmann reputedly had a personality so hard-bitten that she was described as the "one great courtesan who appears to have had no redeeming feature". Count Horace de Viel-Castel, a society chronicler, called her "the queen of kept women, the sovereign of her race".