Maria Versfelt

Maria Johanna Elselina Versfelt (27 September 1776 – 19 May 1845), also known as Ida Saint-Elme, Elzelina van Aylde Jonghe, and by her pseudonym La Contemporaine, was a Dutch courtesan and author celebrated for her tumultuous life alongside French generals of the Grande Armée. Her travels through Italy, Egypt, and the Mediterranean are chronicled in her highly popular yet largely fictitious and unreliable memoirs. Additionally, she is credited with "possibly the earliest satirical magazine produced by a woman."

Life Versfelt was born in Lith to the portrayal in her fabricated memoirs, which erroneously claim a Tuscan origin. Her parents were Gerrit Versfelt (1735–1781), a vicar, and Alida de Jongh (1738–1828). and not Léopold-Ferdinand de Tolstoy and Van Aylde Jonghe, a corruption of her mother's name. After the death of her father, the family moved to Amsterdam and lived at Groenburgwal. In May 1792, at the age of 17, she married Jan Claasz Ringeling (1768–1801) the son of a helmsman from Buiksloot, with whom she resided at Nieuwendijk and not in Lille, that was Louise Fusil. They had two children; one of whom died in April 1796. In December 1795 they divorced on ground of adultery, It is questionable if she took part in the disastrous retreat of the French army from Russia in 1812 being accompanied Etienne-Maurice Gerard.

Works She published her memoirs with the help of Armand Malitourne, Amédée Pichot and Charles Nodier in eight volumes from 1827 to 1828, Mémoires d'une Contemporaine, which made her famous. Many prominent individuals (Julie Talma, Louise Fusil, and Theresa Cabarrus) and events appear in her memoirs. The front piece of the book showed a marble sculpture of Versfelt "representing her at the age of 19, lying naked on an ancient Greco-Roman bed." In the words of one outraged reviewer, she was the "indiscreet and immoral confidante of the men of the Directoire, the Empire and even the Restoration… and from each of these personalities, as a skillful courtesan, she had known how to extract things which should have died with the man and gone with him to his tomb." Jehan d'Ivray recounts that Versfelt told the story of how the French diplomat and Minister of finance Talleyrand used thousand franc bills to roll locks of her hair into curls one night, while she pointed out to him the ones he had missed. an account of her travels through France, Egypt, and the Mediterranean. "Give me the great highway, the pleasures and dangers of the road!" However, when Versfelt published embarrassing letters supposedly written by King Louis Philippe I of France, she was prosecuted for libel. She was not convicted because "the court could not prove that the published letters were actually falsified." She died, aged 68, in Brussels, in the hospice of the Ursuline sisters.